e-Government stakeholders—Who are they and what do they want?

There is an increasing recognition that various stakeholder groups for e-government have a significant role to play in ensuring the long-term success of the e-government enterprise. This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the stakeholders’ multiple perspectives by proposing typologies of stakeholder roles, and stakeholder benefits, respectively, and embedding these in a stakeholder benefits analysis tool. A literature review is used to surface the diverse existing categorizations of e-government stakeholders and their interests and the benefits sought. This review informs a proposal for a typology of stakeholder roles, and for a typology of stakeholder benefits, which together are used to construct an initial proposal for a stakeholder benefits analysis tool (SBAT), which can be used to map stakeholder roles to stakeholder benefits. This tool has been tested by an expert group, and revised. This exploratory study is an important first step towards the development of tools and approaches for understanding the benefits sought by a wide range of different stakeholder groups in e-government. Progress in the development of such tools is important for the development of knowledge and practice, policy, and evaluation with respect to stakeholder engagement with, and participation in, e-government.     

Enterprise Information Portals in support of business process, design teams and collaborative commerce performance

Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs) have been widely adopted as platforms for the integration of knowledge management and information technology (IT). This study has been conducted from the knowledge management perspective in order to examine the influence of EIPs on collaborative commerce in the automobile industry. This study explores the integration of internal and external business processes and the coordination of collaborative design teams. An initial qualitative investigation explores the practical applications of an EIP in an automobile company. A research model is then formulated and tested using a questionnaire survey of the R&D department of a motor company in Taiwan. The results of the data analysis reveal that presence of EIPs can help a company realize the benefits of c-commerce. EIPs also can improve collaborative commerce performance by promoting the degree of integration of the enterprise process and by strengthening the process innovation and communication of collaborative design teams. The results suggest that managers should reinforce important factors, including knowledge management tools, process integration, and the quality of design teams, in order to achieve success in collaborative commerce.     

Influencing citizen behavior: Experiences from multichannel marketing pilot projects

Information technology allows national and local governments to satisfy the needs of citizens in a cost effective way. Unfortunately, citizens still tend to prefer traditional, more costly channels, such as the front desk, phone and mail. Through pilot projects government agencies attempt to influence this behavior of citizens, directing them towards the online channel. With this paper we provide insight into the possibility to influence citizens’ behavior in the complex landscape of multi-channel service provision. The paper systematically compares five pilot projects using a framework that is based on organizational and marketing literature. The results show that socio-psychological factors are crucial in multi-channel management, much more than the technology itself. We conclude that citizens can be directed towards the online channel. However, not all projects are successful. Economic and legal instruments tend to sort more direct effects than communication or service instruments. Moreover, organizational factors such as bureaucracy often hinder eventual success. Choosing a smart and relatively small scope and strong project manager may help to evoke success in directing citizen online behavior.     

Analyzing the impact of knowledge management on CRM success: The mediating effects of organizational factors

Customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) have become key strategic tool for all companies, especially in the current competitive environment. Moreover, customer knowledge is an important issue for CRM implementation. Reviewing the literature, we found many studies that analyze the crucial role played by KM initiatives as determinants of the success of CRM. Moreover, we found also diverse studies that show high rates of failure when implementing that strategy, so there is still no integrated conceptual framework to guide companies to their successful implementation. In this paper, with data of 153 Spanish hotels, we examine the relationships between KM and CRM success using a structural equation model. The main contribution is that having knowledge management capabilities is not sufficient for the success of CRM, but there are other factors to consider. In particular, organizational factors indeed impact CRM success and they appear to be intermediaries of the impact of other factors (KM capabilities/technological/customer orientation factors) in the success of CRM (in financial and marketing terms).     

The impact of consumer trust on attitudinal loyalty and purchase intentions in B2C e-marketplaces: Intermediary trust vs. seller trust

The online merchant of an e-marketplace consists of an intermediary, providing the market infrastructure, and the community of sellers conducting business within that infrastructure. Typically, consumers willingly buy from unknown sellers within an e-marketplace, despite the apparent risk, since they trust the institutional mechanisms furnished by the relatively well-known intermediary. Consumers’ trust in one component of the e-marketplace merchant may not only affect their trust in the other, but also influence the way consumers make online purchases. This paper explores the impact of trust on consumer behavior in e-marketplaces. An empirical study has been conducted to accomplish our research objectives, using a questionnaire survey of 222 active e-marketplace shoppers in Korea. The results reveal that consumer trust in an intermediary has a strong influence upon both attitudinal loyalty and purchase intentions, although consumer trust in the community of sellers has no significant effect on the two constructs representing consumer behavior. In addition, it was found that trust is transferred from an intermediary to the community of sellers, implying that the trustworthiness of the intermediary plays a critical role in determining the extent to which consumers trust and accept the sellers in the e-marketplace. This paper offers some implications from the findings of the research.     

Transparency and technological change: Ensuring equal and sustained public access to government information

The Obama administration campaigned on the platform of increased transparency and access to government information after the limitations of the Bush years. As part of this focus on transparency, the Obama administration is emphasizing the use of e-government and new social media services to open up access to government. This paper explores the considerations and challenges of this approach, such as the inclusion of members of the public with limited access to the internet, the use of non-governmental channels to disseminate government information, the permanence of digital-born government information, and the design of e-government.     

Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Their Pupils’ Mathematical Errors

This article is mainly concerned with the didactical and the epistemological approach towards pupils’ errors in mathematics. The findings of an investigation into a representative sample of Cypriot teachers’ attitudes of errors in mathematics are presented. Although teachers draw on behaviourism as a way of understanding pupils’ errors, a considerable number of teachers seem to be influenced by both cognitive science error theory and the obstacle theory. Inferential statistical analysis revealed that teachers’ attitudes of errors are mainly associated with the attendance of a specialised INSET course in mathematics. Teachers who attended the INSET course in mathematics are generally more influenced by the cognitive science theory and the obstacle theory. Implications for the development of policy on teacher training are discussed. It is argued that with appropriate training teachers will be able to adopt a model of interpreting errors in mathematics based on the didactical and the epistemological approaches.     

School policy on teaching and school learning environment: direct and indirect effects upon student outcome measures

School policy on teaching and the school learning environment (SLE) are the main school factors of the dynamic model of educational effectiveness (Creemers & Kyriakides, 2008 Kyriakides, L. and Tsangaridou, N. 2008. Towards the development of generic and differentiated models of educational effectiveness: A study on school and teacher effectiveness in physical education. British Educational Research Journal, 34: 807–838. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). A longitudinal study in which 50 primary schools, 108 classes, and 2369 students participated generated evidence supporting the validity of the dynamic model. This article reports the results of a re-analysis of the data of this study in order to search for direct and indirect effects of school factors included in the model. Using multilevel structural equation modelling techniques, indirect effects of school policy on teaching and SLE upon achievement in mathematics and Greek language are demonstrated. Implications of findings are drawn. Comparing the results of the multilevel direct and indirect effect model with those from using a multilevel regression model, we demonstrate the importance of choosing appropriate conceptual models and using relevant methodological approaches to understand the dynamic nature of educational effectiveness.     

Investigating validity from teachers' perspectives through their engagement in large-scale assessment: The Emergent Literacy Baseline Assessment project

This paper argues for an expanded conception of test validity, in which teachers, as end-users of tests, contribute a distinctive perspective on validity, referred to as inferential validity. It also offers a methodology that could be adopted in order to subject this dimension of validity to scrutiny. An investigation conducted into the meanings constructed by teachers of a literacy test, the Emergent Literacy Baseline Assessment (ELBA), is reported to illustrate the methodology. In the first section of the paper, current conceptions of validity are discussed. It is argued that the validation process for tests should include the clarification and justification of the interpretations and uses of observed scores. This argument is illustrated from the methodology for investigating the validity of the ELBA. Self-assessment questionnaires and focus-group interviews provided data on teachers' views about the validity of the ELBA. Arguments in favour of investigating the validity of large-scale tests by taking into account teachers' perspectives are provided.