Delfina Soares

• University of Minho

Various organizations and researchers have developed Smart Cities Measurements (SCM) to monitor the advance of Smart Cities (SC) initiatives worldwide, yet there is no consensus about their impact on local governments. Local managers implement SC and SCM projects differently depending on their contexts, but few studies have analysed these measureme...

Online health services provision is the future of heath sector globally. Hospitals that do not make the transition from paper-based systems to electronic may swiftly undermine their chances of sustaining competitiveness in the market and efficiency towards their patients. This paper applies Hospital Online Service Index (HOSPI) assessment methodolo...

This study thoroughly examines and assesses hospital websites in Malaysia according to a predefined list of indicators and sub-indicators, based on four criteria: Technology Features, Content, Services, and Community Interaction, defined in the Health Sector Website Assessment Index (HSWAI). A total of 107 Malaysia hospitals were assessed. Private...

Electronic health services have been received with a tremendous interest world over. Patients consider hospital websites as highly important sources for health information and services. As a number of health institutes are carrying out projects to improve their websites, the need to design proper assessment means to measure whether they have achiev...

Purpose This study investigated the impact of the virtualization requirements of the learning process on students' satisfaction and their intention to continue using online learning. Design/methodology/approach A research model was developed using the process virtualization theory (PVT); it was validated empirically using data obtained from an onl...

Given the current trend for digitalisation, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been playing a central role in institutional performance and development. This centrality impacts local e-government plans and strategies, with consequences for service delivery and interaction and engagement with citizens. This work provides a charac...

This work presents the results of a project developed to characterize the role of ICTs in Portuguese municipalities, providing a picture of the efforts and successes reached using ICTs to improve their internal functioning and their interaction with the residents. Results here presented refer to some of the technical aspects surveyed among all 308...

The research work on understanding whether citizens will readily accept to engage with governments in e-participation initiatives through social media remains limited. Therefore, this study investigates the factors that are influencing citizens' intention to engage in government-led e-Participation initiatives through Facebook. To that end, the stu...

This study provides a general overview of citizens' perceptions toward e-Participation initiatives through Facebook that are sponsored by municipalities. Through a survey of 400 Facebook users in Jordan, the results provided evidence that Jordanian citizens uphold a positive attitude to participate in municipalities' e-Participation initiatives thr...

This research aims to explore how central governments of Brazil and Portugal are using mobile applications to offer services to citizens. To this end, 12 APPs were analysed in Brazil (which provide 25 services) and 20 APPs in Portugal (which provide 22 services) based on the following set of criteria: Service coverage; Service category; Service are...

This paper presents an exploratory study aimed at identifying, exploring, and analyzing current EGOV assessment initiatives. We do so based on data obtained from a desktop research and from a worldwide questionnaire directed to the 193 countries that are part of the list used by the Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic a...

The outstanding widespread and adoption of mobile devices all over the planet makes this platform of communication an important means for providing public services to citizens. While mobile services (m-services) seems to be the right way to proceed, the decision to "go mobile" is not as easy to make as it may seem. Indeed, many different factors ma...

A key element in the evolution of hospital services through the Internet is the development of websites that better serve the patients' needs. It imposes a high challenge on health sector organisations to have objective methods to evaluate their web presence. Health sector website assessment is built on identifying relative evaluation dimensions an...

Information Systems and Technologies (IST) assume a fundamental role in organizations, being a critical factor for their economic development and the creation of value. IST may even be a fundamental requirement for the survival of organizations, either private or public. Portuguese municipalities are not an exception to this reality. Since the 80s,...

The purpose of this study is to characterize the information systems (IS) management activity in public Portuguese schools and to suggest possible improvements for that activity. Data was gathered by document analysis, interviews with school directors and IS managers, and a questionnaire sent to the whole universe of 811 schools. Preliminary data a...

Health sector institutions’ websites need to act as effective web resources of information and interactive communication mediums to address the versatile demands of their multiple stakeholders. Academic and practitioner interest in health sector website assessment has considerably risen in recent years. This can be seen by the number of papers publ...

This paper follows the research framework for context-specific public service delivery presented at ICEGOV 2016. The research has been conducted at the UNU-EGOV unit during the last year. The paper presents the research landscape for ICT enabled public service delivery scientific and policy literature. The findings are analyzed and presented in a c...

This paper follows the research framework for context-specific public service delivery presented at ICEGOV 2016 [1]. The research has been conducted at the UNU-EGOV unit during the last year. The paper presents the research landscape for ICT enabled public service delivery scientific and policy literature. The findings are analyzed and presented in...

Whilst the idea of utilizing social media to advance government-led e-Participation initiatives has proliferated significantly in recent years, mostly such initiatives do not meet the intended expectations, as the majority of them fail to attract wider citizens’ audience. Overall, the key factors that could explain and predict citizens’ participati...

As a consequence of the interdisciplinary nature of Electronic Participation (e-Participation), current research on the field is fragmented and scattered. The exciting blurry boundaries and the immature identity of the field are making difficult the understanding of the main domain themes being investigated, in particular for “neophytes” researcher...

This paper presents research findings of reviewing 42 studies concerning electronic participation (e-Participation) through social media. Overall, such initiatives have reflected the prevalence of a one-way communication strategy, what do not considerably foster citizen involvement in policy decision making process.

Based on the latest trends of government digitization efforts, this paper presents a survey of the literature illustrating how governments are using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to deliver public services pursuing concrete development goals and taking into account specific needs of the local context. Based on the survey, we illu...

It is widely acknowledge that many of e-Participation initiatives often attract wider audience and face serious limited citizens’ involvement. The use of social media has been seen as a hope to remedy such limitation. However, despite the recently adoption of social media the lack of citizens’ involvement in e-Participation initiatives still remain...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2016, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in September 2016, in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on eParticipation, ePart 2016. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 87 sub...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2016, held in Guimarães, Portugal, in September 5-8, 2016. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers reflect completed multi-disciplinary research ranging f...

Information systems outsourcing risks are a vital component in the decision and management process associated to the provision of information systems and technology services by a provider to a customer. Although there is a rich literature on information systems outsourcing risks, the accumulated knowledge on this area is fragmented. In view of this...

An e-government Interoperability Framework (IF) is a document or group of documents that specify a set of common elements such as vocabularies, concepts, principles, policies, guidelines, recommendations, standards, and practices for agencies that wish to work together, towards the joint delivery of public services. IFs are seen by governments as p...

Information systems security plays a central role in the provision of services by Public Administration agencies. To foster a trust climate in the development of e-government, it is important to know the main concerns when managing initiatives to protect information assets. The aim of this research in progress is to identify and prioritize the key...

Over the last three decades there has been a remarkable progress in terms of information and technologies (IT) available in Portuguese schools: from a small and shy presence by the end of the eighties to the proliferation of laptops, tablets, and the growing number of Internet broadband connected spaces that can be seen nowadays in Portuguese schoo...

This paper explores a set of national European open government data. The study is particularly focused on analyzing and identifying differences on how northern and southern countries of Europe have adopted, accepted and promoted open government data portals. Using web content analysis, open government data portals of six countries, three from the N...

This paper presents an analysis of a focus group discussion, which was carried out to collect information about the need, utility, and value that can be associated with the existence of an information service aimed to support educational leadership activities. The service intends to support leadership in monitoring and improvement of school perform...

Information systems interoperability is one of the main concerns and challenges of information systems managers and researchers, most of whom perceive and approach it on a pure or predominantly technological perspective. In this paper, we argue that a sociotechnical perspective of information systems interoperability should be adopted and we set ou...

Information systems outsourcing risks are a vital component in the decision and management process associated to the provision of information systems and technology services by a provider to a customer. Although there is a rich literature on information systems outsourcing risks, the accumulated knowledge on this area is fragmented. In view of this...

Over the last few years, many different definitions for the e-government term have appeared in the literature. This diversity of definitions created a conceptual multiplicity and divergence. While being understandable, taking into consideration the newness of the e-government field, this may be prejudicing the e-government research and development....

We report on the development in Argentina of a screening questionnaire for autism administered over the telephone. The Autism Diagnostic Inventory-Telephone Screening in Spanish (ADI-TSS) is based on the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R), keeping its structure but including fewer questions, which were rephrased to assess them over the tel...