Transformation of Government and Citizen Trust in Government

The continuing erosion of citizen trust and confidence in government has been attributed to a number of factors. This chapter examines the potential role of digital transformation of government in reversing this decline. Based on a systematic literature review, key factors that influence citizen trust and confidence in government as an institution are identified, including citizen satisfaction and expectations, government transparency and accountability, transformation of government, and government performance. The review of the literature also reveals a lack of knowledge and understanding of how transformation of government can influence the growing decline in citizen engagement with government. To address this gap, a conceptual model capturing the key constructs is proposed to support a better understanding of strategies for rebuilding trust and confidence in government administrations through transformation of government.

Toward the Improvement of Emergency Response Utilizing a Multi-Tiered Systems Integration Approach

This chapter presents an extension of the Emergency Description Information Technology (EDIT) project to facilitate the effective collection and communication of information during an emergency. New academic findings and industry technologies inform a modified research framework. The research framework contains four primary research areas that are described in detail. Extending the design-science approach used for the EDIT project could improve emergency communications during large-scale international gatherings, as well as for community emergency response.

Debating Digitally-Enabled Service Transformation in Public Sector

Digitally-enabled service transformation (DEST) in the public sector (PS) offers a unique opportunity for public administration (PA) and information systems (IS) disciplines to interlace. Such uniqueness has enabled a deviance in the theoretical selection from the adoption of native PA/IS theories to imported social sciences theories including institutional and structuration. Institutional theory provides a way of viewing and explaining why and how institutions emerge in a certain way within a given context, but it falls under the criticism of structural bias as it avoids explanations situated at individual or same level of analysis. Such a gap is filled with structuration theory adoption, focusing on how institutional structures arise, or are maintained through the interplay process. The fusion of such concepts would potentially enrich the debates on DEST in PS by provoking new insights to keep the “research talking.”

Facebook Contradictions in Municipal Social Media Practices

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the emerging social media practices of governments and citizens. The study takes on the status of an exploratory case study and draws on a grounded research approach. The case study shows an emerging social media practice that is embedded in and driven by a diversity of contradictions. The study identifies the following three contradictions as the most significant: communicative contradictions between service administration and community feeling, organizational contradictions between central control and local engagement, digital platform contradictions between municipal website and social media. The chapter presents a single-case study, which is a small contribution to the initial understanding of the social media practices of governments and citizens. The analysis indicates how a local municipality in its social media practices on Facebook is embedded in and driven by contradictions, and hence offers insights into a new way of understanding the challenges and opportunities of government social media.

Live Video Communication in Prehospital Emergency Medicine

Prehospital emergency medicine treats time-critical diseases and conditions and aims to reduce morbidity and mortality. The progression of emergency medicine is an important topic for governments worldwide. A problem occurs when paramedics need assistance at the emergency site by emergency doctors, who cannot be present. Video-communication in real-time from the emergency site to an emergency doctor offers an opportunity to enhance the quality of emergency medicine. The core piece of this study is a video camera system called “LiveCity camera,” enabling real-time high quality video connection of paramedics and emergency doctors. The impact of video communication on emergency medicine is clearly appreciated among providers, based upon the extent of agreement that has been stated in this study's questionnaire by doctors and paramedics. This study was part of the FP7-European Union funded research project “LiveCity” (Grant Agreement No. 297291).

A Quantitative Evaluation of Costs, Opportunities, Benefits, and Risks Accompanying the Use of E-Government Services in Qatar

Providers of e-government systems and policymakers recognize that usability and adoption are key success indicators of e-government services. Borrowed from the field of e-commerce, several models were proposed and tested in the literature to evaluate users' adoption of e-government services in different contexts. This chapter examines users' satisfaction with e-government services in Qatar reflected by the cost, opportunity, benefit, and risk of using these e-services. After a quick review on research works done on evaluating e-government services in the Middle East region, quantitative data collected from three e-government services in Qatar is presented and analyzed using structural equation modelling techniques. Results revealed that while the hypotheses linking cost and opportunity to satisfaction were rejected, benefits and risk were significantly able to explain the level of users' satisfaction with e-government services.

Smart Government and the Maturity Levels of Sociopolitical Digital Interactions

The emerging concept of smart government has a deep connection with the capacity to equalize high levels of performance and responsiveness in order to promote and enable development and prosperity. The expansion of public space towards the digital environment and increasing contextual complexity push governments to new perspectives concerning political and administrative dimensions. The capacity to interact virtually with citizens leads to the concept of sociopolitical digital interactions and the exploration of a conceptual framework called sociopolitical digital interactions' maturity (SDIM) directed the conducting of this study through a qualitative methodological approach. A comparative content analysis of the 27 Brazilian states' government websites was structured on 2013 and 2018 verifications. In this lapse time, the poor adoption of crowdsourcing digital tools denoted low governmental capacity to explore collective intelligence as well as an unwillingness concerning the adoption of citizen-centric models and a lack of openness to co-creative interaction processes.

Empowering Society Participation in Public Service Processes

Several discussions enforce the need for a greater engagement of society in public issues and show how ICTs can enhance it. This chapter presents the idea of conversations about public services. It is argued that by making society aware of how a service is provided—its process—citizens may develop a better attitude for interacting with government and other service users. Both society and governmental service providers can discuss problems, correct available information, and increase their knowledge about the processes, thus providing closer ties between them. This chapter also presents a tool designed to support these conversations and the results obtained with a case study of its use. The results suggest that conversations have stimulated interaction among citizens and services providers as well as allowed service improvement opportunities.

Strategic Overhaul of Government Operations

Field operations in municipal governments have undergone fundamental adjustments. This empirical study investigated the ramifications of the strategic shift in government field operations when mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) were introduced for field crews in a multiyear process. The implementation had to overcome several serious socio-technical challenges. The data were collected using cognitive work analysis (CWA) and interpreted from a structurationist perspective. The study filled an important methodological gap: While structuration theory (ST) has been criticized for its paucity of guidance for empirical research, CWA has been denounced for its deterministic engineering approach to social systems. However, the subordination of the micro-meso-level CWA framework into the grand theory of ST resulted in an approach referred to as situated action analysis, which was found particularly useful for elucidating the observed feedbacks between human agency, the shaping of the information (technology) artifact, and the organizational structure.