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To investigate the cause of a well‐known phenomenon associated with a range of parallel iterative solvers – the variability in the number of iterations required to achieve convergence.

The conclusions are based on extensive experiments undertaken using parallel computers. Recently published works are also used to provide additional examples of variability in iteration count.

The variability of iteration counts experienced by parallelised, element‐by‐element iterative solvers is caused by numerical precision and roundoff.

A theoretical examination of the phenomenon may bring to light a methodology in which the iteration count could be limited to the lower end of the variable range – thus reducing solution times.

The authors believe that the variability in iteration count described for element‐by‐element methods presents no real difficulty to the engineering analyst.

The paper gives a detailed account of the phenomenon and is useful both to developers of parallel iterative solvers and to the analysts that use them in practice.

Transformational government has been on the European agenda for several years. However, progress towards transforming public services for older adults with age‐related cognitive impairments has been very limited. While socioeconomic factors associated with the older adult community which can hinder their usage of governments' online services, partly explain such slow progress, the paper argues that inability of current web‐based technologies and services to adequately cater for specific cognitive impairments of older adults plays a major part in this. Highlighting such limitations, the purpose of this paper is to present the results from a research project currently being undertaken in the UK, Norway and Italy, to demonstrate how assistive web‐based technologies can be developed to assist the transformation of governments' services for older adults with age‐related cognitive impairments.

The research approach includes three phases. The aim of Phase 1 is to develop a comprehensive list of requirements for the development of the first version of the delivering inclusive access to disabled and elderly members (DIADEM) application. In Phase 2, a usability evaluation is carried out from the perspective of the older adult target user group. These two phases include the literature revive, the focus group interviews and the user trials. Currently, DIADEM project activities are about to go into Phase 3.

The key findings of the study indicate that the users of the DIADEM assisted online form filling seemed report comparatively high levels of satisfaction. Furthermore, the innovative use of experts systems has brought significant benefits to the older adults with cognitive decline as the DIADEM technology appears to be sensitive to the users who present high level of cognitive decline, and provides increased levels of assistance accordingly. The paper shows how such benefits can transform the governments' services to older adults with age‐related cognitive impairments when the DIADEM technology is commercialised and diffused.

The DIADEM enabled transformations is not simply about technology. It is an organisational change too. As a result further research needs to be carried out on the challenges around change management, and the level of commitment to change which will be required to achieve the DIADEM enabled transformation in governments.

The paper focuses on transforming governments' online services for older adults with age‐related cognitive impairments. This research area has been neglected for several years by both researchers and practitioners.

Based on previous inventories, the purpose of this paper is to extend the knowledge on public administration experiments by focusing on their experimental type, design, sample type and realism levels and external validity. The aim is to provide an overview of experimental public administration and formulate potential ways forward.

The authors examine the current state of experimental public administration, by looking at a systematic selection of ISI ranked experimental publications in major public administration journals (1992-2014) and recommend ways forward based on this review.

The review indicates a rise in experimentation in public administration in recent years, this can be attributed mostly to some subfields of public administration. Furthermore, most experiments in public administration tend to have relatively simple designs, high experimental realism and a focus on external validity. Experimental public administration can be strengthened by increasing diversification in terms of samples, experimental designs, experimental types and substantive scope. Finally, the authors recommend to better utilize experiments to generate usable knowledge for practitioners and to replicate experiments to improve scientific rigour.

This paper contributes to experimental public administration by drawing on a systematic selection of papers and assessing them in depth. By means of a transparent and systematic selection of publications, various venues or ways forward are presented.

This paper seeks to explore the challenges that local government face in the UK when implementing fully integrated electronic public services.

A case study based research approach using interviews with employees and citizens in a large local authority was utilised to examine both the government and citizen's perspective of electronic government (e‐government) and related service improvement efforts.

From a theoretical perspective, process and information systems integration are identified in the literature as key challenges for enabling fully functional e‐government services. However, empirical research in this paper highlights that broader issues of technical, political, and organisational origin are of equal importance but tend to be overlooked in practice.

Although the empirical research discussed in this paper is limited to one local authority, its size, geographic location and ethnic diversity makes the local authority a good illustrative example of local e‐government implementation efforts in the UK.

The findings and issues raised in this paper are of practical importance to the UK public sector and elsewhere, and can aid to enable the identification of objectives, priorities and barriers to e‐government, and options for successful implementation thereof. Conversely, the process and information systems integration issues discussed in the paper is timely and novel as national e‐government efforts are now moving from initial e‐enabling efforts to a process transformational phase in the UK.

Despite an abundance of studies on hybridization and hybrid forms of organizing, scholarly work has failed to distinguish consistently between specific types of hybridity. As a consequence, the analytical category has become blurred and lacks conceptual clarity. Our paper discusses hybridity as the simultaneous appearance of institutional logics in organizational contexts, and differentiates the parallel co-existence of logics from transitional combinations (eventually leading to the replacement of a logic) and more robust combinations in the form of layering and blending. While blending refers to hybridity as an “amalgamate” with original components that are no longer discernible, the notion of layering conceptualizes hybridity in a way that the various elements, or clusters thereof, are added on top of, or alongside, each other, similar to sediment layers in geology. We illustrate and substantiate such conceptual differentiation with an empirical study of the dynamics of public sector reform. In more detail, we examine the parliamentary discourse around two major reforms of the Austrian Federal Budget Law in 1986 and in 2007/2009 in order to trace administrative (reform) paradigms. Each of the three identified paradigms manifests a specific field-level logic with implications for the state and its administration: bureaucracy in Weberian-style Public Administration, market-capitalism in New Public Management, and democracy in New Public Governance. We find no indication of a parallel co-existence or transitional combination of logics, but hybridity in the form of robust combinations. We explore how new ideas fundamentally build on – and are made resonant with – the central bureaucratic logic in a way that suggests layering rather than blending. The conceptual findings presented in our paper have implications for the literature on institutional analysis and institutional hybridity.

This chapter advances an articulation of the contemporary knowledge worker as an infrastructural bricoleur. The practical and pragmatic intelligence of the contemporary knowledge worker, particularly those involved in project-based work, reflects an ability to build adaptable practices and routines, and to develop a set of working arrangements that is creative and event-laden. Like Ciborra’s octopi, workers augment infrastructures by drawing on certain forms of oblique, twisted, flexible, circular, polymorphic and ambiguous thinking until an accommodation can be found. These workers understand the non-linearity of work and working, and are artful in their pursuits around, through and beyond infrastructural givens. Modern knowledge work, then, when looked at through the lens of infrastructure and bricolage, is less a story of failure to understand, a limitation in training or the shortcomings of a system, but instead is more a mirror of the contemporary realities of today’s knowledge work drift as reflected in individuals’ sociotechnical practices.

Technologies of measurement and self-monitoring of health data have become part of a metric everyday life in Denmark. As part of a change in Nordic Welfare society, Danish citizens are increasingly experiencing a digitisation of welfare services. This chapter explores the rationales behind the eGovernment strategy of Digital Welfare 2016–2020 in regard to health and discusses how this strategy encourages self-measurement and self-improvement through discourses of improvement at both state and citizen levels. By illustrating how performativity is embedded in current conceptions of health, this chapter emphasises how strategies of digitisation lean on a bio-citizenship where individuals with poor health capacities become dependent, not on a supporting welfare system, but paradoxically on their own self-management skills in order to receive health services. Based on the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) analysis, this chapter scrutinises central documents on the strategy of digital welfare. Our exploration provides a critical insight into the current digitisation of health care by illustrating how new virtues of citizenship are demanded in the digital era in relation to digital health, and furthermore represents a current challenge for Danish welfare in the schism between technology as empowering and a technocratic form of governance.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how and why the intangible critical success factors (CSFs) determine the outcomes of public-private partnerships (PPP) projects in e-governance.

Drawing from the literature, PPP was conceptualized as an organization which facilitates the creation of social capital. It is argued that the intangible CSFs correspond to the key dimensions of the social capital that drives the development of intellectual capital in the course of addressing the challenges faced during the execution of an e-governance project. These efforts determine the accomplishment of the desired project objectives. The emergent framework was applied to an e-governance PPP project to anecdotally exemplify how the deficiency of organizational characteristics impedes the formation of social capital, resulting in project failure.

A theoretical framework was developed to illuminate the mechanisms and the attendant propositions that explain how and why the intangible factors influence the PPP outcomes.

This study fills a critical gap in the literature on PPP projects in general, and on e-governance projects in particular. It also extends the application of the social capital framework from an intra-organizational to an inter-organizational context.

The results of this study foster a better understanding of the drivers of success in managing a PPP model in e-governance initiatives.

This research work would help in improving the formulation and management of PPPs in the emerging economies, which could potentially enhance the societal outcomes.

The explanatory framework of this research serves as a useful perspective to address policy and program implementation issues of PPP initiatives in e-governance.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and study the key issues and challenges facing e‐government development from an integrative perspective, and to provide strategies and policy recommendations to address them in a broad and holistic way.

To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the key issues in e‐government development, the authors took an integrative approach built on several existing theories and research. The authors conducted an empirical case study of Dubai. The data collection methods included documentary research; reviewing the major websites of Dubai government entities; and interviewing 22 e‐government stakeholders.

The authors have identified a variety of important issues and challenges facing e‐government development in Dubai. Of them, they focus on language issues on websites, e‐integration, uptake of e‐government services and the digital divide, and quality of Dubai e‐government websites and e‐services.

Given that Dubai was ranked the number one eCity in the Arab World and the eighteenth in the world in e‐government implementation, this insightful case study has wider implications. It contributes to a better understanding of the key issues in e‐government development in the Arab nations. The broad and holistic strategies developed through this study address the root causes of the issues, which could help governments not only in Dubai but also in other countries in their policy making.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first integrative and empirical study that explores the key issues and challenges in e‐government development through studying e‐government experiences of Dubai from both supply and demand perspectives.

While the concept of supply chain responsiveness (SCR) has received considerable attention in the operations management literature, mostly under the auspices of concepts such as build‐to‐order, mass customisation, lean and agility, so far there is a lack of comprehensive definition of SCR, as well as a defined relationship between “responsiveness” and “flexibility”. Also, the frameworks at hand tend to consider only a subset of factors previously identified in the literature, and thus do not comprehensively portray the cause‐and‐effect relationships involved. This paper aims to address these gaps.

The paper synthesises the existing contributions to manufacturing and supply chain flexibility and responsiveness, and draws on various related bodies of literature that affect a supply chain's responsiveness such as the discussion of product architecture and modularisation.

Four types of responsiveness are identified: product, volume, mix, and delivery, all of which can relate to different time horizons, and can be present as either potential or demonstrated responsiveness. It is argued that a supply chain can feature different levels of responsiveness at different tiers, depending on the configuration of the individual nodes, as well as the integration thereof. Furthermore, a holistic framework is proposed, distinguishing between requiring and enabling factors for responsiveness, identifying the key relationships within and between these two categories.

The definition and framework proposed provide novel insights into the concept of SCR as well as a clear terminology that will inform future research. The framework developed in this paper is suitable for both qualitative and holistic quantitative studies.

In addition to a detailed review of the factors associated with SCR, a generic definition of responsiveness is developed. The paper proposes a definition of four types of responsiveness which will support further empirical studies into the concept and its application. Furthermore, a holistic framework is developed that allows for cause‐and‐effect relationships to be investigated and dependencies to be identified.