Projects as communicating systems: Creating a culture of innovation and performance

Although often downplayed and instrumental, there is evidence that communication in projects is essential in achieving value creation. Our main interest in this paper is on temporary continuity, a situation where the temporary becomes a permanent condition in social systems. The question that we have address is: What characterizes project communication in a situation with temporary continuity?We argue for the need to transform communication processes into communication capabilities. In a situation with temporary continuity, there is a need to connect to a large number of value-creating processes, and communicating capabilities need to be a part of a communication system, where the aim is to bind together value-creating processes and communication capabilities. We construct a viable system consisting of five sub-systems. To become a viable system, projects in the form of temporary continuity, must handle the potential conflict between a culture of performance and a culture of innovation. This involves developing social mechanisms for coordination and interaction, with a focus on developing communication capabilities, in parallel with focusing on all of the five value-creation processes.     

运用“体育微格教学”对学生进行教学技能培养

“体育微格教学”是微格教学的一个分支,它是培养和训练体育专业学生掌握某种教学技能、技巧的一种小型教学活动。本文针对我院部分学生教学技能掌握运用现状对“体育微格教学”的运用进行了探讨。     

The 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science presented to Rob Van der Voo

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science to Rob Van der Voo for his outstanding contributions to the field of paleomagnetism and his reconstruction of ancient continental positions that have lead to a better understanding of plate tectonic processes for the past billion years of Earth history.     

Accessibility of U.S. federal government home pages: Section 508 compliance and site accessibility statements

U.S. federal websites are required to be accessible for people with impairments. However, despite the existing regulations and guidelines, many federal websites continue to be inaccessible, and accessibility policy statements available on federal websites often do not provide any useful information. This paper provides three contributions to the research literature: (1) an accessibility evaluation of 100 federal home pages using both human and automated methods, (2) a content analysis of existing website accessibility policy statements, and (3) a discussion of the relationship between actual Section 508 compliance and the existing accessibility policy statements on a website. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving policy related to Section 508 compliance for websites.     

How do congressional members appear on the web? Tracking the web visibility of South Korean politicians

The web visibility of politicians has substantial implications for the internet and politics. In this regard, the present paper examines the web visibility of South Korea's 18th National Assembly members. This study identifies those members with the highest web visibility and determines the factors affecting their web visibility by using a set of socio-demographic variables indicating web visibility. The concept of web visibility is operationally defined as the number of web mentions of each congressional member. Web mentions of the name of each congressional member were collected across many platforms, including blogs, images, news, and websites, by using a Naver search tool based on the API, and relationships between the web visibility of the members and their socio-demographic attributes (their gender, age, term, constituency, and party affiliation) were analyzed using Kruskal–Wallis, Median, and Mann–Whitney U tests. The most visible politicians in the Korean webosphere had highly qualified political careers and prominence, and the difference in politicians' web visibility depended on their political attributes (their term, constituency, and party), not on their demographic attributes (their gender and age). These findings suggest that politicians who build political power and influence through their political career in the offline world are likely to be more visible in the webosphere. Further, an integrated indicator based on politicians' web visibility status can reflect their “ubiquitous presence” in Korea's digitalized society.     

E-Government readiness index: A methodology and analysis

E-Government has received significant attention as digital technologies transcend private businesses and serve as a basic source of transformation in government functions. One most notable project is the United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) that assesses the e-Government readiness of the 192 member nations according to a quantitative composite index involving website assessment, telecommunication infrastructure, and human resource endowment. However, the UNPAN index, though rich in depth and breadth of data collection, relies on a method that is a simple mathematical average of the values of the variables measured. This paper revisits the UNPAN index and proposes alternative indices based on principal components analysis (PCA). Using the UNPAN survey data, four different versions of the index are presented and the resulting rankings of the nations are examined vis-à-vis the existing ranking. The theoretical and policy implications of the proposed methodology and its results are discussed.     

The forgotten promise of e-government maturity: Assessing responsiveness in the digital public sector

Assessing e-government responsiveness is one of the major gaps in the currently dominant e-government maturity models. While we have a relatively large pool of models focusing on technological and organizational integration from a supply side perspective, measures of responsiveness of e-government systems from a user perspective are still lacking. Replicating a study from New Zealand and Australia, this study explores the response time and quality of e-mail response in Danish local and central governments (N = 175). Despite that Denmark is high ranking in international benchmark studies, we find that one third of central government agencies did not respond at all, and close to 80% of the ministries provided none or incomplete answers. Local government responds faster and provides answers that are more complete and accurate than those provided by central government. Implications for e-government are discussed.     

e-Government services for faith-based organizations: Bridging the organizational divide

In this paper, we examine the challenges faced by faith-based institutions in a low-income, predominantly Black community seeking to take advantage of grants provided through the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives (FBCI). FBCI is an e-Government program that assists nonprofit organizations in competing for Federal dollars with fewer bureaucratic barriers. Informed by the design-actuality framework, we interviewed clergy at seven faith-based organizations. The intent of this analysis is to juxtapose the design intentions of the government officials with the actualities expressed by the intended benefactors of the initiative. Our findings suggest that this e-Government initiative may unwittingly exacerbate existing disparities in the strategic use of information and communication technologies (ICT).     

e-Government Adoption Model (GAM): Differing service maturity levels

This research has as its objective the discovery of the critical factors that enable citizens to adopt e-Government (e-Gov) at different stages of service maturity. To accomplish the objective, this research has explained the related concepts and theories and developed a research framework grounded on a strong theoretical and literature review background. The empirical study was conducted in Canada, which is a leader in providing mature e-Gov services. From our results, we have observed two ontological differences from the present literature in the adoption behavior of e-Gov where organizational and financial perspectives have distinct implications over parsimonious technology adoption behavior. First, technology adoption model (TAM), diffusion of innovation theory (DOI), and theory of planned behavior (TPB) cannot capture and specify the complete essence of e-Gov adoption behavior of citizens. Second, e-Gov adoption behavior also differs based on service maturity levels, i.e., when functional characteristics of organizational, technological, economical, and social perspectives of e-Gov differ. Our findings indicate the critical factors that enable citizens to adopt e-Gov at different stages of service maturity. Public administrators and policy-makers have potential implications from the findings of the adoption behavior of e-Gov at different maturity levels.