Jesper Holgersson

Exploring user participation approaches in public e-service development

It has been argued that user participation is important when public authorities develop e-services. At the same time there is limited research on the usefulness of existing user participation appro ...

Public e-service development : understanding citizens' conditions for participation

For decades, user participation has brought value to various systems development projects. Today, there are expectations that public e-service development will experience the same benefits. However ...

Web service security - vulnerabilities and threats within the context of WS-security

A Web Service (WS) can be described as an XML-based interface that can be used by a client application to invoke a computing service distributed in a network via standard Internet protocols. In order for Web Services to become a ubiquitous technique for program to program communication, however, there need to be a solid framework in place for how Web Services that utilizes the public Internet for transport can be properly protected and secured. As the situation appears today, most Web Services are not publicly exposed but are often deployed inside a corporate, private network. This hampers the vision of Web Services that can be publicly published in directories which potential customers can search in order to find a suitable service to satisfy their need.

Towards a roadmap for user involvement in e-government service development

New technology means new ways of both developing, providing and consuming services. In the strive for government organizations to build and maintain relationships with its citizens, e-presence is highly important. E-services are one way to go, and it has been argued that user participation is an important part of developing said services. In this paper we analyze a selection of user participation approaches from a goal perspective to see how they fit in an e-government service development context., In doing so, we identify four challenges that need to be addressed when including users in the development: 1) Identifying the user target segment, 2) Identifying the individual user within each segment, 3) Getting users to participate, and 4) Lacking adequate skills.

Development of Novel eHealth Services for Citizen Use – Current System Engineering vs. Best Practice in HCI

Many new public eHealth Services are now being developed. Often a conventional customer-vendor process is used, where the customer is a public authority, e.g. a county council, and the vendor a commercial actor, e.g. an IT development company. In this case study the engineering process regards a novel eHealth service aiming to provide patients with online access to their electronic health record. A complicating factor in conventional customer-vendor processes for public e-services is that “the future user could be anyone”. In the light of best practice in Human-Computer Interaction, this study examines the joint effort of the customer and vendor when developing novel services for citizen use. The results include delimiting factors, recommendations for public authority customers and proposed new actions for the research agenda.

Experiences from and Attitudes towards Applying User Participation in Public e-Service Development

It is evident that user participation is a vital component for successful public e-service development. However, it is also apparent that there is little guidance in e-government research about how user participation should be implemented in practice. Some high level guidelines can be found regarding user participation design schools but there is very little guidance in existing research regarding how these design schools can be implemented in practice. In this paper we have explored public administrations’ experience of user participation, both in general systems development and in development of public e-services, in order to identify basic requirements that have to be fulfilled when implementing user participation in public e-service development. Thereafter we have applied these requirements on commonly used techniques to implement user participation in the light of three design schools: Participatory Design, User Centered Design, and User Innovation. Our results show that techniques to implement user participation in public e-service development must be adjusted to limited resources in terms of time and money as well as short development projects.

The Conceptual Confusion Around “e-service” : Practitioners Conceptions

The e-service concept has been a central concern in many research and practitioner areas in recent years. There are expectations of citizens, customers, commercial companies and public organizations of what e-services are, their functionality and benefits. However, there is conceptual confusion that may hamper collaboration and research viability. This paper explores the conceptual vagueness and presents an empirical investigation of how the e-service concept is treated in practice, along with its kindred concept “IT service”. Results show that public and commercial organizations approach e-services differently, that translation problems can cause lack of comparability in research results, and that additional concepts may be introduced instead of e-service.

Knowledge Capture in E-Services Development: A Prosperous Marriage?

In this paper, the authors examine whether the union of Knowledge Management with e-services development would be successful in performing as a collaborative functioning unit. The focus of this research is examining the potential for using Knowledge Management as a means for improving research and practice in e-services development. The authors analyze a real-life case against the Knowledge Capture model and its associated knowledge loss. The results show that KM theory has definite potential to elevate e-services research and practice, for example, by adding analysis and decision points concerning what knowledge to use and how to collect it. This is particularly relevant when collecting requirements, information, and desires from potential users of an e-service at the start of a development project.