Dolores E. Luna

Open government 2.0: citizen empowerment through open data, web and mobile apps

Although the open government concept is not new, current trends in open government imply a change in focus from the traditional principle of accountability to a concept of citizen empowerment, collaboration and information sharing. In this paper, we explore the use of open data and mobile apps in the top countries according to the UN 2010 e-Government Survey. Our exploration suggests that, although not all countries yet offer mobile apps to their citizens, there is a great diversity of apps to create citizen value. Moreover, private companies and citizens are getting involved in the creation of such apps. More research is needed to understand ways to promote the development of this kind of government applications.

Creating Public Value through Digital Government: Lessons on Inter-Organizational Collaboration and Information Technologies

Creating and delivering public value is becoming an important goal in digital government projects around the globe. Moreover, the transition from government to governance has revitalized the interest in inter-organizational collaboration and new approaches to technology development. In working towards a better understanding of the interactions between institutions, organizations, new forms of collaboration, and value creation, we test a model based on the technology enactment framework and survey data. Our results suggest that regulatory frameworks have an impact on facilitating the development of effective organizations, increasing collaboration, and producing better information technologies. Additionally, inter-organizational collaboration and specific technology enactments have an impact on the creation of value, but enacted technology appears to be unrelated to collaboration. Further exploration of how different forms of inter-organizational collaboration and information technologies impact the process of public value creation in a more coordinated fashion is necessary.

Interorganizational collaboration and value creation in digital government projects

The importance of IT collaboration between government agencies and private organizations has been already identified in the literature. However, there is still a gap about the determinants of success of such collaborations. Using survey data, we look at the impact of the resources and processes of the public entity in delivering public value for private public IT collaborations in the context of Mexico, and the moderating role of collaboration with the private sector and with other public organizations in both causal relationships. Our results show that internal processes of the public entity have a positive impact on public value creation in their IT projects, while internal resources have no effect. Collaboration with the private sector moderates negatively the effect of internal resources on public value creation, and moderates positively the effect of internal processes on public value creation. Inter-organizational collaboration within other public sector organizations, on the other hand, moderates positively the relationship between internal resources and public value creation, and does not moderate the relationship between internal processes and public value creation.

Local government websites: cases of innovation and best practices in Mexico

One of the most important tasks in local government websites is the transfer of knowledge. Many e-government websites have practices, programs or citizens initiatives that work very well in their context, but disappear in the next administration or political party change that rules the government. This poster is part of an ongoing research to explore the best practices or innovations in local government sites. We include the cases of the States of Jalisco, Durango and Chiapas as preliminary examples of this ongoing research to find innovative solutions in the local government websites.

GRASP and hybrid GRASP-Tabu heuristics to solve a maximal covering location problem with customer preference ordering

A maximal covering location problem with customer preferences is studied.A GRASP and a hybrid GRASP-Tabu heuristics to find lower bounds are proposed.The heuristics are tested with medium and large size instances.Despite the heuristics simplicity, they provide high quality solutions efficiently.The proposed heuristics are competitive against commercial optimization software. In this study, a maximal covering location problem is investigated. In this problem, we want to maximize the demand of a set of customers covered by a set of p facilities located among a set of potential sites. It is assumed that a set of facilities that belong to other firms exists and that customers freely choose allocation to the facilities within a coverage radius. The problem can be formulated as a bilevel mathematical programming problem, in which the leader locates facilities in order to maximize the demand covered and the follower allocates customers to the most preferred facility among those selected by the leader and facilities from other firms. We propose a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) heuristic and a hybrid GRASP-Tabu heuristic to find near optimal solutions. Results of the heuristic approaches are compared to solutions obtained with a single-level reformulation of the problem. Computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can find very good quality solutions with a small computational burden. The most important feature of the proposed heuristics is that, despite their simplicity, optimal or near-optimal solutions can be determined very efficiently.

A hybrid algorithm for the manufacturing cell formation problem

In this paper we compare different heuristic methods for the manufacturing cell formation problem considering part process sequence: a GRASP algorithm, a reactive GRASP algorithm and a hybrid algorithm which combines reactive GRASP and tabu search. All algorithms are tested with a set of instances from the literature. The results from the GRASP algorithm are compared to those of the reactive GRASP in order to evaluate the advantages of automatically adjusting the parameter value within the randomized greedy procedure. Also the reactive GRASP results are compared to those of the hybrid algorithm to evaluate the contribution to solution quality of replacing the local search phase of the GRASP algorithm with tabu search.

Assessing the impacts of digital government in the creation of public value

Digital government has been a key component on government reform strategies during the last years. Unfortunately, few research exists reporting on the impacts of electronic government in terms of the final outcomes. By using a model that links inputs to impacts, this paper explores the impacts of electronic government on competitiveness, efficiency, and transactions. We used panel data analysis to test eighteen hypotheses. Results support 5 of the 18 hypotheses, however three of the supported hypothesis resulted in the opposite direction. Results suggest that citizens use digital government mainly to complete electronic transactions with government, and also that they need simple portals to accomplish these tasks. Additionally, our results suggest that, at least at the initial stages, having two delivery channels have a negative impact on government efficiency. Finally, it appears that the relationship between digital government and more general impacts in the competitiveness of a region is not directly linked, at least on the short term.

Understanding Public Value Creation in the Delivery of Electronic Services

Understanding public value creation through electronic services is a complex and important research problem. Recent attempts to understand electronic services value from the citizen perspective suggest that dividing service delivery in several stages could be a valuable approach to understand ways in which information technologies support value creation when providing electronic services. Therefore, we propose the use of this process model as a tool to analyze and define public value creation through electronic services. We show the potential value of the model using birth certificate requests as a hypothetical example. We conclude the paper by describing how we are applying the model to our current research.

Using data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess government web portals performance

In the last few years, researchers have evaluated the performance of e-government portals in order to identify best practices and understand some of the factors that influence the quality of the information and services they provide to citizens. Most of these evaluations consider only the results or outputs, but ignore the inputs in terms of capabilities and resources that governments have available for these efforts. This paper argues that using data envelopment analysis (DEA) could help to better understand how efficient are governments in their use of certain inputs to produce high quality e-government portals. DEA is applied to calculate an efficiency score based on some portal characteristics (outputs) such as information, interaction, transaction, integration, and participation, and some organizational, institutional and contextual factors (inputs) such as government capacity, potential demand, and operation cost. The state government portals in Mexico are used for the empirical analysis. Our results indicate that there are some states that are never in the first places in terms of quality, but they have very few resources and capabilities and therefore, they are highly efficient.

Comparing usability of government web portals during governor change of terms

During the last years, we have been assessing the development of Internet State Portals in Mexico. These observations suggest that in many cases, the transition between governor terms is not always easy to manage, and in several cases we have observed important reductions of functionality in the new versions of the portals. In this poster we compare the performance of the Web Portal of the State of Puebla in Mexico, through user-centered design techniques, specifically usability testing. Results show that, contrary to our expectations, the Puebla portal improved its usability from this point of view. Further research will involve interviews with the main actors in the transition process to better understand the main factors involved in this successful transition.