Håkan Sundberg

Towards e‐government: a survey of problems in organisational processes

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at process initiatives in the Swedish social insurance administration, focusing on the problems of crossing functional boundaries, co‐ordinating processes over inter‐organisational boundaries and the issue of whether to aim for radical or incremental change.Design/methodology/approach – The survey involved data collection including a study of internal documents and 16 individual personal interviews.Findings – The organisation experiences collaboration problems when cross‐functional work and processes collide with the traditional and hierarchical command and control structures. These are not easily dismantled, meaning intensive work to change the culture and break functional mind‐sets. Furthermore the administration struggles with and can benefit from co‐ordination of processes over the inter‐organisational boundaries. Changes in the customer front‐line affect the rest of the organisation and its processes. The study has shown that both functional units and su...

Building the Enterprise Architecture: A Bottom-Up Evolution?

This thesis focuses on the general problem of integration and co-operation between business and IT organisations, and on the specific problem of co-ordinating the development process across stovepiped departments that do not collaborate cross-functionally. The purpose is to increase knowledge and understanding about public organisations’ difficulties in meeting their customers’ and the organisation’s needs for electronic services. The thesis also presents a model showing the relationships between factors of importance for understanding public organisations’ difficulties in implementing cross-functional or inter-departmental electronic services. The research is based on case studies of public and private organisations, and results show that public organisations attempting e-government will face large problems if they are unable to solve their internal stovepipe problems. On the other hand, they cannot expect the stovepipe problems to be solved without increasing customer orientation. Many private organisations have increased their speed in e-services, customer orientation and organisational changes, and have faced economic pressure early, while the public organisations are impeded by the role of law, complex goal structures, lack of collaboration and culture. But at the same time the public organisations are following a similar path to that of the private, and areas have been found where there are little differences (e.g. development processes and purchaser-contractor relationships). Furthermore, the thesis has identified a large potential in the use of enterprise architecture for improving co-operation between business and IT organisations and in the purchaser-contractor relations. An architecture is an important prerequisite for dealing with the growing complexity in describing an enterprise and its business, information, applications and technology.

Enterprise interoperability development in multi relation collaborations: Success factors from the Danish electricity market

ABSTRACT Increased complexity and the risk of fragmentized business processes and data in many-to-many relationships is hindering development of interoperability. This study aims at clarify what are the success factors for overcoming issues of business process and data fragmentation in the development of enterprise interoperability in multi relation collaborations. A case study allowed for in-depth understanding of experiences and conditions. Seven deep interviews with actors in the Danish electricity market provided empirical data. A literature study formed the base for the analytical framework. Success factors fell into the categories of general project and change management, business process and information and data.