Eric Tze Kuan Lim

Managing Stakeholder Interests in e-Government Implementation: Lessons Learned from a Singapore e-Government Project

As e-government plays an increasingly dominant role in modern public administrative management, its pervasive influence on organizations and individuals is apparent. It is, therefore, timely and relevant to examine e-governance—the fundamental mission of e-government. By adopting a stakeholder perspective, this study approaches the topic of e-governance in e-government from the three critical aspects of stakeholder management: (1) identification of stakeholders; (2) recognition of differing interests among stakeholders; and (3) how an organization caters to and furthers these interests. Findings from the case study point to the importance of (1) discarding the traditional preference for controls to develop instead a proactive attitude towards the identification of all relevant collaborators; (2) conducting cautious assessments of the technological restrictions underlying IT-transformed public services to map out the boundary for devising and implementing control and collaboration mechanisms in the system; and (3) developing strategies to align stakeholder interests so that participation in e-government can be self-governing.

Traversing knowledge networks: an algorithmic historiography of extant literature on the Internet of Things (IoT)

Research on the Internet of Things (IoT) has been booming for the past 6 years due to technological advances and potential for application. Nonetheless, the rapid growth of IoT articles and the heterogeneous nature of IoT pose challenges to conducting a systematic review of IoT literature. This study seeks to address the abovementioned challenges by reviewing 1065 IoT articles retrieved from the International Statistical Institute Web of Science via a blend of quantitative citation analysis and qualitative content analysis. For the former, we generated a historiography of IoT research, a citation network, in which we tried to identify main paths of codification and diffusion, as well as path-dependent transitions. For the latter, we explicated the progression of knowledge through 30 central IoT articles in chronological order regarding infrastructures, enabling technologies, potential technologies, and research challenges. Findings from this study contribute to both IoT research and management.

E-Government Implementation: Balancing Collaboration and Control in Stakeholder Management

As e-government becomes increasingly pervasive in modern public administrative management, its influence on organizations and individuals has become hard to ignore. It is therefore timely and relevant to examine e-governance—the fundamental mission of e-government. By adopting a stakeholder perspective and coming from the strategic orientation of control and collaboration management philosophy, this study approaches the topic of e-governance in e-government from the three critical aspects of stakeholder management: (1) identification of stakeholders, (2) recognition of differing interests among stakeholders, and (3) how an organization caters to and furthers these interests. Findings from the case study allow us to identify four important groups of stakeholders known as the Engineers, Dissidents, Seasoners, and Skeptics who possess vastly different characteristics and varying levels of acceptance of and commitment towards the e-filing paradigm. Accordingly, four corresponding management strategies with varying degrees of collaboration and control mechanisms are devised in the bid to align these stakeholder interests such that their participation in e-government can be leveraged by public organizations to achieve competitive advantage.

Towards the Restoration of Public Trust in Electronic Governments: A Case Study of the E-Filing System in Singapore

E-governments are becoming part and parcel of the virtual economic landscape and are plagued by the same lack of consumer trust that inhibits e-commerce transactions. To make matters worse, the political exclusivity and apathetic bureaucracy of public institutions have amplified the level of difficulty in trying to convince the citizenries to come onboard e-government initiatives. In a preliminary attempt to derive possible developmental implications for the restoring of public trust in e-governments, this study explores the success story of the Singapores Electronic Tax-Filing (e-Filing) system to reveal how trust-building mechanisms have been incorporated into its techno-structure to attract a phenomenal rate of public user acceptance. Specifically, the case examines the means by which process-based, characteristic-based and institution-based trust have been restored in the e-Filing system. This paper concludes by suggesting that the restoration of public trust can only be achieved through a blend of socio-political strategies and Information Technology.

Managing knowledge conflicts in an interorganizational project: A case study of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore

As knowledge gains currency as a critical resource in the information-intensive economy, organizations have doubled their efforts to extract value from knowledge management endeavors, including the creation of interorganizational knowledge alliances. One particular aspect of such knowledge partnerships that has gone unnoticed in academic research is the presence of conflicts in knowledge activities. By adopting a conflict perspective of knowledge management in an interorganizational context, this study arrives at a two-dimensional framework that defines knowledge conflicts in terms of their type and nature. Central to this article is the fundamental notion that conflicts form an integral part of knowledge management, and depending on how they are managed, conflicts may be formidable partners or dangerous adversaries in the corporate quest for a holistic knowledge strategy.

Managing Stakeholder Interests in E-Government Implementation: Lessons Learned from a Singapore E-Government Project

As e-government plays an increasingly dominant role in modern public administrative management, its pervasive influence on organizations and individuals is apparent. It is, therefore, timely and relevant to examine e-governance—the fundamental mission of e-government. By adopting a stakeholder perspective, this study approaches the topic of e-governance in e-government from the three critical aspects of stakeholder management: (1) identification of stakeholders; (2) recognition of differing interests among stakeholders; and (3) how an organization caters to and furthers these interests. Findings from the case study point to the importance of (1) discarding the traditional preference for controls to develop instead a proactive attitude towards the identification of all relevant collaborators; (2) conducting cautious assessments of the technological restrictions underlying IT-transformed public services to map out the boundary for devising and implementing control and collaboration mechanisms in the system; and (3) developing strategies to align stakeholder interests so that participation in e-government can be self-governing.

Exploring the Concept of Para Social Presence in Virtual Project Teams

Though contemporary research has testified to the importance of social presence in influencing the format and structure of group processes, its unidimensional nature and inability to accommodate asynchronous communication has eroded its relevance in the face of more sophisticated IT-based collaborative networks such as virtual project teams. Kumar and Benbasat [25, 26] thus advanced the notion of Para Social Presence (PSP) as a broader, encompassing concept that overcomes the aforementioned weaknesses inherent in the existing social presence construct. Yet to-date, there has not been a theoretical and empirical validation of the pertinent of the PSP construct when applied to more dynamic group configurations as claimed. To this end, this study reviews extant literature to first establish whether the PSP construct is meaningful conceptually and then empirically validates its measurement properties over time through a temporal field experimentation setting.

The art of appeal in electronic commerce: Understanding the impact of product and website quality on online purchases

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to advance product appeal and website appeal as focal psychological mechanisms that can be invoked by business-to-consumer e-commerce sites to mitigate problems of information asymmetry via signaling to bolster consumers’ purchase intention under the influence of trust. Design/methodology/approach Survey approach was employed to validate the research model. Findings Website appeal partially mediates the positive effect of product appeal on consumers’ purchase intention. Trust in e-commerce sites not only increases purchase intention directly, but it also reinforces the positive relationship between website appeal and purchase intention while attenuating the positive relationship between product appeal and purchase intention. Service content quality, search delivery quality, and enjoyment are confirmed as positive antecedents of website appeal whereas diagnosticity and justifiability are established as positive antecedents of product appeal. Research limitations/implications This study not only delineates product and website appeal as complementary drivers of consumer purchase on e-commerce sites, but it also derives five signals that aid in bolstering both product and website appeal. Trust is revealed to exert a moderating influence on the impact of product and website appeal on purchase intention. Practical implications Practitioners should prioritize their resource allocation to enhance qualities most pertinent to product and website appeal. E-commerce sites should offer product-oriented functionalities to facilitate product diagnosticity and reassure consumers of their purchase decisions. Originality/value This study distinguishes between product and website appeal as well as between their respective antecedents. It also uncovers how trust can alter the effects of both website and product appeal on consumers’ purchase intention.

Disentangling Digital Platform Competition: The Case of UK Mobile Payment Platforms

Abstract Digital platforms confer competitive advantage through superior architectural configurations. There is, however, still a dearth of research that sheds light on the competitive attributes that define platform competition from an architectural standpoint. To disentangle platform competition, we opted for the mobile payment market in the United Kingdom as our empirical setting. By conceptualizing digital platforms as layered modular architectures and embracing the theoretical lens of strategic groups, this study supplements prior research by deriving a taxonomy of platform profiles that is grounded on the strategic dimensions of value creation and value delivery architectures. We discover that mobile payment platforms could be delineated based on: (1) whether they are integrative or integratable on their value creation architecture; and (2) whether they have direct, indirect, or open access on their value delivery architecture. The preceding attributes of value creation architecture and value delivery architecture aided us in identifying six profiles associated with mobile payment platforms, which in turn led us to advance three competitive strategies that could be pursued by digital platforms in network economies.

Enterprise System as an Orchestrator of Dynamic Capability Development: A Case Study of the IRAS and TechCo

Corporations are perpetually hunting for ways to develop exclusive, sustainable, and competitive advantages that will enable them to leapfrog ahead of their industrial adversaries. Notably, the debut of enterprise systems (ES) during the recent decade has given rise to frequent talk of the utilization of integrative, IT-inspired business mechanisms to achieve the much sought-after but elusive competitive edge. Others, however, have argued that the search for sustainable competitiveness should instead be anchored in organizational efforts to cultivate and build up firm-specific dynamic capabilities. Cognizant of the various perspectives, this paper takes a holistic approach in proposing the achievement of sustainable competitive advantages by examining the manner in which ES adoption can contribute to the forging of dynamic capabilities. In particular, Montealegre’s (2002) process model of capability development is adopted as the analytical framework to explore the strategization of ES development in two different organizations, with the main distinction being that one of them subscribes to commercially available SAP applications while the other chooses to develop its ES in-house. Through comparing and contrasting evidence from both cases, this study attempts to decipher how ES adoption can be strategized to develop strategic capabilities and understand the implications between off-the-shelf and bespoke ES in affecting the process of dynamic capability development.