Public sector reform movements around the world in the 1990s, codified as New Public Management (NPM) have been aimed at ‘fostering a performanceoriented culture in a less centralised public sector’ (OECD, 1995). Such reforms are characterised by key elements including increasing use of markets and competition in the provision of public services (e.g., contracting out and other market-type mech...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of extension services in enhancing effectiveness of out growers’ credit system in Kisumu County, Kenya. The study specifically sought to determine whether public and private extension services play a significant role in enhancing effectiveness of out-growers’ credit system among smallholder sugarcane farmers. A total of 110 small scale farme...

The adoption of public services that have been delivered electronically are not necessarily uniformly accepted. This paper argues that the diffusion of high definition video communication as a complimentary mechanism for service delivery could not only alleviate this existing gap in adoption and diffusion of government services but also significantly improve services and save cost for governmen...

Today in response to the changes in global economy, growing customer demands and increasing IT possibilities the public sector adapts approaches that have proven to be successful in business environment. Many private companies have successfully implemented customer relationship management strategies and are starting to use knowledge management applications to improve the quality and efficiency ...

This article addresses the problem of how to determine the optimal allocation of public expenditure in the health sector. The first part poses the question: How should the set of services provided in the public health care system and the fees charged for them be chosen to maximize the health status of the population with a fixed budget? First, the findings show that policy reform should take in...

This thesis deals with a socio-technical approach towards the development of interorganisational ICT tools in healthcare. My overall case is Norwegian healthcare, and I investigated how national inter-organisational ICT tools were developed and why good results were difficult to achieve. Three public projects make up the basis of my data collection in which the main categories of data are inter...

Achieving Millennium Development Goal 5 in Bangladesh calls for an appreciation of the evolution of maternal healthcare within the national health system to date plus a projection of future needs. This paper assesses the development of maternal health services and policies by reviewing policy and strategy documents since the independence in 1971, with primary focus on rural areas where three-fo...

This work presents a Web-based, database-oriented set of applications, which include an asynchronous Open Distance Learning tool (without the presence of a tutor), an application for retrieving information about work safety issues and allows information exchange between the public and different departments of Greek Power Company (GPC). All applications offer secure and easy administration, prov...

Two basic questions are investigated in this contribution: 1) How can we explain the value generation process in the public sector? 2) What is the potential role of Web services technology in this process? Our approach has been to make use of the process theory on business value generation developed by Soh and Markus (1993), adapting the original framework of analysis to the public sector. Acco...