Λουκής Ευριπίδης

Περίληψη:
Government agencies are increasingly adopting chatbots, in order on one hand to enhance public services, and on the other hand to reduce service delivery costs and alleviate employees’ workload; some of these chatbots belong to a first generation of rule-based chatbots, and some others belong to a second more advanced generation of AI powered chatbots. However, distinguishing between them in real deployments without detailed examination of their code (which ρequires highly skilled and specialized ICT personnel) remains challenging. This paper addresses this challenge by describing a methodology for this purpose, which is based on a structured 8-dimensional evaluation of the behavior of the chatbot, based on submitting to it a series of queries, both concise/structured and longer/conversational variations of them, and analyzing the responses. The proposed methodology is then applied for validation purposes to four municipal chatbots and provides correct classifications of them as rule-based or AI-powered ones, revealing a clear distinction: two of them (the Athens and Differdange chatbots) exhibit strong AI-powered capabilities, whereas the other two (the Kalamaria and Cork chatbots) operate as rigid rule-based systems.

Περίληψη:
This study evaluates the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the enrichment of migration data using unstructured, fragmented open government data and journalistic articles. By benchmarking six models against a manually compiled journalistic dataset of 129 incidents of migration on the island of Crete during the first two quarters of 2025, we examine the extraction of information such as refugee demographics, perpetrator profiles, and smuggling fees. The results reveal that the models were highly capable of demographic extraction, but their effectiveness diminished when faced with more complex tasks that required geographic reasoning and the synthesis of financial information. The findings of the study conclude that the use of LLMs can be a viable alternative to bespoke software for investigative reporting, provided there is thorough human oversight.

Περίληψη:
Open government data has been in the spotlight for several years, emphasising the need for publicly available datasets to foster societal innovation and enable da-ta-driven decision-making. However, it is not sufficient for data to be available through an open data portal or repository to be usable by end users and for them to fully unveil its potential; it also needs to be accessible and intelligible. Target-ing this aspect, this study builds on the synergy of open government data and emerging technologies, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) to demonstrate that technologically enabled open data portals can have enormous possibilities for end-users to understand an available dataset efficiently, and in an interactive man-ner. This implementation is built on the LLMs Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) functionality which fetches datasets after a user’s choice from the Greek Open Data Portal, allowing the user to ask questions about this dataset using nat-ural language. The Greek open data portal provides access to datasets from dif-ferent domains through the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which makes it easier to bridge the gap between complex data and non-technical users who want to use it. This work explores the implementation potential of such a pipeline in a real-world application using the Greek Open Data portal as data source, and by utilising a conversational smart agent to interact with the open da-tasets available through the portal, it brings forward new capabilities in data-user interaction and efficient data exploration. Apart from the implementation, this study explores the pitfalls and shortcomings of such an endeavour (conversation-al agents) which requires real-time calculations and deterministic responses.

Περίληψη:
This paper attempts to explore the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into modern judicial systems. Through a systematic literature review based on the PRISMA methodology, the study initially examines the use of AI technologies, such as machine learning, natural language processing and generative AI, in justice, and then examines some advanced applications of AI in the judicial systems of some pioneering countries in this area, including China, the United States, Argentina, the Netherlands, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. The paper presents some pioneering practices, such as Smart Courts in China, the “Prometea system” in Argentina, “Predictive Justice” in Italy, and “Judge Analytics tools” in the U.S. and the Netherlands. At the same time, it highlights some ethical and legal issues arising from the application of AI in justice: algorithmic bias, transparency, accountability and protection of personal data. The paper concludes that AI can become a valuable tool for enhancing the efficiency, speed, and accessibility of justice, provided it is implemented within a robust institutional, ethical, and human-centered framework.

Περίληψη:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly adopted by government for supporting and enhancing citizens’ participation and public service co-creation. However, governments that implement NLP technologies like chatbots and sentiment analysis tools for the above purposes should now address critical concerns including ethical implications and sustainability issues. The study investigates NLP uses for supporting and enhancing citizens’ participation and public service cocreation and reveals outcomes as well as the ethical, energy, and sustainability challenges posed. In particular, we aim to address two research questions: the first of them concerns the impacts of NLP on public engagement, participation, and co-creation in public organizations, and the second research question addresses the ethical, energy, and sustainability challenges that the use of NLP in public organizations faces. For this purpose, we conduct a systematic literature review based on PRISMA methodology. It is concluded that NLP promises inclusive solutions for public engagement, participation, and co-creation but is hindered by algorithmic bias, data privacy risk, and the environmental impact of large-scale language models.

Περίληψη:
The large smart city initiatives undertaken by many local government organizations all over the world drive significant digital transformations of them, and this makes their implementation difficult and risky. However, this digital transformation perspective of the smart city initiatives of local government organizations has been only minimally researched. This paper contributes to filling the above research gap. It investigates the ‘digital transformation patterns’ of the projects included in the smart city strategic plans of Greek local government organizations, which have been approved for funding by the Ministry of Digital Governance: we examine what types of digital transformation of the local government organizations they drive. Initially a methodology is developed for this purpose, which is based on the analysis of the documents of the relevant administrative approval and funding decisions, having as theoretical foundation and analytical lens a comprehensive conceptualization of government digital transformation developed in previous research. Using the above methodology an analysis is conducted of the documents of the administrative decisions concerning the approval and funding of the smart city strategic plans of 121 Greek local government organizations, which include 996 projects in total. It is concluded that the dominant type of digital transformation that these projects drive is the digital transformation of the internal processes of the local government organization (71,9% of the projects), indicating an ‘inward-looking’ orientation of these strategic plans, followed by the digital transformation (enrichment) of the services provided to the citizens (30,1% of the projects). Furthermore, we have found that about half of these projects (46,7%) involve more than one type of digital transformation, which indicates a high complexity from a digital transformation perspective, and therefore high levels of implementation difficulties and risks.

Περίληψη:
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a drastic limitation of physical contact in order to minimize its spread, so organizations (both private and public ones) had to rapidly modify their operational model in this direction, with respect to both their internal processes and their interactions with customers, suppliers and partners, and this included the extensive use of digital technologies for the above purposes. So, COVID-19 put pressure on organizations to advance their digital transformation. However, the magnitude of the positive impact that COVID-19 had on the use of digital technologies and the digital transformation differs among organizations, depending on the nature of their activities, their processes, their human resources, as well as their digital maturity and the availability of financial resources. So, it is important to analyze the real impact that COVID-19 had on the use of digital technologies and the digital transformation of different kinds of private and public organizations based on sound theoretical foundations. This study makes a contribution in this direction by conducting a multi-dimensional analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on government digital transformation. For this purpose, a comprehensive multi-dimensional research model has been developed, having as theoretical foundation the resource-based view of the firm, which includes the analysis of the impact of COVID-19: i) on the ICT-related resources; ii) on the ICT-related capabilities; and iii) on the digital transformation outcomes. Our study has been conducted in one of the largest and most important and costly Ministries of Greece: The Ministry of Education. Data has been collected through a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques: a focus group discussion and a questionnaire filled in by its participants. It has been concluded that the COVID-19 led to a large increase of the available financial resources for ICT-related investments and operating expenses, a significant improvement of the ICT-related processes/capabilities, and also acted as a strong driver of digital transformation of this Ministry, which consists of two components: one component that was temporary, as it concerned the support of schools’ operation during the special circumstances of the COVID-19 period, including both the initial online synchronous e-learning, and the subsequent classroom-based learning in the COVID-19 conditions that followed, so it was discontinued afterwards; and another significant component that is permanent, and was continued beyond the COVID-19 period

Περίληψη:
Economic crises are an inherent problem of market-based economies, which is repeatedly appearing with various levels of intensity, resulting in ‘recessions’, meant as significant contractions of economic activity. They have negative conse-quences on organizations (both private and public ones), as they decrease their fi-nancial resources, and therefore their operational and investment expenses and ac-tivities. In this paper we focus on public organizations and investigate the effects of economic crisis on a highly important activity of them: their digital transfor-mation activity. For our study we have selected a highly appropriate national con-text: Greece, which has been hit by a strong economic crisis between 2010-2018. We investigate the effects of this economic crisis on the digital transformation of a large, costly and highly important for the society and the economy public organ-ization: the Ministry of Education. For this purpose, we have constructed a re-search framework, based on the ‘Resource-based View’ (RBV) of the firm, as well as a comprehensive conceptualization of government digital transformation, as our theoretical foundations. Data have been collected through a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques. It has been concluded that the above eco-nomic crisis resulted in a serious decrease of the ICT-related investment and op-erating expenses (for the acquisition of ICT resources) of the Ministry of Educa-tion. However, despite this decrease the economic crisis has led to a significant increase of the digital transformation developments of this Ministry, and a signif-icant advancement in all the main dimensions of the digital transformation of it.

Περίληψη:
The development of ecosystems around open government data in order to generate social and economic value from them requires on one hand the existence of a critical mass of them and on the other hand some level of homogeneity and interoperability among the numerous portals and websites providing them which enables their combined exploitation. This paper presents the Technical, Semantic, Legal, and Organizational (TSLO) Interoperability Framework, a conceptual tool designed to provide a structured evaluation of the interoperability capabilities of open government data infrastructures. It incorporates the technical, semantic, legal, and organizational aspects of open government data provision, which are crucial for developing interoperability between open data portals and websites, which enables the generation of high levels of social and economic value from them, so it can pave the way for creating open data ecosystems for this purpose. We are then applying this TSLO framework to examine from this perspective the open data infrastructures of the Greek local government administration institutions of all three layers of it (decentralized, regional, and municipal). In particular, we examine the open government data portals and websites of the local Greek governments and provide a detailed analysis of them concerning the fore aspects of the framework. This first application of TSLO reveals not only the low participation of Greek local government institutions in the open data movement, and especially of the municipalities, where only 8 out of 332 municipalities provide open data on their portals or websites but also the inconsistent implementation of this, especially with respect to the use of semantic technologies as well as the legal frameworks under which the open data provided. Finally, we propose the automation of the TSLO framework to facilitate the evaluation and standardization of open local government data infrastructure and expand the study to identify and address barriers to open data provision.

Περίληψη:
Economic crises repeatedly appear in market-based economies and have serious consequences on them. They are causing serious decreases of the sales revenue and therefor the financial resources of organizations, as well as oftheir operations and investments. However, they can have some positive effects as well, leading to processes’ rationalizations in important functions of them, improvements of their efficiency and better exploitation of their resources. In this paper we investigate the effects of the strong economic crisis that hit Greece between 2010-2018 on the digitization of one of the most important and costly domains of government activity: the social security. It has been concluded that during the economic crisis period there has been a large decrease of the ICT-related investment and operating expenses; however due to some improvement and rationalization of ICT-related processes and practices, as well as a better utilization of knowledgeable ICT personnel (mainly of the central ‘Electronic Government Center for Social Security’), a significant increase in the digitalization of the Greek Social Security has been achieved during this difficult period.

Περίληψη:
In market-based economies often appear significant decreases of economic activity, which lead to recessionary economic crises. These economic crises have quite negative consequences for firms, as they lead to significant decrease of their sales revenues; firms respond by decreasing on one hand their production and in general operational activities and expenses, personnel employment and materials’ procurement, and on the other hand their investments in production equipment, digital technologies, etc., which leads to technological obsolescence. This reduction of investments, and especially of the ones in digital technologies, due to their importance for firms’ efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation, can have quite negative impact on their future competitiveness, and even put at risk their survival. However, these negative consequences of economic crises differ significantly among firms: some of them exhibit a lower vulnerability to the crisis, so they have less negative consequences, while some other firms exhibit a higher vulnerability, and have more negative consequences; so the competitive position of the former is significantly strengthened with respect to the latter, and finally the former are the ‘winners’ of the crisis, while the latter are the ‘losers’. This paper proposes a methodology for predicting the winner and loser firms of future economic crises with respect to a highly important class of technologies: the digital technologies. In particular, the proposed methodology enables the prediction of the multi-dimensional ‘pattern of digital vulnerability’ of an individual firm to a future economic crisis, which consists of the degrees of reduction of the main types of ‘digital investments’ as well as ‘digital operating expenses’ in a future economic crisis. For this purpose, we are using Machine Learning algorithms, in combination with the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), in order to increase their performance, which are trained using open government data from Statistical Authorities. Furthermore, a first application/validation of the proposed methodology is presented, using open data from the Greek Statistical Authority for 363 firms for the severe Greek economic crisis period 2009-2014, which gave satisfactory results concerning the prediction of nine different aspects of digital vulnerability to economic crisis (five of them concerned the main types of digital investment, and the other four concerned the main types of digital operating expenses).

Περίληψη:
Whilst there is a need for furthering the engagement of the universities in imbibing the Open Government Data (OGD) curriculum in their graduate and postgraduate courses, there has been no systematic research focused on the identification of the qualitative benchmarking regarding the curriculum of OGD-focused academic programmes. Benchmarking the OGD curriculum with the adoption of best practices among the universities is pertinent given the significant role of the students and other faculty members in the value derivation and innovation pursuits in their current and futuristic capacities. Drawing inferences from the QS World University rankings, 2023, via the BEKA (benchmarking, evidencing, knowing, applying) analysis, this paper identifies the best practices in qualitative terms for furthering dialogue and discourse among the university stakeholders and others in the OGD ecosystem. Specifically, a detailed course structure is provided for OGD courses which may serve as benchmarks for further foundation-laying of OGD curriculum in different varsities. As a first contribution towards identification of the best practices in the OGD-focused curriculum designing, the study contributes towards OGD literature, in general, and the benchmarking practices in OGD-focused discourse, in specific

Περίληψη:
Vis-a-vis the digital innovation, i.e. Open Government Data (OGD), in the annals of public administration, the impetus upon user engagement holds eminence given the possibilities unleashed via value derivation. However, user engagement depends to a large extent to which OGD platforms deliver in terms of information expectations of the user. In this vein, the significance of “information scent”, i.e. the propensity of a user to dig deeper into a web portal based on the quality aligned with the intrinsic goal of the user, assumes importance for facilitating optimum user engagement with the OGD portal. Drawing inferences from the experts’ opinion, this study seeks to present possible research themes around this edifice. Given that OGD-research has underscored the need for website maintenance in terms of provisioning quality OGD and conducive portal features for furthering user engagement, the significance of information scent via OGD portals for consistent user engagement merits consideration for furthering the contours of OGD literature

Περίληψη:
User Commitment (UC) assumes significance for ensuring re-use and adoption of Open Government Data (OGD) given the impetus upon value derivation and innovation pursuits of the stakeholders concerned. The present study seeks to empirically validate a research model for determining the impinging variables, i.e. trust, information quality, data quality, system quality, for furthering UC. Drawing inferences from the responses secured from the university students in India, the impinging role of trust, system quality and data quality stand attested with the gender differentials in terms of system quality and data quality for user commitment. The study closes with social, academic and practical implications. As the first study seeking to understand the determinants of OGD UC, it contributes to the existing OGD literature apart from understanding the OGD UC propensities.

Περίληψη:
Given the impetus upon the availability and quality of Open Government Data (OGD) as prime considerations for usability, the value derivation through OGD interoperability unleashes vistas for realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) via economic activities. Therefore, economic growth and development in terms of the SDGs attainment is possible in the globalized contexts where trade & commerce assume significance. For the present study, SDG-specific OGD across the 4 OGD national portals (UK, US, The Netherlands, Greece) are assessed across the availability-interoperability axes to understand how trade & commerce amongst the 4 trading partners might facilitate the attainment of 17 SDGs with value derivation initiatives across commercial products/services of the stakeholders. Specifically, cosine similarity is assessed for drawing inferences for the availability-interoperability loci. Findings show that most value derivation activities via trade & commerce towards the attainment of SDGs in the 4 countries are facilitated across SDG4 (Quality Education) and SDG11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) where the availability-interoperability focus is strongest whilst the reverse is true for SDG 5 (Gender Equality); SDG 10 (Reduced Inequality), and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the goals) where the availability-interoperability focus is weakest. The findings are suggestive of the need for the practitioners and policy-makers to institutionalize OGD initiatives with qualitatively robust OGD to stimulate value creation via trade & commerce products/services in the domains linked with the SDGs.

Περίληψη:
∗Legal information is of paramount importance for social, economic and political activities. Sophisticated legal information retrieval (LIR) systems are designed and built to facilitate user access to accurate and current legal information. The advent of new types of capabilities in the legal information systems domain has necessitated a closer look at the performance and usability of such advanced computer systems, and brought into sharp focus the requirement for an effective evaluation of the available functionalities and quality of the software. The purpose of this research paper is to develop a framework for the effective monitoring and evaluation of an advanced legal information system from differing salient perspectives, and to critically examine the basic set of attributes that characterize the important dimensions of platform functionality. Through the application of the developed evaluation model to a novel legal data platform, we propose both a rigorous validation of the framework itself, together with the identification of the strengths and shortcomings associated with the use of the system under consideration.

Περίληψη:
Extant research on Open Government Data (OGD) has remained confined to the grappling of issues linked with its conceptual, theoretical and empirical dimensions, however focusing on the supply of OGD physical capital (ODG portals, datasets, etc.), and to a lesser degree on the demand for it (e.g., needs of potential users), but not dealing with relevant OGD human capital (human knowledge and skills concerning OGD). Furthermore, research on meta-analysis or literature reviews has not expanded its scope to unravel the formation of OGD human capital, and especially how the OGD theme is being showcased across universities’ curriculum. The present research aims to contribute to filling this research gap, through an analysis of the OGD-related programs and courses offered at the graduate and post-graduate levels across the top-notch universities identified as per the indicators of the QS World University rankings, 2023. Our theoretical foundation is the widely recognized ‘Human Capital Theory’ from the economic science, which gives prominence to the importance of the human capital (human knowledge and skills) as an important complement of the classical physical capital (e.g., production equipment, ICT capital, etc.). Our findings indicate that there are only small number of courses concerning OGD in these top-notch universities; furthermore, a very small share of them have OGD an main topic, while most of them include only a part concerning OGD. Most of them focus on the exploitation of OGD of a specific thematic domain (mainly urban studies and health), and only a few deal with OGD in general. Furthermore, there is a prevalence of postgraduate courses, offered as part of MSC programs, followed by undergraduate courses, offered as part of BSC study programs, and to a much lesser degree short courses. Also, with respect to the objective of these OGD-related programs and courses, most of them aim at the generation of scientific value from OGD, while a smaller number aim at the generation of social-political value, and only a much smaller number at the development of economic value. Therefore, it can be concluded that the formation of OGD human capital by the examined universities is limited.

Περίληψη:
One of the most serious problems of the market-based economies are the in-stabilities of economic activity (business cycles), which are sometimes large and lead to recessionary economic crises of different intensities, geographical scopes and durations, which have quite negative consequences for firms. Most firms experience decrease of their sales and their liquidity, increase of their debts, and reductions of investment as well as personnel employment, while some firms go bankrupt. Governments, in order to reduce these negative consequences of economic crises, which can lead to high levels of unemployment and poverty, as well social unrest and political extremism, undertake various interventions, such as large-scale economic stimulus programs. These interventions, and especially the large-scale economic stimulus programs, are more effective if they are focused on the most vulnerable firms to the economic crisis. This paper makes a contribution in this direction: it describes a methodology for predicting multi-dimensional patterns of firms' vulnerability to economic crisis with respect to the main aspects of their financial situation; for this purpose, we are using Machine Learning algorithms, in combination with the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), in order to increase their performance, which are trained using open government data from Statistical Authorities. Furthermore, a first application/validation of the proposed methodology is presented, using open data from the Greek Statistical Authority about 363 firms for the severe Greek economic crisis period 2009-2014, which gave satisfactory results. Our methodology can be useful for government agencies responsible for designing and implementing interventions, and especially large-scale economic stimulus programs, in order to reduce the negative impacts of economic crises, or other kinds of firms’ support programs; and also, for banks and in-vestment firms, as well as for firms of all sectors that rely largely on big supply chains

Περίληψη:
As a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) application, ChatGPT holds pertinence not only for the academic, medicine, law, computing or other sectors, but also for the public sector-case in point being the Open Government Data (OGD) initiative. However, though there has been some limited (as this topic is quite new) research concerning the capabilities ChatGPT in these sectors, there has been no research about the capabilities it can provide to government concerning its wide range of functions and activities. This paper contributes to filling this gap by investigating the capabilities that the ChatGPT can provide concerning one of most recently initiated and novel, and at the same time most promising, activities of government that aims to fuel the emerging data economy and society: the opening of large amounts of government data; furthermore, we investigate the public values that can be promoted through the use of ChatGPT in the area of OGD by both the data publishers as well as their users. At the same time, we investigate the issues that the use of ChatGPT in the area of OGD can pose, which can reduce the capabilities identified as aforesaid as well as the benefits and public values that can be generated from them. For these purposes interviews with 12 experts have been conducted and their responses have been analyzed. Finally, based on our findings we have developed a research agenda concerning the exploitation of ChatGPT application in the OGD domain.

Περίληψη:
In market-based economies economic crises of different geographical scopes and durations are often appearing, and are resulting in economic recessions, which have quite negative consequences for the economy and the society. Governments respond by undertaking large-scale economic stimulation programs, spending vast amounts of financial resources (with orders of magnitude between 3-6% of GDP), in order to mitigate these negative consequences. It is of critical importance to make effective use of these huge financial resources, in order to have high positive impact on the economy and the society in these tough crisis periods. This necessitates careful and rational design and implementation of these large and costly economic stimulation programs. Since one of the most important consequences of economic crises is the decrease of firms’ investments, the above economic stimulation programs include investment support actions, which aim to mitigate these crisis-induced firms’ investment decreases, and include a wide range of interventions for this reason, such as investment incentives, subsidies, low-interest loans as well as relevant tax rebates. In this paper is presented an integrated methodology for leveraging government data from economic crisis periods, using on one hand Unsupervised Machine Learning techniques, and on the other hand Supervised Machine Learning ones, in order to provide support for the rational design and implementation of firms’ investment support actions in economic crises. A first application of the proposed methodology is presented, based on existing data from the Greek Ministry of Finance and the Statistical Authority concerning 363 firms for the economic crisis period 2009- 2014, which gave interesting and encouraging results.

Περίληψη:
Economic crises of different durations, intensities and geographic scopes are often appearing in market-based economies, while at the same time the economic stability periods become shorter. They have several negative impacts on firms, which include a decrease of their technological investments in various technological resources (e.g., production equipment, ICT, etc.). This can result in firms’ technological backwardness and obsolescence, and finally lower competitiveness and growth, or even threaten the survival of many firms. At the same time, economic crises can have some positive impacts on firms as well, as they put pressure on them to exploit more efficiently their resources by rationalizing and improving the relevant processes and practices they follow for using and exploiting their resources, including the technological ones, which can have positive impacts on their competitiveness and growth. Therefore, institutions that provide financial support to firms, such as government agencies (through various government firms’ financial support programs), banks (through the provision of various kinds of loans), and institutional investors, in their relevant decision-making should take into account not only criteria concerning firms’ economic performance during normal economically stable periods but also criteria concerning their ‘technological resilience’ (with respect to their main production technologies, ICT, etc.) during economic crises periods as well. This is important because low technological resilience in economic crisis periods can result in severe technological backwardness and obsolescence, and finally lower future competitiveness and growth, and even threaten their survival. This paper proposes a methodology for enhancing government agencies’, banks’ and, institutional investors’ decision-making concerning the financial support of firms by adding to pre-existing relevant criteria predictions of firms’ technological resilience to economic crises. Having as theoretical foundation the resources and capabilities theory from the strategic management domain, we view technological resilience as a two-dimensional concept, which consists of a) the extent of reduction of technological investments during economic crises, and b) the extent of rationalization and improvement of their technological resources’ exploitation processes and practices during economic crises. These predictions are based on existing data from government agencies (Statistical Authorities) which are used to construct relevant prediction models through artificial intelligence techniques from the area of machine learning. Also, an application of this methodology is described, which gives satisfactory results.

Περίληψη:
As the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media increasingly change our lives, all the extensive capabilities they offer are exploited by firms, using them to promote and advertise their products, to improve and strengthen their external communication with their customers, as well as the internal communication among firm’s employees, and even to improve their absorptive capacity, which is of critical importance for their innovativeness. Several different forms of social media use by firms, starting from simpler and advancing to more sophisticated ones, have been developed and are increasingly used by firms. The objective of this study is to understand the extent and the forms of social media usage by firms of the Greek food and beverage sector, which is one of the most important sectors of the Greek economy; and especially to examine to what extent are used the more sophisticated forms of social media use that can contribute to the improvement of firm’s absorptive capacity. Our research methodology is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques. We conduct semi-structured interviews with seven firms from the Greek food & beverage sector, which include questionnaire filling. From the analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data collected it has been concluded that these firms are unter-utilizing the potential of social media, using mainly the simpler forms of social media use, but not the more sophisticated ones, especially the ones that can improve their absorptive capacity.

Περίληψη:
The enterprise systems (ES), such as ERP, CRM, and SCM ones, represent the highest and most mature form of electronic support of firms’ internal activities and co-operation with suppliers and customers. They can offer great benefits, however their implementation is costly and has significant difficulties and risks, which hinder their adoption. Therefore, research has been conducted concerning the factors that affect positively or negatively their adoption, however further research is required on this topic examining a wider range of factors. This paper contributes to filling this research gap by investigating the effect of a highly significant factor, which has not been examined in previous relevant literature, on the extent of ES adoption: the recessionary economic crises, which constitute the most critical disruptions that repeatedly occur in firms’ external environment with quite negative consequences. Furthermore, we compare this effect with the ones of several other factors, which according to previous literature affect firms’ innovation activity. Our study has been based on data collected from 363 Greek firms concerning the economic crisis period 2009-2014. Using these data, a comprehensive ES adoption model, based on the Technology, Organization, Environment (TOE) theory of technological innovation adoption, has been estimated, which includes as independent variables: a) three crisis-related factors that concern the main manifestations of economic crises, and b) some additional factors that have been identified by previous innovation research as promoting firms’ innovation activities, especially concerning technological innovations (ICT use, size, human capital, use of organic forms of organization, competition and sector). It has been concluded that none of the examined crisis-related factors affected the extent of ES adoption; on the contrary, we have found that it was some firm’s characteristics that affected it: size, ICT use, human capital and use of organic forms of organization, as well as the non-price competition.

Περίληψη:
Traditionally public decision-makers have been given discretion in many of the decisions they have to make in how to comply with legislation and policies. In this way, the context and specific circumstances can be taken into account when making decisions. This enables more acceptable solutions, but at the same time, discretion might result in treating individuals differently. With the advance of AI-based decisions, the role of the decision-makers is changing. The automation might result in fully automated decisions, humans in-the-loop or AI might only be used as recommender systems in which humans have the discretion to deviate from the suggested decision. The predictability of and the accountability of the decisions might vary in these circumstances, although humans always remain accountable. Hence, there is a need for human-control and the decision-makers should be given sufficient authority to control the system and deal with undesired outcomes. In this direction this paper analyzes the degree of discretion and human control needed in AI-driven decision-making in government. Our analysis is based on the legal requirements set/posed to the administration, by the extensive legal frameworks that have been created for its operation, concerning the rule of law, the fairness – non-discrimination, the justifiability and accountability, and the certainty/ predictability.

Περίληψη:
Legal information is of paramount importance for social, economic and political activities. Sophisticated legal information retrieval (LIR) systems are designed and built to facilitate user access to accurate and current legal information. The advent of new types of capabilities in the legal information systems domain has necessitated a closer look at the performance and usability of such advanced computer systems, and brought into sharp focus the requirement for an effective evaluation of the available functionalities and quality of the software. The purpose of this research paper is to develop a framework for the effective monitoring and evaluation of an advanced legal information system from differing salient perspectives, and to critically examine the basic set of attributes that characterize the important dimensions of platform functionality. Through the application of the developed evaluation model to a novel legal data platform, we propose both a rigorous validation of the framework itself, together with the identification of the strengths and shortcomings associated with the use of the system under consideration.

Περίληψη:
The digital transformation of public services has been traditionally one of the main targets of digital government research and practice; however, it has focused mainly on the digital transformation of complex public services, based on the development of highly sophisticated and costly information sys-tems (IS) for this purpose. Nevertheless, considerable public value can be gen-erated through the digital transformation of widely used simpler public services as well, as it can result in huge savings of both public servants’ and citizens’ time, as well as improvements in the quality of these services. Furthermore, due to the financial resource constraints that governments of most countries face, it is important that this is implemented at a low cost, adopting a ‘frugal innova-tion’ approach. In this direction this paper: a) describes the ‘frugal’ low-cost digital transformation of a widely used simple public service in Greece, the ‘certification of authenticity of signature’, which is applied in two special forms, the ‘formal declaration’ and the ‘authorization’; b) evaluates these novel e-services, based on an extension of ‘Diffusion of Innovation’ theory with an additional trust-related dimension, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, and finally drawing interesting conclusions of wider interest and ap-plicability.

Περίληψη:
Business Analytics (BA) has attracted great interest among firms of most sectors worldwide, as it enables a more advanced and valuable exploitation of firms’ data assets, beyond operations, for the supporting of decision-making. However, though numerous firms take some first steps in this area, most of them make limited use of BA in some of their activities, and cannot advance to a more extensive adoption of BA throughout their activities, so they do not exploit the full potential of it. For this reason, some first research has been conducted on BA adoption and factors affecting it, however more research is required on this topic. Our study makes a contribution to this research stream, by investigating empirically the effect of the extent of enterprise systems (such as ERP, CRM and SCM ones) adoption, as well as the degree of development of firm’s ICT capabilities, distinguishing between technological and management ones, on the extent of BA adoption. It has been based on the Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE) framework. We have used data collected from 363 Greek firms from both manufacturing and services sectors through a questionnaire, from which ordinal regression models are estimated. It has been concluded that both the adoption of enterprise systems, as well as the development of firm’s ICT capabilities, and especially the ICT management capabilities, affect positively the extent of BA adoption.

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Blockchain Technologies, known as BCT have been praised by most people as a new and evolutionary means of ensuring secure and transparent data sharing and record keeping with potential uses in a number of sectors. The government sector is one of them. The potentials of DLTs are among the motivating reasons why most government agencies are looking to this technology to help make them become more efficient, accountable, cost-effective, and transparent. Some, on the other hand, are looking for ways in which the DLTs can help increase the trust in government agencies as well as various governmental institutions. Despite the endless potentials of the DLTs , they are still in infant stage and at the same time having a number of risks that may deter its future integration and use. This paper proposes a framework towards the integration of DLTs into government organizations of various levels like municipalities and public services that will help in introduction of them in governmental tasks such as digital ID management, secure document handling and voting while keeping them simple for administrators to use and apply in every organization and domain.

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The public sector in many countries is initially experimenting with and then adopting various forms of Cloud Computing (CC) services, in order to take advantage of the important benefits it can offer over the traditional ‘on-premises’ model concerning the electronic support of their operations. This study empirically investigates the extent of use of the simplest form of CC services, the Cloud Storage (CS), by the Greek Municipalities, as well as the factors that affect it. Our theoretical background is Rogers’ 'Diffusion of Innovation Theory'. The study is based on data collected through a questionnaire from 121 Greek Municipalities. The results of this study paint an encouraging picture: some important steps have been taken concerning the utilization of this technology by the Greek Municipalities, and also there are positive future trends. But at the same time, they indicate a rather defensive and conservative approach of the Greek Municipalities towards the adoption of CS. We have found that its adoption is mainly affected by the perceptions of the Municipalities about the level of threats that this technology poses (mainly the risks of loss, destruction or improper modification of their data), its compatibility with existing procedures, needs and culture, as well as its application complexity and difficulty. However, CS adoption does not seem to be affected by Municipalities’ perceptions about the extent of comparative advantages (in comparison with the traditional ‘on-premises’ model) it offers.

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Most of the research that has been conducted in the area of legal infor-matics concerns its ‘supply side’, dealing with the development of effective sys-tems for legal information provision. However, limited research has been con-ducted on the ‘demand side’ of legal information provision, though it is abso-lutely necessary to gain a good understanding of it, in order to design effective and useful systems for the provision of legal information; furthermore, this lim-ited research is dealing with the legal information needs of the lawyers, and ne-glects the ones of other important groups. This paper contributes to filling this research gap. It analyses legal information requirements of a highly important for the society group: the designers of public policies. Initially we investigate current legal information sources and systems used by public policy makers, as well as their relevant search practices. Then we investigate their business needs for ad-ditional capabilities/functionalities for a better support of their policymaking ac-tivities using advanced legal analytics tools and services. Finally, we discuss the information, processing and technical requirements for the development of a le-gal information system providing the above advanced functionalities and ser-vices. For the above purposes, we have collected data through semi-structured interviews form 13 Greek and 7 Austrian public administrators dealing with the design of public policies, which lead to interesting and useful insights, as well as a novel set of additional advanced capabilities and functionalities that can give rise to a new generation of legal informatics.

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The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to lead to a severe recessionary economic crisis with quite negative consequences for large numbers of firms and citizens; however, this is an ‘old story’: recessionary economic crises appear re-peatedly in the last 100 years in the market-based economies, and they are rec-ognized as one of the most severe and threatening weaknesses of them. They can result in closure of numerous firms, and decrease of activities of many more, as well as poverty and social exclusion for large parts of the population, and finally lead to political upheaval and instability; so they constitute one of the most threatening and difficult problems that governments often face. For the above reasons it is imperative that governments develop effective public policies and make drastic interventions for addressing these economic crises. Quite useful for these interventions can be the prediction of the vulnerability of individual firms to recessionary economic crisis, so that government can focus its attention as well as its scarce economic resources on the most vulnerable ones. In this direction our pa-per presents a methodology for using existing government data in order to predict the vulnerability of individual firms to economic crisis, based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Furthermore, a first application of the proposed methodology is presented, based on existing data from the Greek Ministry of Finance and Statistical Authority concerning 363 firms for the economic crisis period 2009-2014, which gives encouraging results.

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Most of smart city research focuses on the ‘supply-side’, and only limited research has been conducted about the ‘demand-side’ of smart cities: the smart city actions that are perceived by citizens as having higher usefulness, value and therefore priority; also limited research has been conducted for the comparison between the supply-side and the demand-side of smart cities. This paper contributes to filling these important research gaps. It investigates and compares smart city actions’ priorities of the municipalities with the ones of the citizens, in order to identify points of convergence as well as of divergence. A novel methodology has been constructed for this purpose, which includes as a first step the development of a detailed taxonomy of possible smart city actions, based on previous relevant literature. This taxonomy is then used for collecting assessment data from municipalities as well as from citizens concerning these possible smart city actions. Furthermore, our methodology includes three layers of processing of the above assessment data, which identify: a) the priorities of these two important stakeholders concerning smart city actions; and b) points of convergence as well as points of divergence between them. This methodology has been applied in the context of the Greek local government. Assessment data concerning the importance of the smart city actions of the above taxonomy were collected from 144 Greek municipalities and 500 citizens; their processing has revealed an important divergence between these two important smart city stakeholders.

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Digital Governance (initially ‘Electronic Government’, and later ‘Electronic Governance’ incorporating also ICT-based innovations and transformation) has emerged as a research and practice domain aiming at the exploitation of information and communication technologies (ICT) in government, in order to support, transform and enhance its activities, both the internal ones, as well as the ‘extrovert’ ones concerning communication with the external environment (dialogue and consultation with citizens and firms, and also transaction with them), in order to increase their effectiveness and efficiency. During the last decades, Digital Governance has been recognized as a well-established domain with a highly ambitious objective, which is quite beneficial for the society and the economy: to study and advance the exploitation of ICT for addressing problems and needs of public sector organizations, and develop novel methods and frameworks for enhancing their internal efficiency, service quality and policy-making effectiveness through the use of ICT. Though substantial progress has been made through government funded as well private sector research in a number of areas of it, yet the lack of a science base of the Digital Governance domain seems to hinder unlocking the real transformative value of ICT in the public sector, as well as the full contribution and creativity potential of all its stakeholders, from researchers to industry and SMEs. Such a scientific background would enable a better documentation, organization, structuring of the existing knowledge in this area, as well as its dissemination through training, and also provide systematic directions for high priority future research, in order to develop a portfolio of systematic solutions to specific problems concerning the exploitation of ICT in government organizations (methods for assessment and identification of problems, as well as methods for providing solutions, which can be applied (possibly with some adaptations) in a wide range of organizational, cultural and legal contexts, as it happens in ‘mature’ sciences, such as the engineering ones).This paper provides some research directions concerning the development of the science base of the Digital Governance domain as well as its evolution, and proposes specific relevant research questions that have to be addressed.

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Government agencies are increasingly making use of cloud computing (CC) services, initially simpler infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS) ones, and later more sophisti-cated software as a service (SaaS) ones. However, with respect to the latter the electronic sup-port of the high complexity government processes is a difficult task and requires highly sophisti-cated and complex government-specific SaaS offering extensive functionalities for fulfilling the extensive requirements posed by relevant legislation. It is therefore imperative to conduct com-prehensive evaluations of such complex government-specific SaaS, in order to assess to what extent they support the targeted government processes and fulfil their extensive and complex requirements, and also identify and prioritize necessary improvements. This paper presents an advanced methodology for evaluating complex government-specific SaaS, which enables com-prehensive multi-dimensional evaluation of a wide range of aspects of them that are highly im-portant in the government context, and detailed evaluation of the provided complex and exten-sive functionality with respect to the requirements defined by relevant legislation; furthermore, it enables a rational identification and prioritization of necessary improvements. It is based on the estimation of multi-layer ‘value flow models’ of these SaaS from evaluation data collected from users. The proposed methodology has been applied for the evaluation of a complex SaaS aiming to support the wide range of activities of the Greek ‘Local School Committees’, which are re-sponsible for managing all government funding provided for the operation of all the schools in a specific geographical area, as well as all other income of them, and for covering all kinds of their operating expenses as well as purchases. The research presented in this paper can con-tribute to a more rational, efficient and effective exploitation of an emerging ‘disruptive technol-ogy’, the CC, and especially its most sophisticated form, the SaaS, in the public sector.

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Firms are implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems not for reducing their operational costs and increasing their efficiency, as it happens with other kinds of infor-mation systems, but in order to offer better services to their customers and build better relation-ships with them. This fact stems from CRM’s customer facing nature, which is there to improve the relationship a firm has with its most valuable asset: the customers. However, there is limited research about the factors that lead firms to adopt CRM systems. This paper aims to contribute to filling this research gap, by investigating the effects of a wide range of factors on CRM adop-tion by firms; these factors include firm’s ICT resources and capabilities, and also the effects of a major disruption in the environment: economic crisis leading to recession. Our main theoreti-cal foundation is the Technology, Organization, Environment (TOE) theory of technological in-novation adoption. Based on data from 363 Greek firms CRM adoption models have been esti-mated, which indicate that the sophistication of firm’s ICT technological resources has a strong positive effect on CRM adoption, alongside two ICT capabilities: ICT strategic planning, and the rapid internal implementation of various interconnections/integrations of existing applications to achieve interoperability. Human capital, innovativeness and use of ‘organic’ forms of work organization (such as horizontal teamwork) are also important factors that affect positively CRM adoption. On the contrary, the effects of the economic crisis (decrease of domestic demand for products/services from businesses, individual customers and the public sector, reduction of credit limits by banks and non-payment or late payment by customers) do not have impact on CRM systems adoption.

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For long time research and practice in the area of Electronic Government (e-government) has been focusing on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for improving the efficiency government agencies’ internal operations, as well as transactions with citizens and firms. However, the increased needs and expectations of citizens, and the proliferation of ‘participatory democracy’ ideas, gave rise to a new generation of ICT exploitation by government for increasing and enhancing citizens’ participation. Furthermore, the increasing social problems and challenges that had to be addressed by government through appropriate public policies, such as the increasing inequalities and poverty, the aging society, the environmental degradation, and the rising number of ‘unpredictable’ events, such as the financial and economic crisis, give rise to the development of a new wave of egovernment focusing on policy analytics for supporting the design of effective responses - public policies for these challenges. Therefore, evolutions in the needs of modern societies, in combination with technological evolutions, give rise to evolutions in e-government, and the emergence of new generations of it. This paper aims at the identification and better understanding of the main characteristics of the different e-Government generations, using an analytical framework based on two rounds of literature review. The results of the study provide insights on the main features of the three main e-government generations, regarding their main goals, obstacles, key methods and tools, and reveal the new emerging generation of e-Government 3.0 and its basic characteristics. Furthermore, within the first and to some extent the second e-Government generation there have been substantial advancements, which have created distinct sub-generations of them, revealed and analysed through extensive relevant growth/maturity stages research.

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An important trend in the area of digital government is its expansion beyond the support of internal processes and operations, as well as transactions and consultations with citizens and firms, which were the main objectives of its first generations, towards the support of higher-level functions of government agencies, with main emphasis on public policy making. This gives rise to the gradual development of policy analytics. Another important trend in the area of digital government is the increasing exploitation of artificial intelligence techniques by government agencies, mainly for the automation, support and enhancement of operational tasks and lower-level decision making, but only to a very limited extent for the support of higher-level functions, and especially policy making. Our paper contributes towards the advancement and the combination of these two important trends: it proposes a policy analytics methodology for the exploitation of existing public and private sector data, using a big data oriented artificial intelligence technique, feature selection, in order to support policy making concerning one of the most serious problems that governments face, the economic crises. In particular, we present a methodology for exploiting existing data of taxation authorities, statistical agencies, and also of private sector business information and consulting firms, in order to identify characteristics of a firm (e.g. with respect to strategic directions, resources, capabilities, practices, etc.) as well as its external environment (e.g. with respect to competition, dynamism, etc.) that affect (positively or negatively) its resilience to the crisis with respect to sales revenue; for this purpose an advanced artificial intelligence feature selection algorithm, the Boruta ‘all-relevant’ variables identification one, is used. Furthermore, an application of the proposed economic crisis policy analytics methodology is presented, which provides a first validation of the usefulness of our methodology.

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Public administration and information technology university departments worldwide have responded to the explosion in e-Government by offering related programs or courses. In this study, the authors investigated education programs in e-Government by reviewing the curriculum and course descriptions of 70 programs that had web listings of their programs. Findings suggest that 64 institutions, from 32 countries worldwide, offer e-Government related programs. The programs are classified into four types based on their education level. Offered courses have been classified in 15 clusters. The majority of the proposed courses belong to the areas of Information Systems (20,7%), e-Governance (17,8%), Management (12,9%) and Public Administration (8,4%) clusters.

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Data science and business analytics have been initially developed in the private sector, and their success gives rise to the development of data science in the public sector as well, and the emergence of the ‘policy analytics’. A new generation of the e-government domain is gradually emerging, referred to as ‘e-government 3.0’, which aims at the exploitation of the large quantities of data possessed by government agencies, possibly in combination with data from the private sector, using advanced modelling and analysis techniques, in order to support and improve policy making, and promote ‘evidence-based policy’ making. This paper makes a contribution towards the development of public sector data science and policy analytics, focusing on a highly important problem: the economic crises, which occur repeatedly in market-based economies. It presents a methodology for the exploitation of government data from Taxation Authorities and Statistical Agencies, in combination with data from the private sector (from business information and consulting firms), for the identification of firm’s characteristics that affect behavior in the economic crisis, focusing on their investment related behavior (the extent of reduction of their investment). Our methodology aims to support the design of public policies for reducing the negative impact of economic crises on firms’ investment, and improving firms’ investment behavior during economic crises. An application of this methodology is presented, using data from Greek firms for the crisis period 2009 – 2014, which leads to interesting insights; four firms’ characteristics have been identified that reduce the negative effects of the crisis on Greek firms’ investment.

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In order to address the complexity of the modern social problems and needs through effective public policies, government agencies have started experimenting with policy informatics methods, adopting various approaches that increase citi-zens’ and stakeholders’ participation in the public policy formulation processes. Such approaches allow the exploitation of their opinions, which incorporate valu-able perceptions of them, as well as knowledge, proposals and ideas. This paper outlines three advanced methods of social media (SM) exploitation in public poli-cy making processes for citizen-sourcing, which are based on the concepts of ac-tive citizen-sourcing, passive citizen-sourcing and passive expert-sourcing respec-tively, as well as the conclusions from some first applications of them. Based on them a comparison of these methods is conducted, and then a maturity model is developed concerning the use of SM for citizen-sourcing in order to support policy making.

Περίληψη:
For long time research and practice in the area of Electronic Government has been focusing on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the internal operations of government agencies, as well as for providing elec-tronic transaction services to citizens and firms. The increased needs and expectations of citi-zens, and the proliferation of ‘participatory democracy’ ideas, result in an increase of their di-rect participation in policy making processes, and the use of ICT seems to be an important fa-cilitator of this. At the same time the multiple social problems and challenges to be addressed through policy-making, such as the increasing inequalities and poverty, the aging society, the environmental degradation, and the rising number of ‘unpredictable’ events, such as the finan-cial and economic crises, necessitate the development of a new generation of eGovernment fo-cusing on the design of effective responses - public policies for these challenges. Therefore evo-lutions in the needs of modern societies, in combination with technological evolutions in the ICTs, give rise to evolutions in e-Government, and the emergence of new generations of it. This paper aims at the identification and better understanding of the main characteristics of the dif-ferent e-government generations, using an analytic framework based on two rounds of literature review. The results of the study provide insights on the main features of the three main e-Government generations, regarding their main goals, obstacles, key methods and tools, placing special emphasis on the new emerging generation of e-Government 3.0 and its basic character-istics.

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The development and success of the ‘business analytics’ in the private sector, in combination with the growing availability of large quantities of useful data in government agencies, gives rise to the emergence of the ‘policy analytics’ in the public sector. However, though some knowledge has already been developed in this area, extensive research is required in order to increase our knowledge base concerning the exploitation of these exponentially increasing quantities of data available in government, in combination with data from private sector firms as well, using advanced analytical techniques (from various areas, such as machine learning, sta-tistics, simulation, etc.), in order to provide substantial support for all stages of public policies in various important policy domains. This paper makes a contribution in this direction, by de-scribing a methodology for policy analytics in the economic policy domain, concerning a highly important problem: the economic crises, which repeatedly occur in market-based economies being an inevitable trait of them. Our methodology aims at the identification of firm’s character-istics that affect positively or negatively their sensitivity to the economic crisis, which enables a deeper understanding of the kinds of firms that exhibit higher sensitivity to economic crisis (i.e. have more negative consequences) and provides a basis for the design of public policies for supporting such firms. It exploits existing data from various public sources (e.g. Ministries of Finance, Statistical Authorities), in combination with data from private sources (e.g. business information firms, consulting firms), from which firm-level crisis sensitivity models are estimated. Furthermore, an application of the proposed methodology is presented, using data from Greek firms for the crisis period 2009 – 2014, which provides interesting insights.

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Social Media have been initially used by government agencies for general public oriented ‘citizen-sourcing’. Though this enabled the collection of useful policy relevant information and knowledge from the general public, and provided valuable insights into their relevant perceptions, it would be quite useful if this could be combined with the collection of policy relevant information and knowledge from experts as well (‘expert-sourcing’). In this paper, a passive expert-sourcing method based on social media, which has been developed in a European research project, is evaluated from a fundamental perspective: the wicked problems theory perspective. In particular, we investigate to what extent this method enables government agencies to collect high quality information concerning the main elements of important social problems to be addressed through public policies: particular issues posed, alternative interventions/ actions, and advantages/disadvantages of them; as well as to what extent there is consensus about these elements among different stakeholder groups. For this purpose data are collected through interviews with Members of the Greek Parliament. From their analysis interesting conclusions have been drawn about the strengths and weaknesses of this expert-sourcing method, as well as required impro-vements of it.

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Cloud Computing (CC) has high potential to offer to firms important benefits, concerning both costs reduction, and in general efficiency improvements, as well as innovation facilitation and support. However, these benefits are not straightforward and auto-matically generated; their realization as well as their magnitude will depend on a variety of factors. Nevertheless, limited empirical research has been conducted in order to identify CC benefits’ determinants. This paper contributes to filling this research gap. It empirically investigates the effects of a) the contractual and relational governance of firm’s relationships with its CC services providers, and b) the adaptations of the skills of firm’s ICT personnel, as well as its internal ICT organization, to this new CC paradigm, on the magnitude of CC bene-fits. Our study uses data collected through a questionnaire from 115 Greek firms using CC services. It has been concluded that all the above four examined factors impact positively the benefits firms obtain from CC; the effect of the adaptation of the skills of firm’s ICT personnel is the strongest, followed by the effect of the relational governance.

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The financial and economic crisis of 2008 affected negatively investment in general, and investment in ICT was not left unchanged, with negative consequences for firms’ future performance and competitiveness. So this paper aims at investigating factors explaining firms’ crisis behavior with respect to ICT investment and ICT operational expenditures, i.e. their crisis vulnerability of ICT expenditures, for the crisis period 2009-2014. To this end, we examine the effects of six groups of factors on firms’ ICT investment and expenditure behavior during the crisis 2009-2014: three groups of internal factors and three groups of external factors. We focus our analysis on the internal ICT-related factors; we need all other factors in order to be able to appropriately specify two econometric models, one for ICT investment expenditures and a second one for ICT operational expenditures, and avoid omitted variable bias. The analysis of the factors that may influence the likelihood of a reduction of ICT investment and operating expenditure as a consequence of the crisis is primarily explorative, thus driven by available data and economic intuition. Our study is based on Greek firm data from the manufacturing, construction and services sector that have been collected in 2015/2016. We find that all six groups of variables contribute significantly to the explanation of both ICT investment and ICT operational expenditures during the crisis period 2009-2014, even if not to the same extent and not for each of the two dependent variables.

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The growing adoption of the open innovation paradigm in the public sector poses a set of research challenges related to the particularities of the domain and the technologies required to manage the associated knowledge flows among diverse types of stakeholders. This paper aims to shed light on how the proper combina-tion of existing ICT tools can support and advance the implementation of open innovation practices in the public sector. Towards this aim, it first presents a non-exhaustive taxonomy of these tools, which is also associated with the open inno-vation phase they primarily support. Paying particular attention to the issues of collaboration support and sophisticated data collection and analysis, the paper al-so proposes an open, inclusive and sustainable web-based platform that builds on the synergy between human and machine intelligence to address the important challenges of public sector open innovation. An indicative application scenario, concerning a contemporary societal problem, showcases the potential of the pro-posed solution.

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There are high expectations that cloud computing (CC) can generate sizeable business value (BV) for firms, which includes important benefits, associated with costs reduction, agility enhancement and innovation facilitation and support. However, limited empirical research has been conducted in this direction, in order to investigate to what extent these high expectations are fulfilled, as well as the level of business value that firms realize from CC, the magnitudes of the specific benefits that firms really obtain from it, and their determinants. Our paper contributes to filling this research gap. It investigates the effects of a set of human factors, which concern firm’s general human capital, ICT specific human capital, as well relevant relational capital, i.e. the relationship and co-operation between the personnel of the ICT unit and the personnel of the business units, on the BV generated by CC. our study has as theoretical foundation the ‘resource-based view’ of the firm theory. We have used data collected through a survey from 115 firms from technologically developed sectors of the Greek economy, from which a CC BV regression model has been estimated. It has been concluded that neither firm’s general human capital (quantified by the share of firm’s employees having tertiary-level formal education), nor its ICT human capital (quantified by the share of ICT employees), per se impact the BV generated by CC. On the contrary the relationship and co-operation between the ICT unit personnel and the business units’ personnel have a positive effect on the BV from CC usage. Our findings indicate that it is not the mere acquisition of human resources (highly educated business and ICT employees), but their utilization for the development of a capability for productive and effective co-operation and relation-ship among the ICT and business personnel, that can lead to higher levels of BV from CC usage.

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The Cloud Computing (CC) is a new innovative model of sourcing the information and commu-nication technologies (ICT) services required by firms for supporting their activities, so it is nec-essary to investigate the level of benefits that CC offers to firms, as well as their determinants. However, limited empirical research has been conducted in this direction. Our paper contrib-utes to filling this research gap. It formulates a set of research hypotheses concerning the effects of firm’s ‘hard ICT capital’, and also some types of firm’s ‘soft ICT capital’, on the benefits of-fered by CC, having as theoretical foundation the ‘resource-based view’ theory. These research hypotheses are tested using data collected through a survey from 115 Greek firms, from which CC benefits regression models are estimated. It has been concluded that the sophistication of firm’s ICT infrastructure (an overall measure of firm’s hard ICT capital) has a positive impact on CC benefits. Furthermore, three of the examined types of soft ICT capital have been found to impact positively CC benefits: the information systems (IS) interconnection/integration capabil-ity, the ICT strategic planning and alignment capability, and the internal relationship between firm’s ICT unit and business units. Our findings reveal some aspects of firm’s ICT capital that affect the generation of value from this new innovative CC paradigm, which can be useful to CC service providers, and also management and ICT firms’ practitioners and consultants.

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Cloud Computing (CC) offers a new mode for companies to gain access to information and communication technologies (ICT) services, which can offer important benefits. However, limited research has been conducted about how firms will be able to accomplish the benefits of CC in order to improve their firm performance. This paper contributes to filling these research gaps by investigating empirically: 1) the effects of firm’s adaptation and absorptive capacity (ACAP) on the benefits gained from CC; and 2) the impact of these CC benefits on firm performance. Data for our study have been collected through a questionnaire from 102 Dutch firms using SaaS services, which have been used for the estimation of a structural equation model (SEM). The findings show that CC adaptation has a very strong positive effect, ACAP has a medium to strong effect on benefits gained from CC, which have a strong positive effect on firm performance.

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The first attempts of government agencies to apply crowdsourcing ideas aimed at the collection of policy-related information, knowledge and ideas from the general public (‘citizen-sourcing’), concerning various social problems and needs, in order to support the development of effective public policies for addressing them. However, it was soon realized that, due to the high complexity of modern social problems and needs, it would be quite beneficial if the above could be complemented by the collection of relevant information, knowledge and ideas from experts; this leads to the gradual emergence of ‘expert-sourcing’, as an important foundation of public policy making. Such practices constitute important innovations in the policy development processes, so it is necessary to analyze them from this perspective; the most fundamental question to be investigated is to what extent these innovative expert-sourcing practices have the fundamental preconditions for a wide diffusion. Our paper makes a contribution in this direction, evaluating an ICT-based passive expert-sourcing method for supporting policy making from this perspective, using as theoretical foundation the Diffusion of Innovation Theory.

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Information Systems (IS) are nowadays considered the most important leverage for organizations to operate and gain a competitive advantage. Investments in IS technology, in the recruitment of high qualified IT personnel and the establishment of internal and external robust IT related partnerships are considered determinant factors for business success and continuity. As organizations increasingly rely on IS resources, they face more advanced IS security challenges. This paper explores the relationship between the development of IS resources and security resources; are organizations willing to invest more in IS security resources as they invest more on IS resources? The authors conduct an empirical investigation in organizations located in five Mediterranean countries. The sample includes responses from 61 CEOs, information security managers and IS managers. The results reveal that IS resources positively affect the IS security resources. The human capital plays the most important role for the adoption of IS security.

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As the external environment of most organizations becomes increasingly dynamic and complex, the exploitation and management of external knowledge becomes of critical importance for their success. This has led to a growing interest of both researchers and practitioners in the study of their absorptive capacity (ACAP). However, the research that has been conducted in this area has focused on the private sector, while there is a lack of similar research for the public sector. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by investigating the use of social media (SM) in the public sector from the ACAP perspective, examining to what extent SM are used by Greek government agencies for the enhancement of their ACAP. It has been based on interviews with the SM managers of ten Greek government agencies from the central, regional and municipal government. It is concluded that in the examined government agencies SM are used only to a small extent for enhancing their ACAP, making limited exploitation of the potential that SM have for this purpose. In particular, SM are used to some extent for enhancing one of the components of ACAP, the ability for external exploratory learning, but not at all for enhancing the other two critical components of it: the abilities for transformative and exploitative learning.

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Cloud computing (CC) can offer significant benefits to enterprises. However, it can pose some risks as well, and this has led to a lower adoption than the initial expectations. For this reason, it would be very useful to predict which enterprises will exhibit a propensity for CC adoption. In this direction, we investigate the use of six well-established classifiers (fast large margin Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbor, and Linear Regression) for the prediction of enterprise level propensity for CC adoption. Having as our theoretical foundation the Technology – Organization – Environment (TOE) framework, we are using for this purpose of set of technological (concerning enterprise information systems), organizational and environmental characteristics. Our first results, using a dataset of 676 manufacturing firms of the glass, ceramic and cement sectors from six European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, and UK), collected through the e-Business W@tch Survey of the European Commission, are encouraging. It is concluded that among the examined characteristics the technological ones, concerning enterprise systems, seem to be the most important predictors.

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The absorptive capacity (ACAP), defined as firm’s ability to identify useful knowledge in its external environment, assimilate it, transform it and finally apply it for achieving firm’s objectives, has become quite important for the survival and the achievement of high financial performance of firms, in the rapidly changing, competitive and ‘knowledge intensive’ modern economy. It has been recognized that information and communication technologies (ICT) can be quite useful for the enhancement of firm’s ACAP. However, there has been no empirical investigation of the effects of the various types of information systems (IS) currently used by firms, mainly for efficiency improvement purposes, on their ACAP. This paper makes a contribution towards filling this research gap, by empirically investigating and comparing the effects of the use of three important types of IS, the ERP and e-commerce ones, and also a recently emerged one, the social media (SM), on the ACAP of Greek firms. Our study is based on data collected through a survey from 122 Greek firms from both manufacturing and services sectors. It has been concluded that the use of ERP systems affects positively firms’ ACAP, while this does not hold for the e-commerce ones. Furthermore, the use of external and internal SM both affect positively the ACAP, with the effect of the former being the strongest among the three examined IS types.

Περίληψη:
The public sector gradually starts exploiting the crowdsourcing ideas initially developed in the private sector. However, there is much less knowledge on efficient and effective methods and practices for public sector citizen-sourcing in comparison with private sector crowd-sourcing, so extensive research is required in this area. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an ICT-based method for ‘pssive expert-sourcing’, with the latter term denoting the collection of policy relevant information, knowledge and ideas from experts, which aims at supporting policy making by the European Union (EU) by leveraging its large policy community. Its theoretical foundation is previous theoretical work on the relationships between democracy and technocracy, and also on policy networks. The main technological pillars of the proposed method are: EU policy experts’ profiling and reputation management, relevant documents’ opinion mining and relevance rating, and finally advanced visualized presentation of them. Finally, a first evaluation of the proposed method is presented, leading to encouraging results.

Περίληψη:
In the highly dynamic, competitive, complex and ‘knowledge intensive’ modern economy the exploita- tion and management of external knowledge has become of critical importance for the success of firms, and this has led to increasing interest of both researchers and practitioners in the concept of firm’s absorptive capacity (ACAP). It has been recognized that information and communication tech- nologies (ICT) can be quite useful for the improvement of firms’ ACAP. Some empirical research has been conducted in this direction, which however has not examined the role from this perspective of the most important ICT investments of firms: the different types of enterprise systems (ES) implemented by firms increasingly, which become critical infrastructures of their operation. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an empirical investigation of the effects of the five most im- portant and widely used types of enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, SCM, business intelligence/business analytics and collaboration support systems) on the ACAP of Greek firms. It is based on data collect- ed through a survey from 122 Greek firms from both manufacturing and services sectors, which are used for the estimation of regression models of firm’s ACAP. It has been concluded that the use of three of the above types of ES, the ERP, the CRM and the business intelligence/business analytics ones, have positive effects on firm’s ACAP, which concern mainly two of its dimensions: the internal diffusion and analysis of external knowledge, and also the assimilation/integration in the knowledge base of the firm.

Περίληψη:
The public sector, motivated by the multiple ‘success stories’ of the ‘open innovation’ paradigm, and especially the crowdsourcing, in the private sector, and also by the increasing complexity of social problems and needs, has started moving in this direction as well, and this gives rise to the gradual development of the ‘citizen-sourcing’. However, there has been much less research and practice in the area of public sector citizen-sourcing in comparison with the area of private sector crowd-sourcing, so there is much less knowledge and maturity in the former area than in the latter. This paper makes a contribution towards filling this gap. In provides an overview of the research that has been conducted in this area by the research group of the author in the last decade as part of several European projects, concerning the application in the public sector of the crowdsourcing ideas, and the development of ICT-based methods for this purpose. In particular, we present four such ICT-based methods for public sector citizen-sourcing we have developed, for both ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizen-sourcing, initially aiming at the general public and latter focusing on the knowledgeable experts. Furthermore, we propose directions for future research in this area.

Περίληψη:
Information and communication technologies (ICT) have been initially used mainly for supporting or automating firms’ pre-existing business processes, in order to improve their efficiency. Subsequently it was realised that much more value can be generated from ICT if we exploit their great potential to drive innovations in firms’ products/services and processes. However, limited empirical research has been conducted concerning the effects of the many different types of enterprise systems (ES) that firms use on their innovation performance. This paper contributes in this direction. It investigates empirically and compares the effects of six important and widely used types of ES (ERP , CRM, e-sales, telework and collaboration support systems) on firms’ product/service and process innovation. Our study is based on a large dataset collected from 14.065 European firms through the e- Business Watch Survey of the European Commission, which has been used for estimating innovation models. We have been found that all examined types of ES have some positive effect on both product/service and process innovation; however, these effects differ in magnitude. Our results indicate that the e-sales are the strongest drivers of product/service innovation, followed by the CRM and external collaboration support systems; with respect to the process innovation the e-sales the strongest drivers of it as well, followed by the telework systems.

Περίληψη:
Social media monitoring has been initially adopted by private sector firms in order to collect opinions, complaints and questions concerning their products and services, to be used for mak-ing appropriate changes and improvements of them and also for designing communication strategies. Recently government agencies have started adopting SMM, as a form of ‘passive citi-zen-sourcing’, in order to collect useful information from citizens concerning their needs, prob-lems, opinions and suggestions, to be used for public policy formulation. It is therefore im-portant to evaluate these first initiatives, so that the potential of SMM with respect to public pol-icy making can be exploited, and at the same time appropriate adaptations and improvements of relevant ICT platforms and practices can be made, in order to reach higher levels of maturity. This paper makes a two-fold contribution in this direction. Initially it develops a framework for evaluating the use of SMM for supporting policy making, initially from the ‘classical’ ease of use perspective, and then from a public policy perspective, based on the wicked social problems theory. This framework is then used for the evaluation of three pilot applications of a novel method of SMM by government agencies and other policy stakeholders, which has been devel-oped as part of a European research project.

Περίληψη:
The European North-South divide has been one of the most important and widely debated problems of Europe for long time. The countries of the European South have for decades lower levels of economic and technological development and performance than the countries of the European North; though there has been a convergence between the European North and South for some time, recently, due to the economic crisis, this trend has stopped, and on the contrary a divergence is observed. It is widely recognized that in order to overcome this negative situation, and achieve a gradual convergence be- tween these two regions, it is important not only to cut wages and public expenditure in the European South (which has been the dominant approach so far), but also to make wider and better use of new technologies and boost innovation. This paper contributes in this direction, comparing empirically the European North and South with respect to one of the most important, innovative and disruptive new information and communication technologies (ICT): the cloud computing (CC). CC is emerging as a new paradigm of providing ICT support of firms’ and activities, which can not only reduce costs (es- pecially investments), but also enable the rapid and low cost experimentation with and exploitation of new emerging technologies, and also support and facilitate innovation and external collaboration. In particular, we empirically investigate and compare Northern and Southern European firms with re- spect not to the ‘quantity’ of CC use, but to its ‘quality’: their CC adoption motivations and orienta- tions. Our study has been based on a dataset collected through the e-Business W@tch Survey of the European Commission from 556 European firms from the glass, ceramic and cement sectors. It has been concluded that Southern European firms of the above sectors view CC as a means of reducing ICT investment, while Northern European ones view it as a means of supporting and facilitating prod- uct/service innovation, and also of reducing cost and increasing capabilities of their existing external electronic collaboration (with business partners and experts) for the development of innovations. Fur- thermore, both Northern and Southern European firms of the above sectors view CC as a means of experimentation with and exploitation of new emerging technologies.

Περίληψη:
In this paper we investigate, first, the characteristics of the firms that reduced their ICT investment due to the 2008 crisis, focusing on the firms’ ICT characteristics in terms of the ICT, budget, skills and applications used. The analysis of the ICT characteristics that may influence the likelihood of having reduced ICT investment as a consequence of the crisis is primarily explorative, thus driven by available data and economic intuition. The second research question we examine empirically refers to the possibility that an economic crisis could affect innovation performance through the ICT investment channel. In connection with this, it is also interesting to analyze the ICT characteristics that are associated with ICT-enabled innovation performance; this is the third research question of this paper. Our study is based on firm data from the glass/ceramics/cement industry in six European countries, which have been collected through the ‘e-Business Survey’ of the European Union. We find that ICT-related crisis vulnerability correlates positively with decreasing ICT budgets (pro-cyclical investment behaviour), the existence of skill deficits in ICT, the awareness of and interest in new ICT applications that presumably request much additional ICT investment, the exposure to strong price competition and the strong presence in international markets, in which activities have significantly decreased due to the crisis. Further, statistically significant negative relationship between ICT-enabled product innovation and crisis vulnerability (pro-cyclical behaviour) is found only for new products or services that contain ICT components, and are therefore directly affected by crisis-related decreasing product demand.

Περίληψη:
Governments initially used social media mainly in order to disseminate information to the public about their activities, services, policies and plans. Then they started using social media also in order to collect from citizens useful information, knowledge, opinions and ideas concerning the problems and needs of modern societies and more recently in order to apply crowdsourcing ideas in the public sector context and promote ‘citizensourcing’. In this direction governments first used their own accounts in various social media, in which they provide information about specific problems and policies, and solicit citizens’ feedback on them (active citizensourcing). Recently, they attempt to take advantage of the extensive public policy related content developed beyond their own social media accounts, in various political forums, blogs, news websites, and SM accounts, by the citizens, without any stimulation (passive citizensourcing). These constitute significant innovations in policy formulation– citizens communication processes and practices of government. Therefore it is important to evaluate them from various perspectives, in order to learn from them as much as possible, identify and address their weaknesses, make the required improvements, and in general achieve higher levels of effectiveness and maturity of these highly innovative practices. This paper makes a two-fold contribution in this direction: initially it develops a framework for evaluating such citizensourcing innovations based on the passive social media monitoring; and then it uses this framework for the evaluation of three pilot applications of a novel method of government passive citizensourcing through social media monitoring, which has been developed as part of an international research project.

Περίληψη:
In the last decade there is extensive and continuously growing creation of political content in the Internet, and especially in the Web 2.0 social media, which can be quite useful for government agencies in order to understand the needs and problems of societies and formulate effective public policies for addressing them. So a variety of ICT-based methods have been developed for the exploitation of this political content by governments (‘citizensourcing’), initially simpler and later more sophisticated ones. These ICT-based methods are increasingly based on the use of opinion mining (OM) and sentiment analysis (SA) techniques, in order to process the extensive political content collected from numerous sources. This paper describes a novel approach to OM and SA use, created as part of an advanced ICT-based method of exploiting political content created in the Internet, and especially in social media, by experts (‘expertsourcing’), aiming to leverage the extensive policy community of the European Union, which is developed in the European EU-Community project. Furthermore, some first experimental results of it are presented.

Περίληψη:
Cloud Computing (CC) is emerging as a new paradigm of providing IT support of firms’ processes and activities, which has a great potential to offer important benefits, but at the same time firms perceive that it poses some risks as well. Its adoption by firms has been lower than the initial expectations. So it is quite important to conduct research on its adoption by firms and identify factors that affect it positively or negatively. Our study makes a contribution in this direction by empirically investigating and comparing the effects of a wide range of firm characteristics, which concern firm’s strategy, processes, technology, personnel on the propensity to adopt CC. Its theoretical foundation the Leavitt’s Diamond framework. It has been based on a dataset collected through the e-Business W@tch Survey of the European Commission from 676 European firms from the glass, ceramic, cement and sectors. Our findings provide interesting insights as to the kind of firms for which the CC is perceived as more appropriate and beneficial.

Περίληψη:
A major trend in the modern economy is the increasing collaboration among firms having complementary resources, both at the operational and at the product/service and process innovation level. At the same time another major trend in the area of information and communication technologies (ICT) is the emergence of cloud computing (CC), which changes radically the way firms access and use ICT for supporting their activities. It has been argued that there is an association between these two trends: that CC can significantly support and facilitate business collaboration at a low cost. However, there has been no empirical investigation of this association based on large datasets. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an empirical investigation of the effects of firm’s operational and innovation collaboration with other firms, and also the use of ICT for supporting it, on firm’s propensity to adopt CC. It is based on a dataset collected in the e-Business Survey of the European Commission from 676 European firms from the glass, ceramics and cement industries. It has been concluded that innovation collaboration with other firms, and also the use of ICT for supporting it, have positive effects on the propensity to adopt CC; positive effects has also, mainly in the smaller firms, the use of ICT for supporting some forms of operational collaboration with other firms.

Περίληψη:
Cloud computing (CC) is emerging as a new paradigm of ICT resources acquisition and management by firms. This paper empirically investigates and compares the effects of a set of organizational factors on the propensity to adopt CC, based on data from 676 European firms from the glass, ceramics and cement industries, collected through the e-Business Watch Survey of the European Commission. Our results do not confirm the initial expectations that CC would be adopted primarily by the SMEs, as they indicate that the size has a positive effect on the propensity to adopt CC. Furthermore, we have found that the latter is associated with ICT investment reduction strategy (quite usual today due to the existing economic crisis), and only to a lower extent with innovation oriented strategy. Our results also indicate that previous experience of ICT outsourcing and employment of ICT specialized personnel have positive effects on the propensity to adopt CC. Finally, we have found that firms with higher ICT infrastructure sophistication have higher CC adoption propensity.

Περίληψη:
In the last decade there is extensive and continuously growing creation of political content in the Internet, and especially in the Web 2.0 social media, which can be quite useful for government agencies in order to understand the needs and problems of societies and formulate effective public policies for addressing them. So a variety of ICT-based methods have been developed for the exploitation of this political content by governments (‘citizensourcing’), initially simpler and later more sophisticated ones. These ICT-based methods are increasingly based on the use of opinion mining (OM) and sentiment analysis (SA) techniques, in order to process the extensive political content collected from numerous sources. This paper describes a novel approach to OM and SA use, created as part of an advanced ICT-based method of exploiting political content created in the Internet, and especially in social media, by experts (‘expertsourcing’), aiming to leverage the extensive policy community of the European Union, which is developed in the European EU-Community project. Furthermore, some first experimental results of it are presented.

Περίληψη:
Policy networks are highly important for the formulation and implementation of public policies, so it is quite valuable to exploit modern ICT in order to support them. This paper presents a novel method of supporting the large policy network of the European Union (EU), which consists of numerous actors geographically dispersed all over Europe, through advanced social media exploitation, in order to improve the quantity and quality of their interaction, and increase efficiency and effectiveness. Based on a series of workshops, in which a large number of individuals involved in EU policy network participated, initially its structure has been analyzed, and then the proposed method has been formulated. Furthermore, the architecture of the ICT infrastructure required for the application of this method has been designed. The main pillars of the proposed method (corresponding also to the main modules of its ICT infrastructure) are: profiling of important EU policy actors’ and reputation management, relevant documents’ storage and relevance rating, and finally advanced visualized presentation of them.

Περίληψη:
Government agencieshave started usingthe social media for increasing communication with citizens, and involvement of themin public policy making processes. However, most of the research in this area has technological orientation, but limited research on the use of social media in government from management and political sciences’ perspectives has been conducted. This paper contributes to filling this gap, presenting a study of an advanced form ofcentrally managed combined use of multiple social media in the European Parliament from an innovationperspective. Our main theoretical foundation has beenRogers’Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory. It has been concluded that the above approach, viewed as an innovation, has to a good extent the fundamental preconditions for a wide diffusion proposed by DOI theory: relative advantage (though some possible ‘relative disadvantages’ have been identified as well), low complexity (though some considerable initial effort is required), compatibility with existing values and practices(at least to some extent), trialability and observability. Furthermore, recommendations have been provided for improving the diffusion potential of the above innovation, through interventions in the above attributes.

Περίληψη:
Most of the research that has been conducted on the business value of information systems (IS) interoperability focuses mainly on the efficiency related benefits it can generate, but deals much less with its potential to drive innovations in firms’ products/services and processes. Our study contributes to filling this research gap by empirically investigating the effect of interoperability of firm’s IS (meant as compliance with various types of relevant standards) on firm’s innovation performance. It is based on a large dataset from 14.065 European firms (from 25 countries and 10 sectors), which has been collected through the e-Business W@tch Survey of the European Commission, and is used for estimating product/service and process innovation models. It has been concluded that IS interoperability has strong positive effects both on product/service and process innovation, which are weaker than the corresponding effects of the degree of development of firms’ IS, but stronger than the effects of the degree of functional development of firm’s e-Sales IS; also they are stronger than the corresponding effects of R&D and competition (regarded as important innovation drivers according to previous literature). Finally, a comparison among different types of IS interoperability standards shows that their positive effects on firms’ innovation activity differ, with the industry-specific and the XML-horizontal standards having stronger effects of similar magnitudes, while the proprietary standards have weaker ones.

Περίληψη:
Cloud computing (CC) is expected to lead to new highly beneficial models of information and communication technologies (ICT) acquisition and management in firms. According to relevant literature CC enables firms having weak ICT support to create sophisticated ICT infrastructures rapidly and at a low cost. However, the adoption of CC has been below expectations. Therefore, it is important to conduct further research on factors affecting CC adoption positively or negatively. In this paper is presented an empirical investigation of the effects of two important firm’s ICT infrastructure characteristics, its sophistication and electronic interconnection with suppliers and customers, on firm’s propensity to adopt CC. It is based on a large dataset collected from 676 European firms from the glass, ceramics and cement industries through the e-Business Survey of the European Commission. It has been concluded that in these industries both the sophistication and the electronic interconnection of firm’s ICT infrastructure have a positive effect on its propensity to adopt CC. This finding is not in agreement with the high expectations from and promises of CC: in this context it is not the firms lacking a highly sophisticated and interconnected ICT infrastructure that have more interest and propensity to use CC services in order to obtain it, but on the contrary the firms having such a strong infrastructure in order to reduce its cost.

Περίληψη:
Two important trends in government emerging in the recent years have been on one hand the exploitation of the Web 2.0 social media supporting a more extensive interaction and collaboration, and on the other hand the opening of government data to the citizens through the Internet in order to be used for scientific, commercial and political purposes. However, there has been limited attempt of integrating them. Using a design science approach a second generation of open government data (OGD) platforms is developed, which offer to the users both the „classical‟ first generation functionalities, and also a comprehensive set of additional Web 2.0 features. The latter enables social and collaboration, which enable users to generate value from ODG. In this way users become „prosumers‟, both producing and consumingdata. Capabilities forperforming various types of processing,information and knowledge exchange, and collaboration were found to be useful and valuable in a user test.

Περίληψη:
The first generations of social media exploitation by government were oriented towards the general public. Evaluations of them have shown that they can provide some insights into the perceptions of the general public, however in order to achieve the required higher levels of quality, depth and elaboration it is necessary to target specific communities having strong interest and good knowledge on the particular topic under discussion. The research presented in this paper makes a contribution in this direction. It develops a novel approach to social media exploitation by the European Union (EU), which aims at leveraging its policy community, which consists of a big network of individuals/ policy stakeholders having various policy related roles and capacities, geographically dispersed all over Europe. Its theoretical foundation is policy networks theory. Based on a series of workshops, in which a large number of such individuals participated, the structure of the EU policy community is initially analysed, then the proposed approach is formulated and elaborated, and finally the fuctional architecture of an ICT platform for supporting it is designed. Theirb main pillars are: important policy stakeholders’ profiles and reputation management, relevant documents’ repository and relevance rating, and finally advanced visualized presentation of them.

Περίληψη:
Hospitals have been making significant investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) for long time. Therefore it is important to investigate their effects on various dimensions of hospitals’ performance, such as their innovation performance. However, there is a lack of empirical investigations of the impact of ICT on innovation in this important industry using large datasets. This paper makes a twofold contribution in this direction. First, it investigates empirically the impact of ICT on product and process innovation in European hospitals, based on data for 743 hospitals from 18 European countries collected in the course of the e-Business Survey of the European Union. Second it uses multiple independent ICT-related variables, associated with ICT investment, budget and personnel, and also with the use of specific ICT applications and standards, both healthcare-specific and general ones, investigating their effects on product and process innovation. Our results provide evidence of positive impact of ICT on hospitals’ innovation, which is however not homogeneous across all types of ICT applications: it is mainly applications enabling the exchange of data and knowledge between different functions/departments of the hospital, and with external environment, that impact positively innovation.

Περίληψη:
Government institutions of various levels have started experimenting with the use of social media for increasing citizens‟ involvement in their public policy making processes. It is necessary to evaluate systematically these initiatives from various perspectives, in order to develop new knowledge in this recently emerged area, concerning methods of social media exploitation in government, the value they can generate, and also the challenges they pose and their limitations. This paper contributes in this direction, by analysing three centrally managed multiple social media consulations conducted by Members of the European Parliament, from a public policy perspective, based on the wicked problems theory. It has been concluded that the above method of social media exploitation has a good potential for disseminating highly informative multimedia content on a policy under formulation to a much wider audience than the usual participants in the „traditional‟ European Parliament consultations, and also involving and stimulating them to think about the policy, leading to the collection of useful relevant ideas, knowledge and opinions, in a cost efficient manner. However, in order to go into more discussion depth it will be necessary to conduct further consultations, more focused on particular sub-topics and participants. Furthermore,their outcomes should be combined and integrated with the ones of the „traditional‟ consultations and experts‟ studies. Finally, a critical success factor is to build wide, knowledgeable, diverse and pluralistic communities for these social media consultations, including various social actors with strong interest and good knowledge of the particular problem, and extending beyond the networks of the initiator.

Περίληψη:
Numerous open data infrastructures are currently under development aiming to stimulate the potential advantages of the publication and use of open government data. In particular the development of open data infrastructures in the form of marketplaces, where open data providers and open data users trade and share data and data services, can stimulate the realisation of these advantages. Yet, only little research has been conducted on the development directions of open data infastructures to realise such marketplaces. This study aims to identify elements for the development of future electronic open data marketplaces. This aim is attained by using a literature review and expert discussions, which resulted in the following elements: 1) bring stakeholders together, 2) provide rich metadata, 3) enable data quality assessment, 4) ensure trust, security and critical mass, 5) have an appropriate revenue model, 6) provide use cases, training and support, 7) provide technical support: open data tools, 8) provide a full API for machine-to-machine operation and 9) target multiple nationalities. The results of this study can be used to develop and improve open data marketplaces to stimulate the realisation of open data advantages.

Περίληψη:
Recently, a second generation of advanced open government data (OGD) infrastructures has emerged, influenced by the principles of the Web 2.0 paradigm, and oriented towards the elimination of the clear distinction between providers and consumers of such data, and the support of data ‘pro-sumers’. This paper presents and validates a methodology for evaluating these advanced second generation of ODG infrastructures, which is based on the estimation of value models of them from users’ ratings. This value model includes assessments of the various types of value generated by such an infrastructure, and also of the relations among them as well. This enables a deeper understanding of the whole value generation mechanism and a rational definition of improvement priorities.The proposed methodology has been used for the evaluation of an advanced second generation ODG e-Infrastructure developed in the European project ENGAGE.

Περίληψη:
Extensive investments are made for the development of various types of information systems (IS) interoperability technologies, and also for their implementation at firm level. This necessitates the systematic study of the business value that IS interoperability technologies generate. However, quite limited empirical research has been conducted on this. Our study contributes to filling this research gap by presenting an empirical study of the effect of the adoption of three types of IS interoperability standards (industry-specific, XML-horizontal and proprietary ones) on the business benefits firms gain from their information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructures. It is based on a large dataset from 14.065 European firms (from 25 countries and 10 sectors) collected through the e-Business W@tch Survey of the European Commission. For all these three types of IS interoperability standards it has been concluded that their adoption for establishing IS interoperability with cooperating firms (suppliers, business partners, customers) increases the business benefits gained from firm’s ICT infrastructure, both the cost reduction and the sales growth related ones. A comparison among these three types of IS interoperability standards shows that their positive effects on the ICT business benefits differ, with the industry-specific standards having the strongest effects, which are of similar magnitude with the ones of the degree of development of firm’s internal IS (widely recognized as the main determinants of these benefits). Furthermore, we have found that the adoption of industry-specific standards is particularly important for realizing sales growth related benefits from firm’s ICT infrastructure.

Περίληψη:
The Web 2.0 social media have been initially exploited by private sector firms, in order to support mainly their marketing and customer relations functions, and there has been considerable research for developing frameworks and practices for the effective utilization of these new communication media in the private sector. Government started exploiting the high capabilities and popularity of the social media much later, so there has been much less research concerning their effective utilization by government agencies. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, presenting a novel framework for the effective utilization of the Web 2.0 social media by government agencies for promoting participative governance and applying crowdsourcing ideas. It is based on the centralised automated publishing of content and micro-applications to multiple Web 2.0 social media, and then collection of citizens’ interactions (e.g. comments, ratings) with them, based on central platform that uses efficiently the application programming interfaces (APIs) of these social media. Finally, citizens’ interactions are processed in this central platform using a variety of techniques (web analytics, opinion mining, simulation modelling) in order to provide finally useful analytics that offer substantial support to government decision and policy makers. Furthermore, an application and an evaluation model for the proposed framework are described, as well as an extension of it that combines active/moderated and passive/non-moderated crowdsourcing.

Περίληψη:
Many government agencies worldwide have started making considerable investments for developing information systems that enable opening important data they possess to the society, in order to be used for scientific, commercial and political purposes. In order to rationalise and support future decisions concerning the development, upgrade, improvement and management of this new type of information systems it is important to understand better what value they create and how, and at the same time to identify the main improvements they require. This paper contributes in this direction presenting a methodology for determining the value generation mechanism of open government data (OGD) systems and also priorities for their improvement. It is based on the estimation of a ‘value model’ of the OGD system under evaluation from users’ ratings. It consists of several value dimensions and their corresponding value measures, organized in three ‘value layers’, and also the relations among them. These three value layers concern value related to the efficiency of the OGD (= quality of the various capabilities it provides to the users), its effectiveness (= degree of supporting users for achieving their objectives) and also users’ future behavior intentions respectively. The proposed methodology has been applied successfully to an advanced OGD system developed as part of the European project ENGAGE (‘An Infrastructure for Open, Linked Governmental Data Provision towards Research Communities and Citizens’), providing to interesting insights and improvement priorities. This first application provides evidence that our methodology can be a useful decision support tool for important ODG systems development, upgrade, improvement and management decisions.

Περίληψη:
While the first generation of e-participation has been based on official e-participation spaces owned and operated by government, the second one is oriented towards exploiting the highly popular web 2.0 social media for performing ‘crowd-sourcing’ of policy-related knowledge, opinions and ideas from citizens, through posting relevant policy-related content to some social media and then retrieving and processing citizens’ interactions with it. Recently, the idea of a third generation of e-participation has been proposed, which is based on a more ‘passive’ form of crowd-sourcing in social media, through automated passive search by government agencies for content on a public policy under discussion, that has been created in a large number of predefined relevant web 2.0 sources (e.g. political blogs, news websites, facebookand twitter accounts) by citizens freely, without any direct stimulation by government, retrieval and sophisticated processing of this content. In this paper we analyze and elaborate this idea, based on cooperation with potential users experienced in the design of public policies, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques. Initially, the main roles required for the practical application of this concept are identified, and then the functional requirements of each of them are determined. Finally, based on these functional requirements the architecture of a central platform supporting the application of this concept is designed.

Περίληψη:
Governments have started increasingly using web 2.0 social media as a new channel of interaction with citizens in various phases of public policies lifecycle. In this direction they have started moving from simpler forms of expoitation of these strong bi-directional communication channels to more complex and sophisticated ones. These attempts constitute important innovations for government agencies, so it is necessary to analyse them from this perspective as well. This paper analyzes an advanced form of centralised use of multiple social media by government agencies from this perspective, using the well established Diffusion of Innovation Theory of Rogers. It is based on a pilot application of the above approach for conducting a consultation campaign concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program of the Piedmont Regional Government, Italy. It has been concluded that this approach has the fundamental preconditions for a wide diffusion (relative advantage, compatibility with existing values and processes, reasonable complexity, trialability and observability), at least in government organizations having a tradition of bi-directional communication with citizens in all phases of policy making, and also some experience in using social media for this purpose.

Περίληψη:
Government agencies gradually start moving from simpler to more advanced and sophisticated forms of social media use, which are characterized by higher technological and political complexity. It is quite important to evaluate systematically these efforts based on sound theoretical foundations. In this direction this paper outlines and evaluates an advanced form of automated and centrally managed combined use of multiple social media by government agencies for promoting participative public policy making. For this purpose an evaluation framework has been developed, which includes both technological evaluation based on the software platforms and ecosystems theory, and political evaluation based on wicked problems theory, and focuses on the fundamental complexities and challenges of these advanced forms of social media exploitation. It has been used for the evaluation of a pilot application of the above approach for conducting a consultation campaign concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program in Piedmont, Italy, revealing both its important potential and strengths, but also at the same time some notable problems and weaknesses as well.

Περίληψη:
This paper examined the relationship between indicators for the intensity of use of ICT, several forms of workplace organization, and human capital and several measures of innovation performance at firm level in an innovation equation framework, in which was also controlled for standard innovation determinants such as demand, competition and firm size. The empirical part is based on data of Swiss and Greek firms. based on the same questionnaire for both countries and took place in 2005. This paper contributes to literature in three ways: first, it analyzes the three most important factors, i.e. information technology, organization, human capita, that are considered to be drivers of innovation performance in the last fifteen to twenty years in the same setting, it uses several innovation indicators that cover both the input and the output side of the innovation process and, third, it does the analysis in a comparative setting for two countries, Greece and Switzerland, with quite different levels of technological and economic development.

Περίληψη:
The establishment of interoperability of enterprise IS with the ones of trading partners (e.g. customers, suppliers, business allies) is regarded, based on a variety of theoretical arguments, as an important source of business value associated with efficiency gains and innovation. However, there is a lack of empirical investigation of this business value. This paper presents an empirical study of the effect of adopting two types of IS interoperability standards for exchanging electronic data with trading partners, the industry-specific and the proprietary ones, on the benefits firms obtain from their ICT infrastructures, and finally on their business performance. Furthermore, it examines what part of these effects is through increasing effectiveness of existing business process for producing existing products and services, and what part of them is through driving innovation. It is concluded that the adoption of both these types of IS interoperability standards for exchanging electronic data with trading partners has positive effect on the benefits gained from ICT infrastructures, with the effect of the industry-specific standards being much higher than the effect of the proprietary ones. Also, it has been found that a large part of these effects (46% for the industry-specific standards and 62% for the proprietary ones) is through driving innovation.

Περίληψη:
Considerable investments are made to develop numerous e-infrastructures for the reuse of open government data for scientific, commercial and political purposes. This necessitates a deeper understanding and assessment of the value these infrastructures generate. For this purpose, our paper presents a framework for evaluating open government data infrastructures, both ‘traditional’ ones following the web 1.0 paradigm and also advanced ones influenced by the web 2.0 paradigm. The evaluation framework is based on findings of previous research on the evaluation of public projects, information systems and e-services, and also on technology acceptance and IS success models. The proposed evaluation framework consists of an evaluation model with measurable evaluation dimensions and criteria, as well as a comprehensive evaluation procedure for using this evaluation model, which enables both higher level and detailed evaluation. It includes quantitative as well as qualitative methods in order to provide comprehensive and deep insights. Finally, we describe an application of the proposed framework (both the model and the procedure) for the evaluation of a European e-infrastructure for opening government data. This first application has provided some first evidence concerning the applicability and usefulness of the proposed evaluation framework, and at the same time useful directions and ideas for the improvement of the above-mentioned e-infrastructure.

Περίληψη:
Firms have been making big investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) in the last twenty years. Therefore the investigation of their effect on various aspects of business performance is necessary. This paper presents an empirical investigation and comparison of the effects of hard and soft ICT investment, and also of four ‘traditional’ innovation drivers (demand expectation, price and non-price competition, market concentration), on the innovation performance of Greek firms. In particular, we examine from this perspective four different types of soft ICT investment in ICT structures, personnel, skills and processes. Our results indicate that while in the innovation averse Greek national context none of the examined traditional innovation drivers have a statistically significant impact on the innovation performance of Greek firms, both hard ICT investment, and three of the examined types of soft ICT investment, have such positive impacts. Our results provide empirical evidence that both hard and soft ICT investment can be strong drivers of innovation, even in such innovation averse contexts, in which the classical innovation drivers do not affect innovation performance.

Περίληψη:
The emergence of web 2.0 social media enables the gradual emergence of a second generation of e-participation characterized by more citizens’ control, in which government agencies post content (e.g. short or longer text, images, video) to various social media and then analyze citizens’ interactions with it (e.g. views, likes/dislikes, comments, etc.). In this paper we propose an even more citizens controlled third generation of e-participation exploiting web 2.0 social media as well, but in a different manner. It is based on the search by government agencies for content on a public policy under formulation, which has been created in a large set of web 2.0 sources (e.g. blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites, online forums) by citizens freely, without any initiation, stimulation or moderation through government postings. This content undergoes advanced processing in order to extract from it arguments, opinions, issues and proposals on the particular policy, identify their sentiments (positive or negative), and finally summarize and visualize them. This approach allows the exploitation of the vast amount of user-generated content created in numerous web 2.0 social media for supporting governments to understand better the needs, wishes and beliefs of citizens, and create better and more socially rooted policies.

Περίληψη:
In order to achieve e-governance, we are in need of new and more advanced tools, specifically designed towardssupporting the policy making procedure. The purpose of thispaper is to investigate the perspectives, provided by thedevelopment of decision support tools, to confront complex e-government phenomena. The analysis is performed using aSystemDynamics simulation model that enables policymakers to investigate the estimated impact of plannedgovernment initiatives. Simulation applies on the diffusion of Internet and Communication Technology. The developmentof the model, made in collaboration with the Observatory forthe Greek Information Society, addresses the digital divide inGreece. Data fromthe i2010 initiative indicators have beenused for the simulation. The results, arising fromtheexecution of alternative scenarios, indicate the parameters tobe changed through the implementation of actions to have thebest impact on society.

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The value of business simulations as pedagogic tools in education has been debated for over twenty years. This paper proposes a methodology for analyzing and understanding in-depth the educational validity of business simulations. It is based on Principal Component Analysis and Structural Equation Modelling, which are used for estimating models of educational value generation. The proposed methodology has been used for analyzing the educational validity of a business game conducted among students using the well established marketing strategy simulation package MARKSTRAT. It was found that such a simulation does indeed create value for participants and helps them to develop strategic marketing skills. We identified three types of educational value generated: capability for experimentation with strategic marketing, understanding of relevant concepts and creation of professional skills applicable and useful in future real life job situations. Also, the relations among these types of educational value have been examined. It was found that the experimentation has a very strong impact on the understanding of concepts, and both of them have medium to high direct impacts (of similar magnitudes) on professional skills development. Finally, it is the perception of the participants about the professional skills applicable in their future jobs they acquired in the business simulation game that determines their overall impression and level of satisfaction.

Περίληψη:
It is widely believed that the establishment of interoperability of firm’s IS with the ones of other cooperating firms (e.g. customers, suppliers, business partners) can generate significant business value. However, this has been only to a very limited extent empirically investigated. This paper contributes to filling this research gap by presenting an empirical study of the effect of IS interoperability on the four business performance dimensions/ perspectives proposed by the Balanced Scorecard approach (financial, internal business processes, customers, learning and innovation). In particular, we examine the effects of adopting three different fundamental types of IS interoperability standards differing in the level of detail and applicability: XML, industry-specific standards and proprietary standards. Our study is based on a large dataset from 14065 European firms (from 25 countries and 10 sectors) collected through the e-Business Watch Survey of the European Commission. It is concluded that all these three examined types of IS interoperability standards increase considerably the positive impact of firm’s IS on the above four business performance perspectives/dimensions; however, their effects differ significantly. The adoption of industry-specific interoperability standards has the highest positive impact, while proprietary and XML standards have similar lower impacts. These conclusions provide valuable empirical evidence of the multidimensional business value generated by IS interoperability and its strong dependence on the type of IS interoperability standards adopted.

Περίληψη:
Several off-line mechanisms have been developed and applied for the participation of citizens in government policy making and services design. The increasing adoption of ICT, and especially the Internet, by individuals allows the development of a new generation of digital mechanisms for public participation (e-participation). The dominant digital mechanism has been in the last ten years the development of official e-participation websites by government agencies, which provide to the citizens information on government activities and also policies and services under formulation, and allow them to participate in relevant consultations in electronic fora. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism has been much lower than expectations. In this paper are presented three different digital mechanisms for public participation, which have been developed by the authors as part of European research projects. The first of them is based on the use of structured e-forum, in which citizens can enter only annotated postings according to a predefined discussion ontology. The second is based on the use of a central platform which can publish policy-related content and micro-applications to multiple social media simultaneously, and also collect and process data on citizens’ interaction with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). While the previous mechanisms were moderated by government, the third one – still under development as part of the European research project NOMAD - is non-moderated. It is based on the search by government agencies for content on a public policy under formulation, which has been created in numerous social media and other sources (e.g. blogs and micro-blogs, news sharing sites, online forums, etc.) by citizens freely, without any government initiation, stimulation or moderation, and the advanced processing of this content.

Περίληψη:
The limited number of previous empirical investigations of the effect of information and communication technologies (ICT) on innovation focus mainly on the ‘hard’ dimensions of ICT (i.e. firm’s ICT equipment). This paper presents an empirical investigation of the effect of five important ‘soft’ dimensions of ICT at firm level (ICT structure, personnel, skills, strategy, processes) on firm’s innovation performance (concerning both products/services and processes innovation). It is based on firm-level data collected through a survey of 271 Greek firms, which have been used for estimating regressions of product/service innovation and process innovation on measures of the hard ICT, the above five soft dimensions of ICT, and also four important ‘traditional’ innovation determinants identified from the long previous research in this area (demand expectation, price and non-price competition, market concentration). It is concluded that four of the examined soft dimensions of ICT (ICT personnel, skills, strategy and processes) have positive effects on firm’s innovation performance. Our results indicate that the soft dimensions of ICT at firm level are strong drivers of innovation, which increase considerably the positive contribution of ICT to firms’ innovation performance.

Περίληψη:
In Parliaments there are huge amounts of knowledge concerning public policies for addressing social problems and needs, which is however contained in numerous long textual documents (e.g. drafts, laws, justification reports, discussions’ minutes, experts’ reports), and it cannot be exploited to a good extent. Its full exploitation necessitates an appropriate structured representation of it. In this paper, initially we analysed the legislation formulation process of the Greek Parliament and its main documents from a public policy perspective, focusing on the knowledge they contain on social problems and needs, and on public interventions (e.g. regulations, programmes, services provision, infrastructure building) for addressing them. Based on the conclusions drawn from this analysis we developed a methodology for the codification, representation and management of the policy related knowledge of Parliaments, which is founded on a well established product of CSAV research, the Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) framework. A first application of this methodology has been made for the whole set of documents produced for the Law on the ‘Contracts of Voluntary Cohabitation’ passed by the Greek Parliament. It was then evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative techniques based on the ‘Technology Acceptance Model’ (TAM). The evaluation concluded that the above representation/codification includes to a good extent the substantial elements of the policy related knowledge contained in the Parliamentary documents, and it is understandable by the users. At the same time it revealed weaknesses that lead us to the development of an extension of the IBIS framework in order to achieve a better representation of this knowledge.

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This paper aims at analyzing (a) the factors determining the firms’ propensity to outsource various processes (b) the impact of outsourcing on firms’ innovation performance as well as labour productivity. The integral investigation of the determining factors as well as the impact of outsourcing on innovation and productivity based on the same data in a comparative setting is the new element this study adds to existing empirical literature. Relocation to external providers is related to (parts of) the production process of final products and intermediate products as well as Research and Development (R&D) and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services.

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There has been extensive theoretical work on the potential of information and communication technologies (ICT) to drive significant innovations, which can dramatically enhance firms’ performance. However, this potential has not been sufficiently investigated empirically. This paper investigates empirically and compares i) the effects of the two most widely used types of information systems (IS), the ERP and the e-business ones, on innovation, and also ii) to what extent their effects on business performance are through (i.e. mediated by) the innovation they drive. It is concluded that both ERP and e-business IS have positive impact on innovation, with the former being a stronger driver of innovation than the latter. However, most of their positive impact on business performance is mainly through automation and support of existing processes, and only a smaller part of it (20% for the ERP and 30% for the e-business IS) is through innovation.

Περίληψη:
The trend of opening government data, in order to be used for scientific, commercial and political purposes, has resulted in the development of numerous e-infrastructures providing public sector information (PSI). The big investments that have been made in this direction necessitate a deeper understanding and assessment of the value they produce. This paper presents a methodology for evaluating PSI einfrastructures, which is based on the estimation of multiple value models corresponding to their main stakeholder groups: data users and data providers. Each value model consists of several value dimensions and their corresponding value measures, organized in three levels (associated with efficiency, effectiveness and future behaviour), and also the relations among them. The proposed methodology allows a comprehensive assessment of the various types of value generated by a PSI e-infrastructure for each stakeholder group, and also the interconnections among them. This enables a better understanding of the whole value generation mechanism and a rational definition of improvements priorities.

Περίληψη:
There has been an extensive theoretical literature during the last 20 years supporting that information and communication technologies (ICT) have a huge potential to drive significant innovations in firms’ processes, products and services, which can result in big performance improvements. However, limited empirical investigation of this innovation potential of ICT has been conducted. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the impact of two widely used types of information systems (IS) (internal and e-sales ones), and also of four important ‘traditional’ innovation determinants (demand expectation, price and non-price competition, market concentration) for comparison purposes, on innovation in Greek firms. It has been concluded that in the ‘innovation averse’ Greek national context both these IS types have a strong positive impact on innovation, whilst this does not hold for any of the examined ‘traditional’ innovation determinants.

Περίληψη:
Electronic Participation (eParticipation), both in its traditional form and in its emerging Web 2.0 based form, results in the production of large quantities of textual contributions of citizens concerning government policies and decisions under formation, which contain valuable relevant opinions and knowledge of the society, however are exploited to a limited only extent. It is of critical importance to analyze these contributions in order to extract the opinions and knowledge they contain in a cost-efficient way. This paper reviews a wide range of opinion mining methods, which have been developed for analyzing commercial product opinions and reviews posted on the Web, as to the capabilities they can offer for meeting the above challenges. The review has revealed the great potential of these methods for the analysis of textual citizens’ contributions in public policy debates, both for assessing contributors’ general attitudes-sentiments (positive, negative or neutral) towards the policy/decision under discussion, and also for extracting the main issues they raise (e.g. negative and positive aspects and effects, implementation barriers, improvement suggestions) and the corresponding attitudes-sentiments. Based on the conclusions of this review a basic framework for the use of opinion mining methods in eParticipation has been formulated.

Περίληψη:
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is an established technology that has been around for more than fifteen years. However, its adoption follows a very slow pace. Previous research, based either on a theoretical analysis of PKI or on specific cases of PKI implementation, has indicated several possible reasons for PKI non-adoption. In this paper we examine the effect of specific organizational factors on PKI adoption using empirical data from 14065 European firms collected through the e-Business Watch Survey of the European Commission. We have shown that it is still addressed as innovative technology that requires an innovation culture. Moreover, small and medium –sized firms are rather reluctant to adopt it and it is mostly implemented in firms with a large number of employees and tele-workers. Also, the extensive use of IS for supporting internal functions and cooperation with the external environment (e.g. customers and prospects), and the high dependence on them, are drivers of PKI adoption.

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The article proposes the concept of Policy Gadget (Padget) as an innovative tool for leveraging the group knowledge produced over Social Media platforms inside policy making processes. The concept has been developed within an international research project named PADGETS financed in the context of the “ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling” call of the FP7. In addition, the article highlights the value proposition of Padgets within the policy cycle as well as their novelty with respect to existing practices in the use of ICT for participatory purposes.

Περίληψη:
Government agencies are making considerable investments for exploiting the capabilities offered by ICT, and especially the Internet, to increase citizens’ engagement in their decision and policy making processes. However, this first generation of e-participation has been characterised by limited usage of the ‘official’ e-consultation spaces of government agencies by the citizens. The emergence of Web 2.0 social media offers big opportunities for overcoming this problem, and proceeding to a second generation of broader, deeper and more advanced e-participation. This paper presents a methodology for the efficient exploitation of Web 2.0 social media by government agencies in order to broaden and enhance e-participation. It is based on a central platform which enables posting content and deploying micro web applications (‘Policy Gadgets’-Padgets) to multiple popular Web 2.0 social media, and also collecting users’ interactions with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings) in an efficient manner using their application programming interfaces (API). These interactions’ data undergo various levels of processing, such as calculation of useful analytics, opinion mining and simulation modelling, in order to provide effective support to public decision and policy makers. The proposed methodology allows government agencies to adopt advanced and highly effective ‘hybrid’ e-participation approaches.

Περίληψη:
The high penetration of the Internet/WWW has led to the development of various types of e-services, such as e-business, e-banking, e-government and e-learning; however, their usage and quality have been lower than expected. Since this is a relatively new area, there is a need for intensive learning and improvement, and this can be achieved through deep and sophisticated evaluation of existing e-services that will produce extensive knowledge on their value generation mechanism and provide guidance for improvement interventions. In this direction this paper describes and validates a methodology for structuring and enhancing e-services evaluation based on the estimation of multi-level value flow models, which enable a better understanding of their value generation mechanisms and provides improvement decisions support. It is founded on well established theoretical frameworks from previous research in the areas of IS evaluation, technology acceptance models (TAM), IS success models and e-services evaluation. The proposed methodology has been validated for an e-learning service provided by the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) to ICT professionals.

Περίληψη:
While previously public policy making was predominantly technocratic, based mainly on ‘first generation’ approaches employing mathematical optimization algorithms, in the last thirty years it has become much more participative, adopting ‘second generation’ approaches which involve the affected citizens to a continuously increasing extent. This trend has been reinforced by the explosive growth of the information and communication technologies (ICT) and especially the Internet, resulting to the development of e-participation. Public participation provides to the competent government organizations useful information on citizens’ interest in and acceptance of public policies under formation or application, and also numerous proposals for changes, improvements and enhancements of them. It is therefore necessary to support and enhance participative policy making with technocratic mechanisms and tools for screening these proposals and analysing them as to their outcomes, and also for forecasting the future evolution of citizens’ interest in and acceptance of them. The use of simulation can be a very useful tool for these purposes. In this paper we present a state of the art review of existing modelling and simulation approaches from the above perspective. In particular, we examine Discrete Event Modelling and Simulation, Monte Carlo Simulation, System Dynamics, Dynamic Systems, Cellular Automata and Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation. From this investigation it is concluded that System Dynamics seems to be the most promising for the above purposes, followed by Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation, and that both can contribute significantly to the technocratic enhancement of participative policy making.

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It is widely recognised that innovation is of critical importance for the competitiveness and growth of firms, sectors and countries, so understanding its determinants is a critical research question. Beyond the ‘traditional’ innovation determinants identified by previous relevant research, there has been extensive theoretical literature on the potential of information and communication technologies (ICT) to drive innovation; however limited empirical investigation of it has been conducted. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the impact of three different ICT (internal information systems (IS), e-sales and e-procurements), and also - for comparison purposes – of four important ‘traditional’ innovation determinants (demand expectation, price and non-price competition, market concentration), on the innovation performance of Greek firms. It is based on firm-level data collected through a survey of 271 Greek firms. The results show that in the Greek ‘innovation averse’ national context (characterised by low level of innovation and uncertainly avoidance culture), though none of the examined ‘traditional’ innovation determinants has an impact on product and process innovation of firms, the internal IS have a strong positive impact on both product and process innovation, and the e-sales only on process innovation; on the contrary, e-procurement is not a driver of innovation. Our results indicate the high potential of ICT as innovation driver even in innovation averse contexts, which however varies between different types of ICT.

Περίληψη:
The paper presents a policy analysis framework developed through a process of interdisciplinary integration as well as through a process of endusers needs elicitation. The proposed framework constitutes the theoretical foundation for the decision support component of a technological platform bringing together Social Media and System Dynamics simulation developed withinthe PADGETS project. The main novelties introduced have to do with the possibility to provide decision makers with a set of synthetic, fresh and relevant data in a cost effective and easily understandable way.

Περίληψη:
The large scale application of ICT-based assistive environment technologies for the home care of elderly and disabled people is going to generate huge numbers of signals transmitted from homes to local health centers or hospitals in order to be monitored by medical personnel. This task is going to be of critical importance and at the same time - if manually performed - quite demanding for specialized human resources and costly. In order to perform it in a cost-efficient manner it is necessary to develop mechanisms and methods for automated screening of these signals in order to identify abnormal ones that require some action to be taken. This paper proposes a method for automatic screening of heart sound signals, which are the most widely acquired signals from the human body for diagnostic purposes in both the „traditional‟ medicine and the emerging ICT-based assistive environments. It is based on a novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Bayesian Inference approach, which estimates conditional probability distributions in structures obtained from a Tree-Augmented Naïve Bayes (TAN) algorithm. The proposed approach has been applied and validated in a difficult heterogeneous dataset of 198 heart sound signals, which comes from both healthy medical cases and unhealthy ones having Aortic Stenosis, Mitral Regurgitation, Aortic Regurgitation or Mitral Stenosis. The proposed approach achieved a good performance in this difficult screening problem, which is higher than other widely used alternative classifiers, showing great potential for contributing to a cost-effective large scale application of ICT-based assistive environment technologies.

Περίληψη:
Firms all over the world have to make important investment decisions concerning the development of costly World Wide Web (WWW) infrastructures aiming to benefit from the extensive connectivity, transaction and collaboration capabilities provided by the Internet, and to conduct various types of e-business activities. Therefore it is quite important to understand whether and how such web-related infrastructures create business value for firms. Aiming to contribute to the investigation of whether and how Internet/WWW technologies create business value for firms, this paper develops a conceptual model which analyzes Web infrastructure and Internet-based innovation as sources of business value. The methodology involved a large data source collected by the European e-Business Market Watch. The results show that, as hypothesized, Web infrastructure is not significantly related to business value, while on the contrary Internet-based innovation has a positive significant impact on business value. In addition, the results show no significant complementarity between Web infrastructure and Internet-based innovation. The above conclusions indicate that firms should be very careful when they decide to make this kind of investments, since they have to combine ‘hard’ investments in web infrastructure with ‘soft’ investments for the development of new products, services and processes exploiting the capabilities of this infrastructure.

Περίληψη:
The development of ‘intelligent’ medical equipment, which can not only acquire various signals from the human body, but also process them and provide recommendations as to probable pathological conditions, will be highly beneficial for both the medical personnel and the patients. However, this necessitates the development and exploitation of advanced highly efficient classification techniques. In this direction this paper presents a novel ensemble classification technique, combining Random Forests with the ‘Markov Blanket’ notion, which is used for the automated diagnosis of aortic and mitral heart valves diseases from low-cost and easily acquired heart sound signals. It has been tested in a highly ‘difficult’ global and heterogeneous dataset of 198 heart sound signals, which been acquired from both healthy and pathological medical cases. The proposed ensemble classification technique exhibited a higher classification performance in comparison with the classical Random Forest algorithms, and also other widely used classification algorithms.

Περίληψη:
Governments of many countries attempt to increase public participation by exploiting the capabilities and high penetration of the Internet. In this direction they make considerable investments for constructing and operating e-participation websites; however, the use of them has been in general limited and below expectations. For this reason governments, in order to widen e-participation, should investigate the exploitation of the numerous users-driven Web 2.0 social media as well, which seem to be quite successful in attracting huge numbers of users. This paper describes a methodology for the exploitation of the Web 2.0 social media by government organizations in the processes of public policies formulation, through a central platform-toolset providing interoperability with many different social media, and enabling posting and retrieving content from them in a systematic centrally managed and machinesupported automated manner (through their application programming interfaces (APIs)). The proposed methodology includes the use of ‘Policy Gadgets’ (Padgets), which are defined as micro web applications presenting policy messages in various popular Web 2.0 social media (e.g. social networks, blogs, forums, news sites, etc) and collecting users’ interactions with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). Interaction data can be used as input in policy simulation models estimating the impact of various policy options. Encouraging have been the conclusions from the analysis of the APIs of 10 highly popular social media, which provide extensive capabilities for publishing content on them (e.g. data, images, video, links, etc.) and also for retrieving relevant user activity and content (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.), though their continuous evolution might pose significant difficulties and challenges.

Περίληψη:
In this paper a systematic evaluation is presented of an e-participation platform based on GIS tools, which has been developed as part of the FFED project co-financed by the European Commission. The evaluation methodology has been based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which has been elaborated and adapted to this particular type of IS, taking into account the particular objectives and capabilities of this platform. Our main evaluation dimensions were usage, ease of use, functional usefulness, political usefulness and importance of discussion topic; each of them has been analysed into a number of sub-dimensions. Using this methodology five pilot applications of this platform in „real-life‟ situations and problems have been evaluated with both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Finally it has been concluded that the use of GIS tools can provide significant value in the area of e–participation, which however depends on a number of context factors, such as citizens‟ computer literacy and familiarization, trust to the political system, interest of the sponsoring public authorities, appropriate promotion, importance of the topic under discussion and quantity and quality of reference information appended on the digital maps by public authorities.

Περίληψη:
The limited use of the ‘official’ e-participation websites by the citizens, their high heterogeneity in terms of political interests, educational level and technological skills and at the same time the emergence of the new web 2.0 social media necessitate central and local administration to exploit the numerous usersdriven virtual spaces, which have been launched through citizens initiatives with dramatic success in terms of adoption and usage, in order to widen and enhance e-participation. This paper describes a methodology for the systematic exploitation of the emerging Web 2.0 social media, in combination with established simulation modelling techniques and tools, by governmental organizations in the processes of public policies formulation. It is based on the concept of ‘Policy Gadget’ (Padget), which is defined as a micro web application combining a policy message with underlying group knowledge in social media and interacting with citizens in popular web 2.0 locations (such as social networks, blogs, forums, news sites, etc) in order to get and convey their input to policy makers. Such ‘Padgets’ will be created by a central platform-toolset and then deployed in many different Web 2.0 media. Citizens input gathered through ‘Padgets’ will be used in various simulation modelling techniques and tools, such as the Systems Dynamics methodology), which are going to simulate different policy options and estimate their outcomes and effectiveness. Finally, a use case scenario of the proposed methodology is presented, which outlines how it can be used in ‘real life’ public policy design problems.

Περίληψη:
Electronic consultation through the Internet has become an important means of e-participation in order to enable interaction and discussion among government agencies and citizens on public policies and decisions. Tools that enhance the quality of electronic consultations need therefore to be designed in a way that better opinions and arguments are produced. Well designed ICT tools can contribute to better, more informed and socially rooted public policies and decisions. This paper analyses two different models of structured electronic consultation in the area of formation of legislation, a highly complex and controversial category of government decisions. The first model is a highly structured e-consultation model based on the Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) framework, having as basic elements issues, alternatives, pro-arguments, contra-arguments and comments. The second model is simpler and less structured, having as basic elements questions, answers and comments. Our analysis was based on two pilot cases concerning legislation under formation in Greece and Austria. Evaluation took place using discussion tree analysis and quantitative and qualitative methods.

Περίληψη:
The aging population in many countries, in combination with high government deficits and financial resources limitations, necessitates new methods for the home care of the elderly at reasonable costs based on the exploitation of modern information and communication technologies (ICT). This requires the installation of assistive environments at the homes of elderly people, which include various types of sensors, generating biosignals of other types of signals, which are transferred through networks to local health centers or hospitals in order to be monitored. However, scaling up the application of such ICTbased methods of elderly home care is going to increase tremendously the workload of the medical staff of local health centers or hospitals. Therefore it is of critical importance to develop capabilities for an automated first screening of these signals and identification of abnormal elements and diseases. In this direction the present paper proposes a system for the automatic identification of murmurs in heart sound signals, and also for the classification of them as systolic or diastolic, using a new generation of advanced Random Forests classification algorithms, which are aggregating the prediction of multiple classifiers (ensemble classification). The proposed system has been applied and validated in a representative global dataset of 198 heart sound signals, which come both from healthy medical cases and from cases having systolic and diastolic murmurs. Also, some alternative classifiers have been applied to the same data for comparison purposes. It has been concluded that the proposed systems shows a good performance, which is higher than the examined alternative classifiers.

Περίληψη:
Many public policy problems are ‘wicked’, being characterised by high complexity, many heterogeneous views and conflicts among various stakeholders, and also lack of mathematically ‘optimal’ solutions and pre-defined algorithms for calculating them. The best approach for addressing such problems is through consultation and argumentation among stakeholders. The e-participation research has investigated and suggested several ICT tools for this purpose, such as e-forum, e-petition and e-community tools. This paper investigates the use of an advanced ICT tool, the structured e-forum, for addressing such wicked problems associated with the legislation formation. For this purpose we designed, implemented and evaluated two pilot e-consultations on legislation under formation in the Parliaments of Austria and Greece using a structured e-forum tool based on the Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS) framework. The conclusions drawn reveal the advantages offered by the structured e-forum, but also its difficulties as well

Περίληψη:
The relation between information systems, innovation and business performance is a critical question for both researchers and practitioners. This paper provides an empirical investigation of this issue in the tourism sector by conducting an analysis of the relations between: I) the exploitation level of two widely adopted types of IS, namely internal and e-sales systems (first level); II) the extent of business innovation and benefits from ICT (second level); and III) business performance (third level). This study has been based on firm-level data from 2665 European tourism firms, which have been used for constructing a structural equation model (SEM) and estimating the interrelationship amongst these constructs. The model provided evidence of a positive impact of the exploitation level of both IS (internal and e-sales) on innovation, with the former being a stronger driver of innovation than the latter. The exploitation levels of the internal and e-sales IS were also found to have both a positive impact on the business benefits that the tourism firms achieve from their ICT infrastructures, which impact is also mediated by innovation; internal IS were found to have a higher impact on ICT business benefits than the e-sales IS. Furthermore, these ICT benefits and innovation (both directly and indirectly through the ICT benefits) were found to have an ultimate positive impact on business performance. Consequently, the findings suggest that tourism firms should combine the development of internal ICT and e-sales IS with innovation if they wish to get more IS driven business benefits and ultimately increase their business performance.

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The study on the links between strategy, structure and performance has been for long time a fundamental and highly important research topic for the management researchers and practitioners. In this direction this paper presents a ‘holistic’ empirical investigation of the whole network of relations between business strategy (at a first level), information and communication technologies (ICT) investment, non-ICT investment and BPR (at a second level), and finally business performance (at a third level). It is based on firm-level data from 271 Greek firms, which are used for the estimation of structural equation models (SEM) connecting the above variables, theoretically based on the Cobb- Douglas Production Function. It is concluded that none of the three generic business strategies defined by M. Porter (cost leadership, differentiation and focus) has a significant effect on ICT and non-ICT investment; on the contrary, particular strategic choices (differentiation and focus strategy) have been found to drive process change. Also, it has been found that all the investigated internal factors, ICT investment, non-ICT investment and BPR, have a positive impact on business performance. Concerning their interrelations, ICT investment affects positively BPR, which indicates that BPR is a partial mediator in the relationship between ICT and performance; on the contrary, this does not happen with non-ICT investment, indicating an important difference between these two types of capital investment as to their relation with process change.

Περίληψη:
The problems of formulation and application of various kinds of public policy concerning energy and environment are wicked’ and highly complex ones, with multiple and conflicting objectives and many stakeholders with different views, values and concerns. For this reason a deliberation among stakeholders and argumentation approach using advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) is the best way for addressing such problems. The use of e-participation technologies and methods can be very useful for this purpose. This paper describes an advanced ICT platform that has been developed for supporting and facilitating such deliberation and argumentation approaches, as part of the FEED (Federated e-Participation Systems for Cross-Societal Deliberation on Environmental and Energy Issues) project. This platform aims to support and enhance deliberation among all stakeholders and argumentation for the formulation and application of public policy concerning environment and energy, by providing i) federated content from various sources, ii) efficient mechanisms for accessing it based on ontologies and maps, and ii) stakeholders’ interaction capabilities through forum and petition functionalities. Also, a usage scenario of this platform is described.

Περίληψη:
Most public policy problems are ‘wicked’, being characterised by high complexity, many heterogeneous views and conflicts among various stakeholders. Therefore citizens interested to participate in such debates in order to be sufficiently informed should study large amounts of relevant material, such as reports, laws, committees’ minutes, etc., which are in legalistic or in other specialist languages, or very often their substance is hidden in political rhetoric, putting barriers to a meaningful participation. In this paper we present the results of the research we have conducted for addressing this problem through the use of ‘Computer Supported Argument Visualization’ (CSAV) methods for supporting and enhancing e-participation in the legislation formation process. This approach has been implemented in a pilot e-participation project and then evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative methods based on the ‘Technology Acceptance Model’ (TAM), with positive results. Based on the conclusions of this evaluation an enrichment of the IBIS framework has been developed for improving the visualization of legal documents.

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Most of the information systems (IS) interoperability research and practice in the e-government area has been focused on the operational level, aiming mainly at enabling the delivery of integrated electronic services involving several government agencies to citizens and enterprises based on the ‘one-stop shop’ model, and the support of co-operation among government agencies from the same or even different countries at the operational level. This paper is dealing with knowledge-level interoperability, which aims at the support of higher knowledge-intensive tasks of government, such as the formulation of legislation. In particular, it presents an ontology-based methodology for achieving knowledge-level interoperability among IS of Parliaments. It is based on the common use by Parliaments of the ontology of the ‘Issue-Based Information Systems’ (IBIS) framework for codifying the public policy related knowledge produced in the various stages of legislation formulation. Also, an application of the proposed methodology is presented for the case of the Law concerning ‘Contracts of Voluntary Cohabitation’ that has been recently passed by the Greek Parliament; its evaluation resulted in a proposal for a refinement of the above ontology that can be used for achieving a better codification of the knowledge that the main content (articles) of Laws contains.

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The high potential of modern ICT for supporting citizens’ and administrations’ interaction for the formulation of public policies has been extensively recognized by academics and practitioners, resulting in a rapid development of the e-participation domain in the last decade. Extensive research is required for developing appropriate advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) platforms that exploit and realize this potential to the highest possible extent. In this direction this paper describes an advanced ICT e-participation platform that has been developed having as main objective to improve the quantity and quality of interaction among citizens, and also with public administrations, concerning the formulation of public policies and decisions on environmental and energy issues, as part of the FEED (Federated e-Participation Systems for Cross-Societal Deliberation on Environmental and Energy Issues) project of the European Commission. It enables citizens and administrations to upload geographically referenced multimedia content (e.g. pictures, videos, etc.) on an electronic map of the area which the public policy or decision under discussion concerns, so that other interested citizens or administrations can easily access and download them. The proposed e-participation platform provides: i) federated relevant content from various sources, ii) efficient mechanisms for accessing this content based on maps, semantic annotation and ontologies, iii) additional stakeholders’ interaction capabilities through forum and petition functionalities. Finally, a pilot application of this platform for supporting e-participation/e-deliberation concerning important environmental and zoning public policies and decisions in the Flevoland region, Netherlands, which has been designed by the project consortium and is going to be implemented in the near future, is described.

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The analysis of the relationships among strategy, structure and performance is a major research topic of particular interest to both researchers and management practitioners. This paper develops a research model for investigating these relationships for the case of e-business strategy adoption. A model is developed consisting of several hypotheses concerning the relationships among e-business strategy adoption, information and communication technology (ICT) investment, non-ICT investment, business process reengineering (BPR) and business performance. In order to test the hypotheses, data from a sample comprising 271 Greek firms are used to estimate a structural equation model. The results show that e-business strategy adoption is positively associated with BPR, while it is not related however to ICT and non-ICT investment. Furthermore, BPR, ICT investment and non-ICT investment have significant positive paths leading to the dependent construct (business performance), while e-business strategy adoption has a statistically insignificant coefficient. Therefore, our results show an indirect positive effect of e-business strategy adoption on business performance through BPR.

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This paper aims at investigating empirically at the firm level the effect of the use of modern information and communication technologies (ICT), and also of two other factors, the adoption of new forms of workplace organization (which is regarded as a ‘complement’ of ICT), and trade (export) activities (a major characteristic of modern economy), on the demand for employees’ (vocational) education and skills. The study is based on firm-level data collected through a common questionnaire from firms’ samples of similar composition (concerning firm sizes and industries) in Greece and Switzerland; from these data econometric models of similar specification have been constructed for both countries. The results of multivariate analysis show that the intensive use of ICT correlates positively with the employment shares of high-educated personnel and negatively with the ones of the low-educated personnel. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis of ‘skill-biased technical change’. Further, the intensive use of “employee voice”-oriented organizational practices correlates positively with the employment shares of high-educated employees in both countries, and also negatively with the employment share of low-educated ones only for the Swiss firms. The results for the “work design” organizational practices are more ambiguous. Thus, there is only partial confirmation of the hypothesis of skilled-biased organizational change. Finally, we found some evidence in favour of the trade effect (export activities) only for the Swiss firms. Our results show both similarities and differences in the above aspects between Greece and Switzerland, and indicate that national context characteristics affect the relationship of the demand for employees’ (vocational) education and skills with ICT use, adoption of new forms of workplace organization and trade.

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Although many countries today exploit the potential of ICT for supporting citizens’ engagement in the democratic processes and invest significant amounts of money in eparticipation, have do not pay corresponding attention in evaluating these efforts. In this direction, this paper describes a framework that has been developed for evaluating eparticipation pilots in the legislation development processes of parliaments. The proposed framework is based on a) the objectives and basic characteristics of the ‘traditional’ public participation, the e-participation and the legislation development processes, and b) the existing frameworks for the evaluation of information systems, e-participation and traditional public participation. It includes four evaluation perspectives: process, system, context and outcomes evaluation, each of them being analysed into a number of evaluation criteria/variables; also, it includes the assessment of associations between the assessed values of outcomes evaluation factors on one hand and the assessed values of the context, process and system evaluation factors on the other, in order to identify the reasons of positive of negative outcomes.

Περίληψη:
In the modern economy firms, in addition to the ‘traditional’ production factors - traditional physical capital and labour - increasingly tend to form and use some ‘new’ types of production factors: information and communication technologies (ICT) capital, human capital and organizational capital. It is therefore necessary to investigate the effect of these new production factors on firm performance in various contexts and also to compare it with the effect of the traditional production factors in various contexts. In this paper is described a comparative empirical study of the effect of the ICT capital, the human capital, the organizational capital (new organizational practices associated with ‘employee voice’ and new forms of ‘work design’) and their combination on labour productivity in Greece and Switzerland. This study has been based on firm-level data from both countries, which have been collected through a common questionnaire, from samples of similar composition (concerning firm sizes and sectors). Based on these data econometric models of similar specification have been estimated for both countries based on the framework of firm-level production function. From these models it is concluded that in both countries physical capital, ICT capital, human capital and new “employee voice”-oriented organizational practices have a statistically significant positive effect on labour productivity. Also, some considerable differences between the two countries have been identified: Swiss firms are more efficient and mature in creating, using and combining these ‘new’ production factors (ICT capital, human capital, organizational capital and knowledge capital) than the Greek ones. These conclusions have interesting policy implications both at the firm and government level.

Περίληψη:
Even though many countries invest significant amounts of money in engaging citizens in public decision-making using information and communication technologies (ICT), they do not pay corresponding attention in evaluating these efforts. Since e-participation is a relatively new approach it is necessary to evaluate it carefully, in order to understand it better and identify both the benefits and advantages it offers, and also at the same time its disadvantages and problems. In this direction in this paper initially are reviewed existing frameworks which can be useful for structuring the evaluation of e-participation. Then a framework is developed for evaluating a number of e-participation pilots in the legislation development process that will be implemented as part of the LEX-IS project (‘Enabling Participation of the Youth in the Public Debate of Legislation among Parliaments, Citizens and Businesses in the European Union) of the ‘eParticipation’ Preparatory Action of the European Commission.

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As electronic participation systems are becoming widely available, promoting the public debate on a variety of issues, a new challenge is emerging: how to organize, access and present multi-format supportive documentation from various sources. The more wide-spread eParticipation systems become, the more difficult is for the participants in electronic debates to find and relate documents, legal information or policy statements, on the issues discussed. In this world of multiple sources of unstructured and diverse information elements, the presented approach proposes the concept of federated eParticipation systems, able to dynamically locate and channel information from existing, diverse sources. The proposed architecture includes multimedia content management tools, syndication mechanisms and ontologically supported mechanisms, in an effort to provide the users with the proper information for supporting opinions and decisions. As a first application, energy and environmental issues are considered, which constitute an important subject of the European Union policy agenda, as well as a common issue for discussion at local and municipal level.

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The paper presents project needs of new solution in eParticipation initiative area focusing main environmental and energy issues that the new European energy policy has to deal with. The project FEED (Federated eParticipation Sys-tems for Cross-Societal Deliberation on Environmental and Energy Issues) is introduced as one possible solution. There will be discussed its main goals, platform architecture and project work plan.

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The critical importance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for the firms nowadays, and the big ICT investments they make, necessitate a deeper understanding of ‘how’ ICT affects business performance, through identification of the intervening mechanisms and variables in the relationship between ICT and business performance. This paper describes an empirical investigation of whether and to what extent Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has an intervening role in the relationship between ICT investment and business performance, based on firm-level data from 271 Greek firms. Using this data a Structural Equation Model (SEM), founded on the Cobb-Douglas production function, is constructed, which includes a multi-item construct for measuring the extent of BPR with high level of reliability. From this model it is concluded that BPR mediates partially the relationship between ICT investment and business performance. On the contrary, it is concluded that BPR does not have such an intervening role in the relationship between the non-ICT investment (in ‘traditional’ assets) and business performance.

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The business value generated by information and communication technologies (ICT) has been for long time a major research topic of high interest to both researchers and practitioners. Recently there is a growing research interest in the business value generated by particular types of information systems (IS). One of them is the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which are increasingly adopted by organizations for supporting and integrating key business and management processes within and beyond their boundaries. The current paper initially presents a critical review of the existing empirical literature concerning the business value of the ERP systems, which investigates the impact of ERP systems adoption on various measures of organizational performance. Then is critically reviewed the literature concerning the related topic of critical success factors (CSFs) in ERP systems implementation, which aims at identifying and investigating factors that result in more successful ERP systems implementation that generate higher levels of value for organizations. Finally, based on the conclusions of the above literature reviews, future directions of research concerning ERP systems business value are proposed.

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The development of a theory concerning the value generated by information and communication technologies (ICT) has been for long time a major research topic of high importance to both researchers and practitioners. Basic research objectives have been the assessment and deeper understanding of the multiple dimensions of ICT business value at the firm, sector and national economy level and also its main determinants. Recently there is a growing research interest in the value generated by particular types of information systems (IS), such as the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Thιs paper reviews critically the existing empirical literature on the firm level business value of the ERP systems, which investigates the impact of ERP systems adoption on various measures of organizational performance. Then it critically reviews the literature concerning the related topic of critical success factors (CSFs) of ERP systems implementation, which aims to identify factors that result in more successful ERP systems implementation that generate higher levels of value for organizations. Based on the conclusions of this literature review on one hand, and on the experience gained from the ICT business value research on the other, are identified the necessary directions of the future research required in order to develop a theory of ERP systems firm level business value and gain a complete body of knowledge, which can help organizations maximize the value they get from their ERP systems investments.

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This paper empirically investigates and compares the moderating role of the two basic business process change paradigms, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Total Quality Management (TQM), on the business value generated for firms by their ICT investment, using data from 271 Greek firms. Initially multi-item BPR and TQM constructs have been developed based on the relevant literature and their validity and reliability has been tested with positive results. Then based on them moderated regression models with objective measures of business performance (as dependent variable) and ICT (as one of the independent variables) have been constructed, founded on the Cobb-Douglas production function and including all the fundamental independent variables. From these models it is concluded that both BPR and TQM have considerable moderating effects of similar magnitude on the relationship between ICT and firm value added. Therefore the contribution of ICT investment to firm value added can increase considerably if it is combined with BPR or TQM.

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In the present paper, Random Forests are used in a critical and at the same time non trivial problem concerning the diagnosis of Gas Turbine blading faults, portraying promising results. Random forests-based fault diagnosis is treated as a Pattern Recognition problem, based on measurements and feature selection. Two different types of inserting randomness to the trees are studied, based on different theoretical assumptions. The classifier is compared against other Machine Learning algorithms such as Neural Networks, Classification and Regression Trees, Naive Bayes and K-Nearest Neighbor. The performance of the prediction model reaches a level of 97% in terms of precision and recall, improving the existing state-of-the-art levels achieved by Neural Networks by a factor of 1.5%-2%.

Περίληψη:
In the present paper, Random Forests are used in a critical and at the same time non trivial problem concerning the diagnosis of Gas Turbine blading faults, portraying promising results. Random forestsbased fault diagnosis is treated as a Pattern Recognition problem, based on measurements and feature selection. Two different types of inserting randomness to the trees are studied, based on different theoretical assumptions. The classifier is compared against other Machine Learning algorithms such as )eural )etworks, Classification and Regression Trees, )aive Bayes and K-)earest )eighbor. The performance of the prediction model reaches a level of 97% in terms of precision and recall, improving the existing state-of-the-art levels achieved by )eural )etworks by a factor of 1.5%-2%. Furthermore, emphasis is given on the pre-processing phase, where feature selection and outliers identification is carried out, in order to provide the basis of a high performance automated diagnostic system. The conclusions derived are of more general interest and applicability.

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The LEX-IS project (its full title being ‘Enabling Participation of the Youth in the Public Debate of Legislation’ among Parliaments, Citizens and Businesses in the European Union) is part of the ‘eParticipation’ Preparatory Action of the European Commission (Commission of the European Communities, 2006) aims for contributing to these issues. Its main objective is to improve the legislative process and output in the National Parliaments by enhancing public participation in the preparatory stages (legislation proposal formation stage and public debate of draft legislation), with special emphasis on the youth, using advanced ICT-based tools and methodologies, such as ontologies, metadata, argumentation support, facilitation and visualization methods, process management approaches.

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Argumentation systems and ontologies have the potential to support and enhance the participation of citizens in the development of effective and acceptable legislation concerning the complex and multidimensional problems that modern societies face. However, this potential has only to a very small extent been explored and realized. In this direction this paper describes an investigation of this potential, which is performed as part of the EU funded project LEX-IS. The main objective of LEX-IS is to improve the legislation process in the National Parliaments through enhanced public participation in the preparatory stages (legislation proposal formation and public debate of draft legislation) with the use of state-of-the-art ICT-tools and methodologies. This paper introduces four scenarios of public participation in above mentioned preparatory legislation processes thereby exploring the support of argumentation systems and ontologies. Along the scenarios, peculiarities of these two preparatory and highly significant stages of a legislation process are discussed, and results of existing relevant research are reflected. The basic features, advantages and disadvantages of each scenario are shown, and the LEX-IS design is sketched.

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Information Systems (IS) evaluation has been one of the most important and widely researched topics for more than two decades. Τhe evaluation of e-Learning is of critical importance in order to maximize the benefits from the huge investments made in this area. In this paper is presented a method for e-learning multi-layer evaluation and value flow model estimation. It includes evaluation of e-learning using three layers of value measures (efficiency measures, effectiveness measures, and intended future behaviour measures), and also the estimation of the relations between them. In this way a model of value generation and flow is developed. This method generates rich and useful information concerning the different types of value that e-learning creates, the mechanisms of their creation and also possible interventions for increasing them. A first application of this method is presented for the evaluation of an e-learning service in the area of the European cultural heritage that has been developed in the project e-RMIONE of the eTEN Programme of the European Union. This first application gives interesting and useful conclusions concerning the various levels of value created by the above service, as well as the generation and flow of value between these levels, and also it enables the prioritization of the resources and capabilities of this service that should be improved. In this sense this application provides positive and encouraging evidence concerning the validity and the usefulness of the method.

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One of the most critical preconditions for the success of innovative services is to be based on sound business models. Especially today, in the networked economy, the concept of business model is not a theoretical tool but a prerequisite for success. Business model is one of the most common factors encountered for, when Internet firms succeed in business. Furthermore, the rapid introduction of innovative applications necessitates the rational design of their business model. However, despite the extensive use, and sometimes misuse, of the business model concept and design methodology, there exist very limited attempts in design methodology in scientific research. In the present paper, we propose a new framework for ‘digital’ business model design, by implementing it in a real - life business case, specifically in business models for location-based services.

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Open Collaboration (OC) is a tool being developed to support a variety of electronic collaboration needs. In OC, group and role information is propagated in a peer-to-peer fashion, and peers can share data resources with any peer who is a member of an appropriate group or role. In this paper, we introduce our current work on incorporating a recommendation component in OC. The objective of this component is to help users find the most reliable, valuable, important, and interesting information quickly and easily. Four implemented recommendation algorithms (User-based, Item-based, Singular Value Decomposition based, and Non-negative Matrix Factorization based algorithms) in our recommendation component are discussed.

Περίληψη:
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can play an important role in facilitating the involvement of citizens and enterprises in the development of legislation and in managing the increasing complexity of the legislative processes. In this direction the main objective of the EU funded project LEX-IS is to improve the legislative process in National Parliaments through enhancing public participation in the preparatory stages (legislation proposal formation and public debate of draft legislation) with the use of state-of-the-art ICT-tools and methodologies. The main goals of the project are: a) development of tools for managing the complex legal frameworks and structures, b) development and use of ontologies and metadata schemas for the semantic annotation of legal elements (e.g. directives, laws, decrees, etc.), c) modelling of the draft formation and public consultation process using standard process management approaches such as BPMN to support direct integration in common workflow management systems and d) provision of tools for the active participation of citizens, businesses and non-governmental organizations in the above stages of the legislation process d) using argumentation support systems and web-based annotation facilities (ontology, semantic web services, Web 2.0, etc.) to the legal drafts. Using the above technologies the project aims to contribute to engaging citizens online, with special emphasis on the younger ones; bridging the growing gap between citizens and the state, represented by National Parliaments; improving the legislation process and its outcomes; and promoting e-Participation awareness.

Περίληψη:
The contemporary network economy is built on powerful fixed and mobile network infrastructures. These infrastructures provide the solid ground for the continuous introduction of innovative both telecommunication services and business application services. Nevertheless, the exploitation and the profitability of these network infrastructures depend heavily on the commercial success of the services running on them. A critical precondition for the success of these services is to be based on sound business models, as business model is one of the most common factors encountered for, when Internet firms succeed in business. Especially today, in the networked economy, the concept of business model is not a theoretical tool but a prerequisite for success. Furthermore, the rapid introduction of innovative applications necessitates the rational design of their business model. However, despite the extensive use, and sometimes misuse, of the business model concept and design methodology, there exist very limited attempts in design methodology in scientific research. In the present paper, we propose a new framework for ‘digital’ business model design.

Περίληψη:
In this paper is presented a methodology we have developed for the evaluation of an asynchronous e-learning service that will be created in the European cultural heritage domain as part of the project ERMIONE (E-Learning Resource Management Service for InterOperability Networks in the European Cultural Heritage Domain) project of the eTEN Program of the European Union. The theoretical foundations of the methodology are the basic constructs and conclusions of i) the traditional education evaluation research, ii) the e-learning evaluation and critical success factors research, iii) the information systems (IS) success research and iv) the technology acceptance models - related research. This methodology evaluates e-learning capabilities and resources (content, electronic support by the instructor, learning community, technical quality, customization capabilities and perceived ease of use), e-learning context (such as previous familiarity of the e-learners with the computers and the e-course subject), e-learning outcomes (extent of accomplishment of educational objectives and use), and the relations between them. It can be used for both formative and summative evaluation of asynchronous e-learning, while with some adaptations it can be used for the evaluation of other types of e-learning and in general of other electronic services as well.

Περίληψη:
Organizations during the last decade tend to form more and more various types of inter-organizational networks in order to produce complex products and services by combining their resources and capabilities. In the public sector two basic types of inter-organizational collaboration networks are gradually formed: Government-to-Government (G2G) collaboration networks and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). This paper analyses the basic objectives, research directions and methodologies of the ERMIONE (E-Learning Resource Management Service for InterOperability Networks in the European Cultural Heritage Domain) project; the basic objective of this project is to create (up to the level of pilots), study, evaluate and market validate an eRM (e-learning Resource Management) service, which offers an electronic environment that facilitates and supports both G2G collaborations and PPPs in the cultural heritage domain. In particular, it will support the collaborative development, promotion and delivery of composite digital content and e-courses concerning the European cultural heritage, through collaboration among many public and private cultural heritage institutions (e.g. museums, galleries, libraries, archives, etc.), educational institutions (e.g. Universities), commercial promotion companies, ICT companies, etc., from all over Europe. Furthermore, it will offer to learners, teachers and researchers, who are interested in digital content and e-courses concerning the European cultural heritage, an ‘electronic-one-stop-shop’ and an asynchronous e-learning environment. Special emphasis is laid on the description of the multi-stakeholder methodology we have developed for the evaluation of this service, which is based on an extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)

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In this paper is presented an empirical study of the effect of two external environment factors: i) the ‘generalized’ competition the organization faces, which, according to M. Porter’s ‘Five Forces Model’ of competition, consists of the bargaining power of its suppliers, the bargaining power of its buyers, the competitive rivalry from its competitors, the threat of new entrants and the threat of substitute products or services, and ii) the strategy the organization follows for responding to pressures of its external environment, on the business value generated by ICT investment. The study is based on firm-level data from Greek companies, which have been collected through a survey using a structured questionnaire in cooperation with ICAP, one of the largest business information and consulting companies of Greece. Using these data are constructed econometric models of output, based on the microeconomic production theory, and in particular on the Cobb Douglas production function. From these models concerning the above generalized competition dimensions it is concluded that higher level of bargaining power of suppliers results in higher ICT business value. Also concerning strategy it is concluded that organizations following a strategy of frequent introduction of new innovative products and services enjoy higher ICT business value.

Περίληψη:
Despite the high ambitions of the e-government programs, which are in progress in many countries, aiming at the development of highly complex information systems in public administration, the reality is quite different: many failures of information systems (IS) projects, and especially of the largest ones, are reported, which result in waste of huge financial resources, loss of opportunities, disappointment of the public and heavy criticism by the press. If these failures are not drastically reduced, the progress towards e-government, and in general towards the ‘information society’, will be significantly retarded. Appropriate evaluation of these IS projects can highly contribute to the reduction of these failures and to the increase of the benefits from the IS of public sector. However, although extensive theoretical research has been conducted in the area of IS evaluation, which has analyzed its inherent difficulty and complexity and has produced several IS evaluation directions and frameworks, only limited research has been conducted towards their practical application in large and complex ‘real-life’ projects. In the present paper is analyzed the experience gained from the evaluation of a complex inter-organizational G2G collaboration support environment, which has been developed in the ICTE-PAN project of the IST Program of the European Union. We present a user-driven evaluation methodology, which has been developed for this purpose, based on the ISO/IEC 14589 and ISO/IEC 9126 standards. Also we analyze the application of this methodology for the evaluation of the above large inter-organizational IS by the user-partners of this project, its results and also the conclusions drawn from the whole evaluation process.

Περίληψη:
The new network economy is characterized by the continuous introduction of innovative both telecommunication services and business application services, which run on powerful fixed and mobile network infrastructures. The exploitation and the profitability of these network infrastructures depend heavily on the commercial success of the services running on them. One of the most critical preconditions for the success of these services is to be based on sound business models. For this reason, the concept of ‘business model’ has become quite popular among business consultants, managers and entrepreneurs, especially today, in the dawn of the new networked economy. However, despite the extensive use, and sometimes misuse, of the business model concept, only limited scientific research has been conducted in this area. Moreover, there is still some ambiguity concerning the exact meaning of this concept, which results in a diversity of definitions and a confusion in terminology. In the present paper, initially we present a literature review on the definitions, the components and the theoretical foundations of business model. Then we focus on emerging business models for telecommunication and business application services and their success factors. Finally, we review the limited research that has been conducted so far concerning methodologies for designing new business models, we identify its shortcomings and we propose a new framework for ‘digital’ business model design.

Περίληψη:
The contemporary network economy is built on powerful fixed and mobile network infrastructures. These infrastructures provide the solid ground for the continuous and rapid introduction of innovative both telecommunication services and business application servicesOne of the most critical preconditions for the success of these services is to be based on sound business models. Especially today, in the dawn of the networked economy, the concept of business model is not a theoretical tool but a prerequisite for success. Business model is one of the most common factors encountered for, when Internet firms succeed in business. Furthermore, the rapid introduction of innovative applications necessitates the rational design of their business model. However, despite the extensive use, and sometimes misuse, of the business model concept, there is not extensive the scientific research that has been conducted in this area. Moreover, there is still some ambiguity concerning the exact meaning of this concept, which results in a diversity of definitions and a confusion in terminology. In the present paper, initially we present a literature review on the theoretical foundations of business model presenting its definitions- and its components. . Then we focus on the research that has been conducted so far concerning methodologies for designing new business models, we identify its shortcomings and we propose a new framework for ‘digital’ business model design, by implementing it in a real - life business case.

Περίληψη:
The impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) investment on business performance has been a major research subject for long time. Until the mid 1990s there was little empirical evidence of a positive and statistically significant relation between ICT investment and business performance (ICT Productivity Paradox). Subsequent research, conducted mainly in a few highly developed countries, provided some empirical evidence of a statistically significant positive contribution of ICT investment to some measures of business performance, which increases if ICT investment is complemented by ’co-investments’ that create some complementary ‘intangible assets’, such as new work practices, business processes, organizational structures and skills. In this paper is presented the first study of the impact of information systems (IS) investments on business performance in Greece, based on firm-level data collected through a questionnaire-based survey in cooperation with the Federation of Greek Industries. In this study we also examine whether there is complementarity between IS investment and a set of IS management factors. It is concluded that in Greece IS spending by firms as a percentage of their sales revenue is lower than in the highly developed countries. Also, using econometric models based on the Cobb Douglas production function, we conclude that IS investments in Greece make a positive and statistically significant contribution to firm output and labour productivity, but not to the return on assets. Moreover it was found that the average marginal productivities of ICT capital and ICT labour expenses in Greece are higher than in the highly developed countries; also they are much higher than the average marginal productivities of the non-ICT capital and the non-ICT labour expenses respectively. Finally it was found that there is complementarity between IS investment and the examined set of IS management factors with respect to firm output and labour productivity; therefore the combination of IS investment with these IS management factors results in additional increase of firm output and labour productivity beyond the individual effect of IS investment.

Περίληψη:
International trade negotiations among national governments and organizations are usually arduous and complicated. We propose a framework that supports government to government negotiation. With this framework, governments can keep track of previous negotiations us- ing a database of negotiation records in an electronic platform. Moreover, the framework supports searching, sharing and learning past negotiation records as well as the ability to conduct negotiations on a variety of resources, products and services.

Περίληψη:
The development of effective public policies and programs concern-ing the big problems of modern societies is an increasingly complex task. The social problems today are multidimensional and their solution requires close collaboration among various Public Organizations from many regions or even countries. Each individual organization involved possesses pieces of informa-tion, experience, knowledge and competence about the problem. Their values, interests and expectations are often different, or even conflicting, and have to be taken into account. Similar hold for the ‘high level functions’ of the Public Administration, such as decision making towards the development of legisla-tion. This paper presents a web-based system that supports collaborative activi-ties in the above setting. Through a well-structured discourse graph, the system facilitates the wide participation and collaboration of the Public Organizations involved in the solution of social problem and provides a series of knowledge management and argumentative decision making features. The use of the sys-tem is described through a detailed example concerning a debate about state vs. non-state universities, which has recently started in Greece.

Περίληψη:
In this study, Decision Tree algorithms are used with promising results in a crucial and at the same time complicated classification problem concerning differential diagnosis of heart sounds. Decision Tree structures are constructed, using data mining/distillation methods and then are used to classify heart sounds that were recorded from patients that have either Aortic Stenosis (AS) or Mitral Regurgitation (MR). Emphasis is given on the selection of the appropriate features that are adequately independent from the heart sound signal acquisition method. The differentiation capabilities and the classification performance of the fully expanded Decision Tree classifiers and the pruned Decision tree classifiers are studied for this problem. For each constructed Decision Tree classifier the partial classification accuracies for the AS and MR auscultation findings are also estimated.

Περίληψη:
Electronic Government today focuses mainly on offering citizens and enterprises the capability to perform electronically their transactions with the Public Administration and also on the electronic delivery of the currently existing public services over the Internet. However, the huge potential of ICTs has only to a small extent been exploited in the higher level and most critical functions of Public Administration, such as the development, monitoring and evaluation of public policies and programmes, the decision-making for difficult and complex social problems, or for granting licenses and permissions with high social impact, etc. This paper is dealing with the exploitation of the meth-odologies and technologies of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) in these directions. A general functional and technological architecture of a Government to Government (G2G) collaborative environment is de-scribed, for supporting the above high level functions of Public Administration, which has been designed as part of the ICTE-PAN Project. It is based on an ex-tension of the classical Workflow Model, in order to include both ‘Single Per-son Activities’ and ‘Collaborative Activities’, and also on the use of modelling techniques and ontologies, in order to achieve a high level of adaptability to diverse requirements.

Περίληψη:
In this study, Decision Trees Algorithms were used with promising results in various critical problems, concerning heart sound diagnosis. In general this diagnostic problem can be divided in many sub problems, each one dealing either with one morphological characteristic of the heart sound or with difficult to distinguish heart diseases. The sub problems of the discrimination of Aortic Stenosis from Mitral Regurgitation and the discrimination between the second heart sound split, opening snap and third heart sound, are used as case studies. Using signalprocessing methods, we extracted the heart sound feature vector. Relevance analysis was performed using the Uncertainty Coefficient. Then for each heart sound diagnosis sub problem, a Specific Decision Tree (DT) was constructed. Decision Tree pruning was also investigated. Finally, a General Decision Support System Architecture for the Heart Sound Diagnosis problem, is proposed. The partial diagnosis, given by these DT, can be combined using arbitration rules to give the final diagnosis. These rules can be implemented by another DT, or can be based on different methods, algorithms, or even on expert knowledge. All these can lead to an Integrated Decision Support System Architecture for Heart Sound Diagnosis.