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Following the introduction of the New Zealand Local Government Amendment Acts (1996, 2002), some significant changes have taken place in resource allocation and service design of local government organizations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of local government reforms on budgetary processes and service design in a New Zealand local government entity.

The paper adopts a qualitative case study research involving semi-structured interviews with the key informants to understand the evolving role of resource allocation the study investigates the budgetary processes in a metropolitan city council.

The traditional role of budget has changed to a more active and visible instrument in explaining the effectiveness and efficiency in the use and allocation of resources. Budgets have been given a central role in the management of local government finances. The reform process in New Zealand has enabled local government organizations to organize their activities by using the concepts of public and private goods.

This is a single local government entity case study. Any generalization of the conclusions from this study should undertaken with care even though there are similarities between New Zealand and other countries even though they operate under different institutional contexts in different countries.

This paper makes important contribution by highlighting the implications of resource allocation on service design within New Zealand local government entities.

I would like to begin by taking a general look at the official publications of local authorities, not only at what they are, but also at who uses them and what they are actually used for. In addition, I would like to try to make a rough assessment of the recent attempts to increase access to them, particularly emphasising the positive improvements that have taken place over recent years — and also to try to identify the shortcomings that remain. In examining the changing patterns of the publication of information recently, we should not only look at developments such as the Access to Information Act and the abolition of the Metropolitan County Councils, but also take a wider view, examining, for instance, whether increasing emphasis on value for money techniques in individual local authorities and the aim for objective decision making has altered the information and documentary requirements of local government and the value placed on them. Finally, and most centrally, I would like to look at the existing role played by local government information services in this area, and perhaps speculate on what can be achieved in the future. I would like to approach this by making a number of key points and then, hopefully, we can discuss those you feel of most value. My contribution has the broad title ‘Local government information services’. David Mort of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies will take a look at the information services provided by outside organisations for local authorities. The distinction between our contributions is, I hope, fairly clear and I will attempt to restrict myself to discussing the information services provided by individual local authorities while David will look at the wider scene. There is, of course, a grey area of information services which do not fall exactly within the boundaries of this definition and I will very briefly mention a number of these later, but first it might be useful to begin by having a very brief word about our sponsors. This seminar is a joint venture by the Aslib Planning Environment and Transport Information Group (PETIG) and the Standing Committee on Official Publications (SCOOP). SCOOP was formally set up at the beginning of 1983 and is a direct descendant of the Library Association/HMSO Services Working Party which was established in 1971. It might be helpful if I briefly summarise a number of the formal arrangements under which SCOOP operates in order to set the context for my contribution. The Committee's principal aims relate to UK national and local government official publications and these are to improve access and availability to such documents, to identify and propose solutions to problems of access and to provide mechanisms for the exchange of views between members of the library community on matters of common interest concerning UK official publications.

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.

A major part of maintaining a well-managed performance measurement system in local government is providing the infrastructure for performance management. The problem is that local officials often struggle with moving from adopting performance measures to actually using them for improving services and for making resource allocation decisions. This article responds to this struggle by presenting information on the relationships between efficiency and effectiveness measures across six local government service areas, with the goal of providing guidance on using performance measures to support strategic resource management. Our research suggests that stronger correlations exist between efficiency and effectiveness measures associated with local services that possess private good characteristics, concluding that performance measures associated with market-oriented services lend themselves more readily to making resource allocation decisions.

To examine the progress local governments in Victoria. Australia have made utilizing the internet to deliver traditional services, and examine models that attempt to define the maturity of local government electronic service delivery.

The research approach comprised two components. The first was to examination and assess local government web sites in Victoria, and the second part involved an in‐depth case study with one local government.

The findings suggest that conventional linear e‐commerce and e‐Government maturity models are not applicable in the case of local government as this level of government traditionally focuses more on active community participation and interaction.

The research examines a wide sample of council web sites but the case study is limited to one council. It suggests that the implementation and uptake of e‐commerce and e‐Government across the local government sector have been mixed and more detailed models of electronic service are needed.

In Australia, there has been significant Federal government emphasis on initiatives to promote internet use for local government service provision, yet the move to electronic service delivery (ESD) in the sector has been varied. For the local government sector, the internet offers significant potential for the delivery of government services and this research identifies some significant issues.

The report on the research outlines the similarities and differences between the various levels of government and suggests that the purpose and needs of ESD are different for municipal councils.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on new accountability relationships between Newcastle City Council (NCC) and its citizens and stakeholders in the wake of the British government’s austerity politics and its budget cuts for local authorities. It seeks to show some of the ways in which various kinds of budgeting, for example, for alternative sources of funding, the use of volunteers for service provision, resource sharing, and asset transfers, as well as a diverse set of accounts of the social implications of resource diversions and service cuts, have been implicated in those changes.

The authors conducted a qualitative field study of some of the uses of budgets in the shaping of accountability relationships through interviews with council officers, conversations with activists and citizens, analysis of council and other documents, and observation of public meetings and demonstrations. The approach focused on the relationship between the city’s political grassroots and the NCC leadership and administration.

The authors find that NCC’s senior politicians and officers co-opted the city’s political grassroots and managed to reconstitute local political accountability to citizenry and stakeholders as a choice between the cessation of different types of local government services, by combining appeals to the legal framework of English local authorities, the unfairness of national politics, and the fairness of local government service provision. Local government blamed the funding cuts and the resulting resource shortages on the central government. It sought to push responsibility for cuts to the local citizenry whilst reserving for itself the role of mediator and adjudicator who makes the final decisions about the portfolio of causes that will be funded.

This is the first study to offer detailed insight into the effects of the British government’s austerity budget cuts of local authority grants on the politics of accountability in a local authority.

An alternative system of local government finance is proposed based on two taxes—property and residents'—to finance different types of services and promote local accountability and decentralisation.

The significance of cloud services in information technology (IT) is increasing as a means of achieving enhanced productivity, efficiency and cost reduction. Through cloud-based service, the reliability and scalability of an organization’s systems can be enhanced since organizations such as local governments are able to concentrate on their main business strategies. This research seeks to identify critical factors that may have an impact on the acceptance of cloud-based services, where the organizational context is based on local governments in Australia.

To formulate a more comprehensive IT innovation adoption model for cloud technology, factors from the technology-organizational-environment framework, desires framework and diffusion of innovation model were integrated. Data was obtained from 480 IT staff working in 47 local government organizations.

The research results show that the factors which had a statistically significant and positive impact on the adoption of cloud-based services in local governments were compatibility, complexity, cost, security concerns, expected benefits and organization size. It is likely that the outcomes from this research will provide insights to any organization seeking to make investment decisions on the adoption of cloud-based services.

Limitations include generalizability of the findings since the data is restricted to local government areas in Queensland, Australia. Further, the sample mostly included individuals with managerial positions and may not completely capture the cloud adoption factors relevant for front line IT employees. Another limitation is the possible omission of factors that may be relevant but not considered due to the selected theories. Lastly, this research did not differentiate between different types of cloud adoption such as private, public, community and hybrid models that are possible in this context.

The paper provides a combination framework of cloud-based service adoption based on a literature review on cloud adoption from an IS perspective. It adapts integrated model to establish a more comprehensive innovation adoption framework for cloud technology.