Abstract

Innovations in network technologies in the 1990's have provided new ways to store and organize information to be shared by people and various information systems. The term Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has been widely adopted by software product vendors and practitioners to refer to technologies used to manage the content of assets like documents, web sites, intranets, and extranets In organizational or inter-organizational contexts. Despite this practical interest ECM has received only little attention in the information systems research community. This editorial argues that ECM provides an important and complex subfield of Information Systems. It provides a framework to stimulate and guide future research, and outlines research issues specific to the field of ECM.

No abstract

Several theories of E-Democracy have been presented, and implementations of and experiments in E-Democracy emerged. However, existing literature on the subject appears rather noncomprehensive, lacking an integrated basis for gathering knowledge in the future. After an analysis of theories of E-Democracy versus implementations reported in related literature, we address the need for a model generally absent from contemporary theoretical literature: the Partisan model of E-Democracy. We aim to simplify the current "jungle" of E-Democracy models into four idealised models: the Liberal, the Deliberative, the Partisan, and the Direct. We discuss how current theories of E-Democracy, in addition to reported implementations, may be covered by these models. The explanatory potential of these four models is illustrated by analysing implementations of a communication technology for E-Democracy, the web-based discussion forum. We argue that, instead of viewing technology such as the Internet as a "black box," any implementation of E-Democracy should be adapted to the specific democracy model(s) pursued by a particular initiative. In addition, E-Democracy researchers could be more specific about their standard of democracy, in order to avoid artificial comparisons or criticisms of contemporary E-Democracy without an explicit framework of criteria. Finally, we discuss the possibilities of unifying the ideals from different models on E-Democracy. We suggest that any context of E-Democracy may in fact require elements from all four models to stay dynamic over time.

Abstract. Public procurement of information systems (IS) and IS services provides several challenges to the stakeholders involved in the procurement processes. This paper reports initial results from a Delphi study, which involved 46 experienced procurement managers, chief information officers, and vendor representatives in the Norwegian public sector. The participants identified altogether 98 challenges related to IS procurement, divided further into 13 categories: requirements specification, change management, cooperation among stakeholders, competence, competition, contracting, inter-municipal cooperation, governmental management, procurement process, rules and regulations, technology and infrastructure, vendors, and IT governance. The results contribute by supporting a few previous findings from conceptual and case-based studies, and by suggesting additional issues which deserve both further research and managerial and governmental attention. As such, the results provide altogether a rich overview of the IS procurement challenges in the Norwegian public context.