Luc Lagrandeur and Denise Fortier
“ How should e‐Services be developed from a citizen perspective? What contribution can the citizens make in this development process? Is there any common strategy for the development of local e‐Government and e‐Services? How should such a strategy be developed and what should it comprise? What are the current perspectives and in what way do they take citizens into consideration?”( Ibid, pp 49).
Thus, managerial problems are not only relevant to practitioners but also to academics; where there is a knowledge deficit there is an opportunity to fill a gap and explore questions in greater depth by identifying research problems and questions. As supported by Benbasat & Zmud( 1999),“ IS researchers should look to practice to identify research topics and look to the IS literature only after a commitment has been made to a specific topic”( Ibid, pp 8).
3. Conclusion
As demonstrated above, we argue for new ways to address the first two research phases with applicability check. In other words, once practitioners identify relevant and important issues, it becomes the researchers’ responsibility to engage in the research life cycle. Their role then becomes one of tackling problems that have not been discussed in the academic literature. Ultimately, the researcher’ s role is to identify knowledge deficiencies that then become relevant research problems. If we deem the first and second research phases as being the most relevant for practitioners, researchers can then validate these issues as the ones to be investigated in the next phases of the research life cycle. As with traditional research, a review of the scientific literature can validate the relevance of an issue identified by practitioners. Once validated, it is imperative to determine if those“ real‐world” managerial problems can become research questions. Indeed, in his evaluation of current e‐government research, Löftstedt( 2005) identified deficiencies along with directions for future research, indicating that research at the local government level is in its infancy. In sum, knowledge that results from this study is twofold. First, results offer a wide view of the managerial problems faced by municipal governments offering online services. Second, it shows that the scope of the Rosemann and Vessey’ s( 2008) research lifecycle can be shortened by moving applicability check upstream simultaneously as part of the research problem identification. In so doing, this paper paves the way for academic research in an area that is relevant to practice.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Robert Bell from ICF for his support throughout this research project. Furthermore, we wish to thank the elected officials and city administrators who participated in the interviews to ensure relevancy for future research. Finally, sincere thanks go out to our“ guardian angel” Dr. Joachim Jean‐Jules for his acumens and suggestions.
Appendix 1
List of participating communities with population level Community
Population Golden( Canada) 4,200 Hinton( Canada) 9,738 Stratford( Canada) 30,461 Lakeshore( Canada) 34,000
Issy‐les‐Moulineaux( France) 64,448
Helmond( Netherlands) 88,766 Chattanooga( USA) 167,674 Ipswich( Australia) 168,131 Windsor( Canada) 210,891 Geelong( Australia) 223,047 Riverside( USA) 311,575 Arlington( USA) 365,438 Vienna( Austria) 1,730,000
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