Our existing knowledge of business process reengineering (BPR) is mainly derived from the experiences of private sector organizations, which have fundamentally different characteristics from public organizations. This paper represents a first step in understanding how BPR may be different in public organizations. Drawing on the public administration literature, it examines the differences between public and private organizations and their implications for BPR. Following that, it examines the BPR experience of a large public organization through an intensive case study. The case analysis shows that while there are similarities in the BPR experiences of public and private organizations, there are also notable differences. In this specific case, there were social and political pressures to reengineer, press publicity to promote BPR, a reengineering team comprised mainly of neutral staff, performance benchmarks adapted from the private sector, high-level approval for redesigned processes, and a pilot site implementation to secure further funding. It concludes with lessons learned for implementing BPR in public organizations.
There is a lack of both theoretical and empirical research on the process of ethical decision making in the domain of information systems (IS). As a step in this direction, the authors describe and test a general ethical decision-making theory developed in the marketing discipline. They conducted a study on the ethical decision-making process of 243 entry-level IS professionals with regard to softlifting--that is, illegal copying of software for personal use. The results show support for the applicability of the tested ethical decision-making theory to the domain of IS, specifically in the context of softlifting. Entry-level IS professionals were found to use both deontological and teleological evaluations to arrive at an ethical judgment of a moral issue. Subsequently, moral intention to pursue softlifting behavior is primarily determined by the ethical judgment. These findings have implications for both research and practice.
Top management support is a key recurrent factor critical for effective information systems (IS) implementation. However, the role of top management support may not be as critical as external IS expertise, in the form of consultants and vendors, in small business IS implementation due to the unique characteristics of small businesses. This paper describes an empirical study of the relative importance of top management support and external IS expertise on IS effectiveness in 114 small businesses. Partial least squares (PLS) was used for statistical testing. The results show that top management support is not as important as effective external IS expertise in small business IS implementation. While top management support is essential for IS effectiveness, high quality external IS expertise is even more critical for small businesses operating in an environment of resource poverty. These findings call for more research efforts to be directed at selecting and engaging high quality external IS expertise for IS implementation in small businesses.
Most small businesses lack computer experience and do not have sufficient internal computer expertise. Hence, small businesses are more dependent on external expertise such as consultants and vendors than are larger businesses. This paper compares the information systems (IS) effectiveness of a group of small businesses that engage separate consultants and vendors (consultant-vendor approach) with that of another group of small businesses that engage vendors who also provide consultancy service (vendor-only approach). The results show that small businesses that adopt the vendor-only approach have more effective information systems than small businesses that adopt the consultant-vendor approach. Further, the vendor-only approach results in the same level of consultant effectiveness and a better level of vendor support for small businesses compared with the consultant-vendor approach. The relationship between vendor and other parties in the IS implementation project is found to be an important predictor of IS effectiveness.