Information and communication technology (ICT) has become an integral part of the daily municipal administration, production and development of municipal services. Social services and health care account for ≥ 50% of municipal ICT expenditure. Municipalities operate and develop their ICT activities with limited ICT resources. This is an incentive for inter-municipal ICT cooperation. Four sets of secondary data are analysed in this article to evaluate how ICT cooperation is carried out in 20 Finnish municipal regions. Transaction cost economics (TCE), resource-based view (RBV), resource dependency theory (RDT) and the concepts of Granovetter’s social network theory are reviewed. The data are used to describe the expected and perceived economic and social benefits of inter-municipal ICT cooperation, and to understand the social connections that influence the execution of inter-municipal ICT cooperation. The data analysis revealed distinctive differences in the amount and forms of ICT cooperation, and regarding its governance. The results suggest that public organisations were able to benefit substantially from well-organised ICT cooperation. The characteristics of social networks were also found to relate to variations in the degree to which ICT cooperation was performed.
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IT is seen as the means to develop healthcare and social welfare services for citizens and to improve the quality of medical and social welfare data. This is deemed to require better IT cooperation between organizations. My research investigates the formation of...
IT business value (ITBV) research generally state that various “good” IT management and IT governance practices influence positively IT deployment success and organizational performance. This has proved hard to verify empirically. For this study, the authors analyzed factors that influence IT deployment success. First, the authors identified potential factors, then hypothesized about the relationships among and between the factors and finally integrated the hypotheses into a research model. The authors then empirically evaluated the hypotheses and the entire research model. Special attention was placed on the Business-IT alignment, IT management and the consistency of IT investments in relation to the cyclical behavior of the economy. The consistency of IT investment is a novel factor introduced in this study to the ITBV research. The authors used survey data of 212 responses collected from CxOs during an economic recession. Empirical results confirmed that all research model factors impacted positively on IT deployment success.
We are witnessing enormous growth and development in mobile technologies as well as applications and services in the business world. Due to this the deployment of mobile technologies and mobility has spread to most topics within systems sciences. At the same time our understanding of business models, platforms, eco-systems and value creation is not as advanced as necessary to contribute to sound dynamic modeling of the phenomena, deriving theoretical explanations or to provide guidance for these developments. The theoretical core of mobile value services needs strengthening. To overcome this lack of understanding, we have organized this minitrack on mobile value services to shed light on the role of mobile technologies in the development of contemporary phenomena in businesses and organizations. We accepted five papers to the minitrack and organized them into two sessions. The first session deals with models; a model of usage intention and business models. The second session deals with mobile phone addiction observed from different perspectives. The papers of each session are briefly summarized.
Our study investigates the formation of voluntary inter-organizational IT governance for healthcare and social welfare IT. IT governance research has focused on governance within one organization. Therefore we first investigate the theoretical background of inter-organizational governance to understand better the formation of such arrangements. In addition to IT governance and health information governance literature we review resource based view, transaction cost economics and social network theory literature. We take constructs from literature and link them to the IT governance principles and to the benefits of IT cooperation. We then evaluate empirically the perceived significance of those principles and benefits with a case study and an expert survey. The empirical results confirmed that the reviewed literature establishes a solid theoretical basis to describe the formation of inter-organizational IT governance. In the expert survey, all IT governance principles and benefits proved to be important for the formation of the investigated IT governance arrangement. Furthermore, variations in evaluations were not related to demographic, situational or behavioral control variables. Our study supports the use of RBV, TCE and social network theory constructs as augments to prior IT governance constructs.
The design of electronic financial services differ crucially from that of conventional services due to their inability to adjust sporadically to the needs and wants of consumers, as adaptability is strongly associated with the human component of services production. In this regard, identification of the motives driving adoption and consumption is the precondition for successful implementation of electronic services. This article reports the results of a survey conducted for an R&D project with the objective to design an innovative and comprehensive wealth management service for consumers, a service that is offered mainly via the internet. In this study, the authors found that the conventional wisdom of mainstream finance and technology adoption theories, return-risk thinking, and cost-benefit analysis of product characteristics were insufficient to predict adoption. Rather, the adoption decision appears to be dominated by the perceived fit between the new service and the consumer’s established consumption patterns.
Information systems development has returned to strategic management due to the increase of software-enabled businesses. We investigated two failed IS development projects using the exploratory case study method. One of the projects was executed with the plan-driven approach methods and the other with the change-driven (agile) approach methods. Data analysis showed that both projects followed the principles of the selected methods. That, however, was not enough. The plan-driven project achieved project objectives but did not deliver business value and the IS was never taken into use. The change-driven project delivered desired business value but failed to release a robust IS. Our main contribution to research is our proposition to match the characteristics of IS development methods with the characteristics of business development contexts. We also disclose some novel reasons for IS project failures.
We investigate the determinants of CIOs' organizational role and tasks. We first review previous studies, which we classify as either evolutionary or CIO role studies. We consider them to be characteristic to the usage of certain technologies or certain periods of times. We modify Leavitt's well-known model to describe factors that shape the role and the tasks of CIOs over time, industries and technologies. We validate the model from interviews with 36 CIOs within six industries covering the time period from 1960s to present times. We also show that the model can be used to categorize prior research findings. We then use the model to describe how business strategy impacts CIOs' role and tasks and how changes in business strategy influence CIOs and vice versa. We discovered that the modified Leavitt model is a useful description of factors that both define CIOs' role and tasks at any particular time in any specific organization, and show how those tasks change.
Social welfare and healthcare professionals consider their services fragmented, which also impacts information technology (IT) deployment. They also face the question of whether to cooperate with other organisations in IT. The need to cooperate and to organise cooperation has increased with ever-wider IT deployment. Governance of IT helps in this by defining the responsibilities of cooperating organisations. Improved data sharing and the pooling of developments and purchases are among the envisioned benefits. This article depicts the theoretical basis of inter-organisational IT governance arrangements against the background of a case engaging over 100 organisations. The lessons of the case, including a survey involving 68 experts, suggest that a perceived need to cooperate to achieve concrete benefits and governance principles are necessary to establish inter-organisational IT governance. The findings of this research augment the knowledge base of IT governance with constructs taken from the resource-based view (RBV), transaction cost economics (TCE), and social network theories.
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No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
We ponder the relations of software, information systems (IS) and business development methods in the development of digital businesses and in the digitalization of extant businesses. We present our published IS development method (ISDM) framework and its development. The framework is used as the background to reason the relations between the three development layers of digitalization: software, IS and business. We then propose six highly potential areas of future research. In addition, we answer to two research questions also paving the way to future research: is the matching of IS and business development a reasonable proposition, and is the finding of extant literature true, according to which ISDMs are used limitedly in IS development work. We organized two workshops with 21 (14+7) participants to answer these questions. We detected yes and mixed answers. We contribute to research with the empirical findings and the proposed research areas.
During the era of open systems, healthcare services and related data are in a constant flux caused by digital transformation. The amount, sources and dimensionality of data grow rapidly, and solutions for data governance, integration and interoperability are urgently needed. At the same time, digital data and information technology–enabled healthcare services are offered as a means to empower citizens. The objective is for active citizens to take better care of their own health. It is possible to support empowerment in many ways, such as with easy-to-use information systems (IS) or personal health records (PHR), or by supporting citizens’ participation in health data creation. In this article, we first present the federative approach to data governance with data federation matrixes in order to show how data are made interoperable by combining data from different data storages. Federation matrixes define shared attributes with their technical, information-flow and socio-contextual metadata. We then contemplate how the federative approach can be deployed to citizens’ healthcare data empowerment. We propose that data ontologies, e.g., data federation matrixes, are useful in bridging gaps between the social contexts of citizens and healthcare professionals and, by doing so, to promote citizen empowerment. The present article contributes to research on the federative approach to data governance, its deployment to citizens’ healthcare empowerment, and to the practice-oriented further development of the federation matrix tools for this and other use cases.
No abstract is provided for this article.
