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The purpose of this article is to re‐appraise the significance of Lewin's group dynamics theory empirically in the context of technology related change in local government.

The paper examines qualitatively the change management processes in the five city councils selected for this study that have developed eservices. A total of 23 face‐to‐face, semi‐structured interviews were conducted with key managers of participating city councils.

The present study finds that participating Australian city councils are experiencing some degree of disconfirmation of functions, while some participating Australian city councils still maintain a quasi‐stationary equilibrium state. There are some challenges in terms of inter‐department integration and empowering business units to demonstrate explicit ownership of Eservices adoption. Empirical evidence presented in this study supports Lewin's argument that the main focus of change should be on group behaviour rather than individual behaviour.

This study covers five organizations that are from the same geographical proximity and metropolitan area. The findings are limited to government organisations.

The findings of this study would be useful for facilitating technology oriented change in public sector organisations.

This paper reinforces Lewin's argument that to understand change and the individual in the changing organisation, it is necessary to identify, plot, and establish the dynamics of the group. Some insights are provided regarding the complexity of group dynamics and the impact they have when implementing organisation wide‐change.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the transferability of ICT‐solutions for providing support information services from eHealth to eMaintenance.

The applied research approach takes the form of a single‐case study supported by a literature study. Empirical data were collected through documents, observations and interviews. The conclusions of the study were verified by key informants.

The study indicates some major problems that have to be overcome when implementing support information services using an ICT‐solution (e.g. to manage heterogeneous organizations; manage heterogeneous eService‐environments; and enable context and situation awareness in eServices). Further, the study has identified and graded some solutions, which address these problems and are transferable from eHealth to eMaintenance.

The studied case is in the forefront of eHealth solutions and can therefore act as a guidance for those involved at different stages of eHealth implementation. At the same time, eHealth is an application domain with stringent safety and security requirements, which makes the findings valuable for persons involved in support information services related to complex and critical technical systems, e.g. aircraft systems.

The paper reports on experiences from an actual eHealth solution and not just about the concept of eHealth. Hence, it has implications for both practitioners and researchers.

This article, a product of an IIMHL‐brokered partnership, concerns the requisites of today's health services information systems, and how an organisation in London, Ontario, Canada is responding to the addictions and mental health service information needs of the citizens of the Province of Ontario. The piece draws a parallel between theory regarding how stored data can be translated into information, knowledge, understanding and, ultimately, wisdom, and the practical needs of information and referral organisations as per their objective of providing their consumers with the value of current and accurate information. In the case of ConnexOntario ‐ funded by Ontario's Ministry of Health and Long‐Term Care ‐ the keys to this value are the powerful database that is used to house the data, and the innovative ‘front‐end application’ ‐ ConnexOntario eServices ‐ that allows users to input, retrieve and present the information as necessary. An emphasis is also placed on how eServices, in concert with the ConnexOntario database, helps promote the principle of mental health service leadership for its stakeholders, which is relevant as per the stated objective of the IIMHL.

This case study explores student learning outcomes from a student-led eService-learning (SLESL) course. The researchers interviewed 12 participants in addition to evaluating final reflection papers. Data analysis yielded three general categories including leadership insights, personal growth and development, and overcoming community obstacles. Leadership insights were comprised of five emergent themes such as leadership lessons learned, collaboration, communication, influence, and other leadership theories. Personal growth and development included seven themes such as personal challenge, personal awareness, practical application, personal affect, personal self-efficacy, self-efficacy toward future involvement, and service-learning insights. The final category, overcoming community obstacles, was encompassed by three themes including community challenge, insights about others, and innovation. Transferability of the findings along with implications for practice are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the development of a culturally sensitive and end‐user‐centric software architectural framework for the development of eService applications in information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) contexts. The research is undertaken within the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL) in South Africa.

Action research is the approach undertaken in this research with an extensive literature review to inform the development of the architecture, which is later qualitatively and quantitavely validated.

Various factors have to be taken into consideration for technology solutions to be effective in their context of deployment. The authors have provided an architecture that intrinsically enables software solutions to be developed from the ground up with concern for flexibility for context sensitivity. The PIASK architecture separates the presentation, interaction, access, social networking and knowledge base components into five distinct functional layers. This architecture is validated for: technical viability through a development of a knowledge portal in SLL; cultural sensitivity through Dooyeweerd's theory of modal aspects; and user centricity using a SALUTA‐based evaluation.

The successful evolution of any society towards a knowledge society is predicated on technology solutions that embrace and that are sensitive to the socio‐cultural diversity of that society. The PIASK architecture developed in this research is a tool that can be used in the realization of services and applications for ICTD contexts in South Africa and other third‐world countries.

The software architecture developed specifically for ICTD contexts to encapsulate context sensitivity and user centricity is the primary and novel contribution of this research.

The purpose of this paper is to assist in understanding that eGovernment is more than the implementation of IT. There are changes to the fundamental mechanisms of public governance including roles of citizens, organisations and government. This study explores the views, roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in promoting eGovernance, with a focus on countries that are in the early stages of developing their ICT strategies.

An exploratory case study approach is used based on the Malaysian experience. A combination of interviews and comments from questionnaires are used to examine government and citizens' viewpoints concerning eGovernment development.

While these are preliminary, the qualitative findings are intended for reflection, as well as, suggestions for action. They include: creating eCitizen partnerships; narrowing the digital divide; finding consensus on structures and roles in an eGovernment strategy. The discussion calls for collective stakeholder involvement of government and citizens as partners in order to promote social inclusion.

The study is exploratory and the findings cannot be considered as representative. However, they indicate areas for improvement. A second more robust empirical study is envisaged with more emphasis on application of stakeholder theory and techniques.

The debate is about collective social responsibility, arguing for social inclusion through the development of eGovernance for the national good which promotes concepts such as eDemocracy and eCommunity through stakeholder participation and partnership.

The aim of this paper is to create the framework for sustainable eDemocracy development which is used as a guideline for building tools for supporting democracy system. To consolidate this framework, the quality model of eDemocracy system is constructed in order to support the efficient and effective eDemocracy.

This work begins with collecting and analyzing the existing approaches of eDemocracy development, especially the governance development standard called COBIT 4.1. Next, the principles of democracy based on United Nations Information Services and the Bureau of International Information Programs: IIP of the US Department of State's are studied. To support such principle, the intrinsic eDemocracy applications are explored. In addition, the quality model of an eDemocracy system is built by integrating the concepts of technology acceptance model (TAM) and the eGovernment web quality assessment model (eGovernment WebQAM).

The 4 + 1 main constructs of eDemocracy development framework is introduced. They are stakeholder and policy, information and communication technology, development methodology containing process management and project management, environment, and eDemocracy components. Such a framework is claimed to support sustainable development. Furthermore, the five basic eDemocracy applications which support democratic principles are illustrated. They are eInformation, eService, eVoting, eComplaint, and eForum. The quality aspects, i.e. knowledge quality, process quality, communication quality and TAM are embedded to consolidate the authors framework.

Most existing approaches of eDemocracy development emphasize different eDemocracy development aspect depending on their interests and constraints. No approaches support all issues related in the fundamental aspects of eDemocracy development. Therefore, a sustainable framework is then created. Additional key aspect that has been embedded to this work is the eDemocracy qualities introduce in order to achieve citizens' acceptance in eDemocracy development.

This paper presents the framework for sustainable eDemocracy development to support the desirable and workable eDemocracy system. The information system quality and TAM are embedded into the authors framework for building better eDemocracy that meets the citizens' needs and information technology standard.

This research replicates and extends Frey et al. (2003), using a typical e‐mail query to investigate e‐mail customer service by 260 Tunisian hotels. Based on the hotel responses, this study found that guests had one chance in ten of receiving a reply within a day and even less chance that hotels answered the inquiry professionally, promptly, politely and personally. Diffusion of innovations failed to explain differences in responsiveness by Tunisian hoteliers but did help explain the quality of e‐mail replies. The results suggest that reply quality differs across hotel size and hotel affiliation. Hotel affiliation as well as hotel category and website presence showed no significant differences in responsiveness. Differences aside, the results highlight that Tunisian hotels can gain an immediate competitive advantage by analysing common e‐mail queries and implementing basic e‐mail procedures.

The purpose of this paper is to recount the implementation process of the special effects (SFX) linking to Journal Citation Reports (JCR) at the Briggs Library, South Dakota State University.

Following the standard procedure developed by this paper, the research work consulted Ex Libris Customer Center, Listservs and library science literature for existing solutions to implement the SFX linking to JCR. The integration of JCR with SFX at University of Iowa Libraries was identified. Based on their implementation experience, the Briggs Library developed a more efficient method, which followed SFX standards.

A standard procedure has been developed that should be adopted for implementing new SFX services. A new target parser for JCR was created, which can become a global SFX target parser once its responsibility for updates is transferred to Ex Libris. The new method for implementing the SFX linking to JCR was invented.

The paper provides a standard procedure for implementing new SFX services. The method for implementing the SFX linking to JCR should be instructive when implementing similar projects.