eGovernment Research

eGovernment research at Swedish Business School is organized within three groups, ICT4D, Public Sector Innovation, and MELAB.

ICT4D

Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) is an emerging and highly dynamic research field with the purpose to investigate how ICT can make a difference in development. It concerns issues such as access to information, communication patterns and content needs of the poor. The field is inherently multidisciplinary situated within numerous disciplinary frameworks such as development theory, informatics, computer science, pedagogy and sociology. The ICT4D group undertakes a range of various research, in various developing countries, all relating to the use of ICT for development. We have a mutual perspective on improving the living conditions of people with a bottom-up-approach; i.e. we do not stipulate what development is, rather we believe that technologies can empower people thereby enabling them to set their own development agendas.

Public Sector Innovation

The PSI group is concerned with all issues related to ICT-induced government innovation including eParticipation, reorganization of local and national government, design and implementation of enterprise architectures, decision processes and decision support systems, and benefits management.

Projects:
DEMO-net
Societal Decision making
PepNet
Research School “Public sector innovation”
Health care sector national IT plan implementation and analysis
Second Life in local government

Researchers:
Andreas Ask (Contact person)
Anders Avdic
Åke Gronlund
Jenny Lagsten
Karin Hedstrom
Hannu Larsson
Nena Lim
Ann-Sofie Hellberg

Networks:
SIG eGovernment
eParticipation network
DEMO-net
PepNet

MELAB

MELAB is a research group at Swedish Business School, Örebro University. The development of information systems is a process of making social and technological design choices, with the purpose of serving human interests. This means that development of information systems naturally involve an underlying philosophy with corresponding value judgments and neither technology, such as information systems, nor the development process can be seen as value neutral. Instead, they embody the interests through goals and values of the people taking part in the development process. Values also have a role in the evaluation of information systems as the evaluation of the effects of information systems is influenced by the evaluator’s goals and values. As goals and values guide peoples’ actions, they become important in the studies of construction and adaptation of methods and tools, as well as methods and tools in use. Therefore our research aims at developing useful knowledge for practice and research in the following areas:

- Systems development
- Method engineering
- Requirements engineering
- End user development
- Information systems security
- Information systems evaluation