Research in e-government success factors and barriers identifies phenomena that make an e-government initiative succeed or fail, but it does not quite answer the question: “And what shall we do about it?” Therefore, this research explores e-government success influencers in several dimensions – e-government success factors and barriers, public-private partnership, stakeholders in e-government implementation, adoption of e-services by citizens – and re-arranges the e-government success influencers into the role of active ownership of a public e-service. An active owner designates an entity being in charge of the success of the e-service throughout the lifecycle of the e-service, and being committed to the duty of being in charge. Alternatively, an active owner can be a motivated stakeholder committed to the success of the e-service. The research is based on a literature review. The paper explicates and explains the role of active ownership of a public e-service, and the main actors who claim the role, as well as motivates the qualities and tasks of the active ownership.

Personal e-services guarded by eID remain foreign to public organizations and citizens in many countries. In this context, Germany is an interesting case to study. While much of the e-government adoption research focuses on developing countries, Germany is a technologically advanced and wealthy country, close to the Nordic countries with widely accepted eIDs for private and public e-services. Still, Germany experiences rather poor adoption of its eID. Because most public services in Germany are provided through municipalities, we asked the munici-palities why they rarely provide e-services with an option for citizens to identify themselves with the eID. The result is ten reasons of poor adoption of e-services and the eID, and a background story.

In the context of the digital age, the advent of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has been a critical factor in reshaping the citizen-government dynamic, steering towards a Transformational Government (T-Gov) model. However, existing literature largely overlooks a nuanced examination of how ICT enhances public values regarding operational effectiveness and citizen-centric service delivery within public organizations. This research seeks to fill this the gap by focusing on the effectiveness of ICT's role in improving public values with particular attention on citizen-initiated communication, thereby contributing to a more targeted understanding of ICT's impact in the T-Gov framework. Data were gathered through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The findings provided a comprehensive list of ICT solutions mapped to public values they intended to facilitate the development. These ICT solutions were subsequently analyzed to assess their effectiveness in creating and developing the public values they targeted and the extent of their impact and shortcomings. The examination outcome engendered practical and innovative recommendations for public organizations, delineating ICT strategic approach and investment with special attention to progressive integration and application of technologies to improve further public values.

The diffusion of digital technologies redefines the structure and processes of public organizations, continuously enhancing the ways and opportunities of communication with the citizens. Accordingly, co-creation, fuelled by digitally enhanced communication, can facilitate the exchange and integration of resources, steering the digital transformation process to increased public value outcomes. This increased relevance of co-creation in digital transformation prompts for a comprehensive, contextually rich framework of practical and theoretical significance. To address this gap, we select two frameworks from the digital transformation and the co-creation domains based on their common reference in communication. By aligning the communication concepts of the two selected frameworks we link the co-creation into the digital transformation context, thus making the digital transformation framework more complete. This research contributes to the digital transformation field by providing a roadmap which shows how the transformation framework can be enriched with co-creation via communication. We highlight the implications of this research and suggest empirical testing of the aligned framework to assert its applicability in different public organizational contexts.

Text similarity calculation by text embeddings requires fine-tuning of the language model by a large amount of labeled data, which may not be available for small text collections in their specific knowledge domains, in particular, in public organizations. As an alternative to machine learning, this research proposes pairwise term co-occurrence within plain-text matching, i.e., the query and the document share co-occurrences of two terms in a text span. In the entire document, the co-occurrences form the context that affects a term. This is analogous to a contextual word embedding, except our context affects the importance, not the meaning, of the term. Pairwise term co-occurrence has been applied in three text similarity calculation methods: term-pair-based text similarity, BM25 with term weights enhanced by pairwise term co-occurrence, and likewise enhanced cosine similarity. The three methods were evaluated for retrieval of four text types – email messages, web articles, fill-in forms, and brochures from a public organization – by having the first three as queries. Pairwise term co-occurrence performed on par with or better than BERT sentence embeddings without fine-tuning the BERT language model. With some text types, pairwise term co-occurrence outperformed bag-of-words matching by as much as 29.44 (MAP) and 31.71 (P@1) percentage points. Pairwise term co-occurrence can fill a niche by improving text similarity calculation where supervised machine learning is difficult to carry out.

The co-creation paradigm can improve public services and address contemporary challenges through the collective citizens' communication input. Relatedly, the process can be enabled or constrained by the existing sociotechnical contextual factors within and outside the public organization. In earlier work, we developed a conceptual framework defining co-creation as a complex socio-technically infused process that can catalyze input communication to generate outcome public value. However, the way public value is co-created in practice is unclear, as our framework is purely theoretical and empirical research within public organizations is sparse. This paper suggests a method to validate our framework and applies it in the framework's initial validation. To this end, we conducted a case study in the Municipality of Thessaloniki, using semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with expert officials. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, one-fifth of the framework has been validated, as delimited by the scope of the study, proving that the theoretical constructs have real-life counterparts. Second, because the framework had not been tested before, the suggested validation has also served as a method testing exercise. From a practical standpoint, our study shows how citizens’ input communication is causally linked to output public value through the contextually infused co-creation process. These validated links are instrumental in proving the framework's task-oriented role in signposting outcome public value pathways. In this regard, the practical value of our suggested validation method lies in its potential to improve the framework, enhancing its real-world applicability in view of effective co-creation implementation of citizen-led policies.

ICT mediated online or offline communication can lead to public value co-creation if citizens’ input is taken into account by the government to improve its services. Since existing studies have looked into the co-creation process holistically, there are calls for an in-depth understanding of the role of communication whilst offering conceptual clarity to the co-creation process. This study aims to fill these gaps by employing the grounded theory literature research, to analyse and define co-creation in terms of its properties and relationships to communication and public value concepts. The subsequent conceptual framework integrates all the identified concepts to represent co-creation as the functional relationship between the adjustable communication concepts and the public value responses, which are conceptualized as independent and dependent variables respectively. The enablers and constraints emerged through the analysis are aligned with the co-creation properties and correspond to the initial impeding or facilitating conditions of the co-creation process. The results provide a concise and clear, structured representation of the co-creation process in terms of its interacting concepts and relate the co-created public values to crisp communication properties facilitating the validation and refinement of the derived framework by further empirical research. Amidst contemporary socioeconomic challenges, this study could be used to optimize the co-creative potential of public services in terms of existing enabling - disabling conditions and public value requirements.

Marketing and recruitment operate in similar settings: both strive to address people who most often are not looking for being addressed. While IT-support in marketing has been given its share of attention, the benefits of tools and automation in recruitment process are poorly researched. This paper explores these benefits. Eleven benefits have been identified from the literature and our interviews with recruiters. Five of these benefits are shared between recruitment and marketing, whereas six address relationship building and ethics more specific to recruitment.

Despite the benefits of e-government in transforming the public sectors across the world, its implementation in Africa experiences numerous setbacks. Human aspects have been identified as an underwriting factor leading to such setbacks; still, the role of the human aspects has been only partially studied. This research investigates how perception of digital technology by public servants in Ghana may have influenced the adoption of e-government in Ghana. We have discovered 13 relationships between 8 technology perception factors and 5 e-government adoption factors. Analysis of these relationships allowed us suggesting recommendations regarding e-government adoption to the government, public administration managers, and e-government designers in developing countries.

Industry 4.0 is considered to be the fourth industrial revolution and involves virtual and physical systems that are interconnected and collaborate in an autonomous way. Industry 4.0 is a relatively new concept within computer science and raises interest on how to make use of technologies included in the concept and profit from them. This article investigates Industry 4.0 in the context of SMEs: the opportunities and challenges that Industry 4.0 poses upon SMEs, as well as readiness of SMEs for Industry 4.0 are considered. The data collection and analysis methods were literature review with grounded theory. In the result, the main challenges proved being of organizational nature: SMEs need help with company-specific strategies for implementing Industry 4.0; and SMEs need skilled employees. The opportunities are flexibility and openness to innovation, which are pertinent to SMEs; cloud computing; and public investments into technology and adoption of Industry 4.0 by companies. The readiness of SMEs for Industry 4.0 is still somewhat low – they are still learners.