Francesca Ricciardi

Transparency, Openness and Knowledge Sharing for Rebuilding and Strengthening Government Institutions

The developing of the Open Government Model is allowing an organizational revolution for public administrations, providing to citizens and entrepreneurs a better access to information and public services. It also can allow the increasing of transparency in public agencies and citizen participation, indirectly enhancing collaboration and facilitating democratic processes. Transparency and open data can be powerful tools to stimulate and support public services’ improvements, faster innovation and empower citizens’ rights. So actually many governmental organizations are reviewing and rearranging their processes, information and data to improve policies, enhance legitimacy and openness toward outside parties and citizens. An “open” public knowledge may contribute to establish a collaboration and participation culture among the main stakeholders. In this paper authors focus on a new organizational model to deliver transparent services and to improve an effective collaboration between the public administrations. The research methodology adopted is based on a theoretical-deductive approach. The study describes general principles to come, through the case strategy, to the empirical analysis of an innovative national government portal called “Transparency Compass Portal”. It tries also to identify the distinctive aspects of some administrative services offered by several public organizations.

The Challenge of Service Oriented Performances for Chief Information Officers

In the emerging service-centred economy, even the most physical product is “wrapped” in services. Businesses tend, then, to become more and more information-intensive and networked. In this scenario, the business role of Information Management is crucial. This paper investigates management literature as to the role of the highest ranking executive in charge of Information Systems, i.e. the Chief Information Officer (CIO). We found that, in the 1980s and first 1990s, most literature suggested that CIOs were to be intended as staff, strategy-making managers, similar to CFOs; but since the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, CIOs are also expected to work side by side with line managers and to give perceivable contribution to profits. In this scenario, the active contribution of Information Management in developing value-added services may transform IT from a perceived cost center to a perceived profit center within the organization. In the Conclusions, some suggestions for further research are presented.

Smart City Research as an Interdisciplinary Crossroads: A Challenge for Management and Organization Studies

This paper seeks to define the boundaries of Smart City research and to draw a map of the interdisciplinary community focusing on this emerging issue. To do so, we analysed the texts included in the websites of two major international Conferences on Smart Cities, and we used the Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach to examine a representative sample of 114 publications on Smart Cities. We found that Smart City research was hosted in Architecture and Social Sciences journals in the first place, but since 2007–2008 the interest in this issue boomed among Engineering and Computer Science scholars. Whilst there is a growing number of publications describing many ICT-enabled solutions for enhancing the competitiveness, sustainability and livability of cities, only few studies have addressed the organizational issues implied in such innovations so far. On the other side, our graph describing the interdisciplinary links within the 118 analysed publications shows that management studies occupy a strategic position within the interdisciplinary network of Smart City research. Then, Management and Information Systems scholars are given the opportunity to fill an important gap in an emerging stream of studies.

Participatory networks for place safety and livability: organisational success factors

This theory-building paper focuses on a specific type of ICT-enabled participatory network, where citizens actively cooperate with an organisation (typically but not necessarily a public administration) to enhance the livability of their urban or rural environment. We have called these systems ‘citizens to problem-solving organisation (C2PSO) networks’ and argue that they are set to play a role of growing importance in some of the emerging urban and rural livability challenges. The authors present three different explorative case studies that focus on health, safety, independent living for the elderly, and mobility as indicators of place livability. The recurrent organisational factors identified in the case studies translate into key elements of success, the analysis of which highlighted three novel constructs as possible antecedents of improved livability in the living settings of C2PSO networks. The proposed constructs describe the organisational effectiveness of the network and the sustainability of the cooperative processes involved, and, in the authors’ opinion, are a useful complement to the extant literature. For each novel construct, a quantitative measurement scale for survey questionnaires is developed and then discussed with experts for face validity. The paper closes with the description and discussion of a testable cause-effect model before presenting the authors’ conclusions.

Widening the disciplinary scope of eparticipation. reflections after a research on tourism and cultural heritage

Cultural Heritage and Tourism Development may be strong driving factors for local policies and may have great importance in strategic decision making at territorial level; then, they may be important subjects for eParticipation studies. But this paper demonstrates, through a literature review, that todays disciplinary shape of eParticipation as a research field is not suitable to effectively investigate participatory processes related to Tourism and Cultural Heritage. Then, by presenting a field research, which took place in the Italian city of Genoa, and by confronting its outcomes with some most widespread disciplinary eParticipation underpinnings, the paper seeks to identify some areas where a widened disciplinary scope is particularly needed. Finally, we propose a new disciplinary framework, suitable to address also Cultural Heritage and Tourism Development eParticipation processes.

Centralization vs. Decentralization of Purchasing in the Public Sector: The Role of e-Procurement in the Italian Case

In this work, we sought to better understand the possible role of e-procurement in the evolving strategies of centralization (and decentraliza- tion) of public purchase centres. We conducted an explorative research study in the Italian context, where both centralization and decentralization of e-procurement have been experimented. The analysis of the Italian case highlighted an aspect that has been overlooked in literature so far: the strong and sudden centralization of purchasing caused by e-procurement adoption may present problems, especially in complex contexts with a past tradition of wide-spread de-centralized purchasing powers. The Italian case suggests that a possible solution may be the adoption of a hybrid model, where a centralized structure coordinates a network made of regional semi-centralized e-procurement centres, which, in turn, mediate with local contexts and involve or control the smallest agencies. The main features, strengths and weaknesses of this emerging organizational model for e-procurement agencies are discussed.

Design and Normative Claims in Organization Studies: a Methodological Proposal

This paper focuses on the pivotal role of Design Claims in scientific research. In fact, Design Claims link the adoption and/or use of a specific artifact (for example, a procedure, or a belief) to measurable and relevant effects. By doing so, Design Claims continuously spot gaps in theory, and then force to scientific advancements. This paper suggests that the dramatic lack of Design Claims (and consequently of Normative Claims) in Organization Studies not only results in lack of relevance, but also deprives our discipline of the beneficial epistemological interplay that should take place between design, normative and descriptive statements. This epistemological teamwork, where present, results in a “mirroring effect” that makes other fields of studies, such as Medicine, viable and relevant. Models and frameworks developed in Organization Studies, on the contrary, often result in epistemological dead ends: once emanated, their specific influence in the real world is rarely object of further specific interest. It is just as if Medicine scholars, after developing a theory on a certain health issue, were not interested in measuring how the adoption of that specific theory in the world of practice performed. Some methodological suggestions are then provided, to encourage a stronger presence of Design Claims in both qualitative and quantitative Organization Studies research.

Strategies and Solutions in eHealth: A Literature Review

This study has three purposes: First, to provide a synthetic, up-to-date overview of the main emerging strategies for the health care sector in the Western developed countries; second, to understand the possible role of eHealth solutions in each of these emerging strategies; third, to understand how these emerging health care strategies and emerging eHealth solutions may be usefully applied to address one of the most important challenges for health care systems, i.e. population ageing. The overview on emerging strategies and emerging eHealth solutions provided here is based on a literature review including a wide spectrum of recent documents published on the Web about health care and eHealth. The outcome of this document search is a concept matrix linking emerging health care strategies and emerging eHealth solutions. This concept matrix is used as a framework to synthetically describe how eHealth initiatives are perceived by different stakeholders, such as investors, policy makers, insurance companies, PA bodies, researchers and academics, health care professionals, patients.

Business Intelligence for Supply Chain Management: Trends from Scholarly Literature and from the World of Practice

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the possible role of Business Intelligence to tackle Supply Chain Management issues. We conducted a previous literature review on the basis of 122 writings selected thorough keyword search, backward search and forward search. This literature review revealed that Business Intelligence is taken into consideration by a minority, but growing, percentage of writings as a possible solution to tackle Supply Chain challenges. The main outcomes stemming from this literature search were identified and synthesized in a Concept Matrix. After investigating the state-of-the-art of scholarly writings on Business Intelligence in Supply Chain Management, we sought to collect some insights on how Business Intelligence is being perceived and implemented in the world of supply chain practice. We interviewed three practitioners from three important international consulting firms working in the fields of Supply Chain and Business Intelligence, and we collected institutional documents and several case descriptions. We found that the role of Business Intelligence solutions in Supply Chain Management is wider than that identified by scholarly literature. According to our field research, we also found that the adoption of BI solutions for managing the supply chain may be negatively influenced by a factor that has not been taken into consideration by literature so far, i.e. the previous implementation of ERP solutions.

Beyond Darwin: the Potential of Recent Eco-Evolutionary Research for Organizational and Information Systems Studies

Theoretical studies that actually propose to use evolutionary paradigms in organizational/management studies are quite rare, as well as field studies explicitly adopting them. Moreover, these rare writings tend to refer to classical, “Darwin+Mendel+DNA” thought, surprisingly overlooking the last decades’ advancements in evolutionary research, although these recent studies are progressively explaining complex phenomena, which Darwin’s model did not encompass. This paper identifies three streams within recent evolutionary research, whose adoption may result in useful innovation for management, organizational and information system research. These streams of studies present evolutionary, ecological and social processes in an integrated fashion, providing strong frameworks to understand learning processes, procedure creation, flexibility, decision making, networks evolution, cooperation, and the role of relationships, moods and nonrational triggers in change processes. This paper suggests that deeper insights into these factors not only would let us better understand how organizations evolve, but would also give us hints for building organizations which are more compatible with human nature.