Franca Cantoni

Cooperating Strategies in e-Government

Public administration (PA) has significantly shifted its interests to reach the innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), as a result of e-Government projects. The new challenge for public administrations is based on the exploitation of their knowledge resources in order to improve their processes and to offer better services to the users. The aim of this contribution is to investigate the spreading of cooperating strategies in public administrations in order to better understand why and how these organizational behaviors could assure advantages for PA and citizens.

In the Face of Customers’ Changing Behaviour, Should Italian Banks’ Approach to Online Trading Remain the Same?

What drives the behaviors of banks and their customers in times of profound changes? The modern crisis affecting economic and social systems has significantly diminished customers’ willingness to invest, and this trend, together with improved information about financial services, has made them more price sensitive, more rational in their decision making, and thus more challenging for banks to attract. Therefore, banks have invested in projects to improve their internal processes and online services, in particular by deploying web 2.0–based mobile banking and payment opportunities. In the Italian banking sector, 12 years after the publication of “New Distribution Models for Financial Services: The Italian Banks’ Approach to the On Line Trading Development,” this article considers how general and structural changes in customer behavior and the banking sector have affected the strategy banks use to provide online trading services, including the use of outsourcing and new managerial practices.

Between Sponge and Titanium: Designing Micro and Macro Features for the Resilient Organization

Many contemporary organization s must deal with high levels of environmental uncertainty, complexity and equivocality , struggling with not only strong competitive pressures but also increasing uncertainty related to sociopolitical and economic trends within the frame of a risk society. The centrality of resilience in contemporary managerial discourse is mostly related to the social, political, environmental and economic turmoil and jolts, to which organizations have been exposed during the past decades. Organizational survival is therefore increasingly challenged, and to survive and prosper, organizations must transform jolts and shocks into new and resilient solutions. Organizational resilience refers to the ability of an organization to continue to meet its core functions by finding and implementing in a fast and timely manner organizational micro and microstructure able to transform uncertainty into new solutions. While the progressive turbulence of the external environment requires organizations to be more resilient, the design of organizational resilience appears to be still limited to its adaptability to the external environment. Within this context, this chapter draws an original proposal on the design of resilient organizations considering both micro/individual-level and macro/design-level features.

The Psychological Contract as an Integrative Governance Instrument of the Legal Outsourcing Contract

Outsourcing is a managerial procedure whose success needs clarification regarding the long-term relationship between customer and supplier. The authors’ aim is to examine simultaneously the client’s and supplier’s perspectives through the psychological contract that, by assimilating the contents of the legal contract, focuses on (1) the implicit (not formalized) and reciprocal (mutual) duties between the two parties, (2) the equivalence of psychological obligations and contractual values and (3) the importance of the individual commitment level. While the legal contract is managed and based on an organizational level, the psychological contract is individual and perceived as such: from the authors’ point of view, all workers, regardless of whether they work inside or outside the company, are part of the psychological contract. The authors employ a case study represented by an outsourcing center belonging to a group of Italian banks, using the “qualitative and quantitative” mixed method. In the first phase, a series of interviews will help identify the key variables to develop a questionnaire for both customers and suppliers. The second phase will comprise the interviews and questionnaire formalization. The two themes, the psychological contract on the one hand and the outsourcing governance on the other hand, represent a highly relevant matter that has received scant attention in the literature.

Perspectives of Electronic Commerce: The Italian Scenario

This paper provides a brief overview on the current state and future perspectives of electronic commerce activities in Italy. As most European countries, Italy is currently experiencing a large number of initiatives focused on electronic commerce at different levels: new business organizations are being created, traditional enterprises are being reorganized to change their focus on innovative forms of business, banks and financial institutions are exploiting the new opportunities offered by trading online services. At the same time, the first attempts to regulate Internet-based business activities have appeared and some forms of incentive are being planned by the Government.