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- Title
- Information systems management and outsourcing: A study of American city governments.
- Creator
- Kim, Yong-Mi, Florida Atlantic University, Thai, Khi V.
- Abstract/Description
-
An information system is defined as "a system that uses information technology to capture, transmit, store, retrieve, manipulate, or display information used in one or more business processes" (Alter, 1996, p. 61). The use of information systems (IS) in local governments has dramatically increased and diversified over the past ten years. Because IS expenditures are expected to increase, IS management will be a key issue in city governments. In order to explore IS management and outsourcing in...
Show moreAn information system is defined as "a system that uses information technology to capture, transmit, store, retrieve, manipulate, or display information used in one or more business processes" (Alter, 1996, p. 61). The use of information systems (IS) in local governments has dramatically increased and diversified over the past ten years. Because IS expenditures are expected to increase, IS management will be a key issue in city governments. In order to explore IS management and outsourcing in American city governments, three theoretical perspectives and three models are employed. The three theoretical perspectives influencing IS outsourcing are (1) economic factors, (2) diffusion of innovation, and (3) organizational factors. The three models focus on three factors: (1) the percentage of total city budget allocated to total IS expenditure, (2) the percentage of total IS budget allocated to IS outsourcing expenditures, and (3) the percentage of total IS budget allocated to each IS function. In Model 1, the findings show that the population size of city government is inversely related to the total percentage of city budget allocated to total IS expenditures: as the population size of city government increases, the percentage of the total budget of the city government allocated to IS expenditures decreases. In Model 2, three theories to explain decisions regarding IS outsourcing are used. Economic factors influencing IS outsourcing decisions are when: (1) pressure to reduce cost is important, (2) access to cutting-edge technology is important, (3) IS requires a long time for the in-house staff to learn, and, (4) IS facilities are not available. However, city administrators did not express a concern about the loss of control of strategic applications, about being locked into a contract, or even about added costs for business or technology changes when their IS is outsourced. Theories of innovation diffusion includes several factors. The findings show that city IS administrators do learn about IS outsourcing from neighboring governments. Organizational factors that can potentially influence the IS outsourcing decision include the type and population size of city government, available resources, and internal transaction costs. IS outsourcing expenditure as a percentage of total IS expenditure does not vary with the type and size of city government, a finding which requires further investigation. The analysis of different types and sizes of city governments appears in Model 3. When more resources are available to the IS department, the city government is likely to hire IS experts, provide facilities, and engage in a higher rate of insourcing. Internal transaction costs measured by time delays are inversely related to the expenditures on IS outsourcing. In Model 3, IS outsourcing expenditure by function as a percentage of total IS expenditure, three theoretical perspectives are employed to explain this analysis. In the category of economic factors influencing IS outsourcing, asset-non specific IS functions such as data processing/operations and network/telecommunications are outsourced in order to reduce cost while asset-specific IS functions, such as application development/maintenance, are outsourced in order to gain access to cutting-edge technology. With respect to whether theories of innovation diffusion explain the IS outsourcing decision, the findings show that city governments investigate other neighboring governments to determine whether there have been IS outsourcing decisions in the areas of data processing/operations, network/telecommunication, and application development/maintenance. According to the findings, first, small city governments tend to allocate a higher IS outsourcing expenditure as a percentage of total IS expenditure to than do large city governments. Second, large city governments tend to allocate a lower percentage of IS outsourcing expenditure to systems planning/management because large city governments tend to set up this IS function within the organization and, thus, spend money on maintaining this function. Third, the council-manager type of city governments tend to allocate a higher rate of IS outsourcing expenditure to network/telecommunication and application development/maintenance than do the mayor-council type of city governments.
Show less - Date Issued
- 1998
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/12582
- Subject Headings
- Information resources management, Contracting out
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- Title
- An analysis of voluntary annual report disclosures of outsourcing: determinants and firm performance.
- Creator
- Premuroso, Ronald F., Florida Atlantic University, College of Business, School of Accounting
- Abstract/Description
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Outsourcing has become a significant factor in the U.S. economy over the past two decades. Annual report disclosures made by a firm related to outsourcing are voluntary disclosures. Understanding the determinants and firm performance implications of initial outsourcing annual report disclosures is important to capital market providers, standards developers, and to the firms themselves. I identify and study firms making initial voluntary disclosures of outsourcing in their annual reports on...
Show moreOutsourcing has become a significant factor in the U.S. economy over the past two decades. Annual report disclosures made by a firm related to outsourcing are voluntary disclosures. Understanding the determinants and firm performance implications of initial outsourcing annual report disclosures is important to capital market providers, standards developers, and to the firms themselves. I identify and study firms making initial voluntary disclosures of outsourcing in their annual reports on Form 10-K between 1993 and 2003 after they make non-annual report related public disclosures. Specifically, I investigate if determinants of the initial annual report disclosure decision and subsequent performance are associated with the initial disclosure. This study contends managers disclose information related to outsourcing in their annual reports to reduce information asymmetry and to minimize agency costs. I hypothesize and develop a firm-related variable commonly used in agency theory to test this assertion. Signaling theory and voluntary disclosure theory also explain the determinants for firm voluntary outsourcing annual report disclosures. I develop several hypotheses defining determinants potentially associated with the likelihood of initial annual report outsourcing disclosure decisions, and test these determinants using a conditional logistic regression model and a matched-pair group of firms making public outsourcing disclosures but not making annual report disclosure. Using signaling theory, I also develop hypotheses testing if the initial outsourcing annual report disclosure sends a signal regarding future firm performance--specifically testing firm performance measures related to profitability and cash flow. I test these hypotheses using OLS models and the same matched-pair group of firms. I find firms with high levels of debt, high total cost ratios, and high returns on assets are more likely to make initial annual report outsourcing disclosure., I also find firms may signal improvements in future levels of profitability when making the initial annual report outsourcing disclosure.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2008
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/FAU/77650
- Subject Headings
- Offshore outsourcing, Contracting out, Economic aspects, Managerial economics, Organizational effectiveness
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- Title
- Prison privatization in the United States: a new strategy for racial control.
- Creator
- Mercadal-Sabbagh, Gertrudis, Araghi, Farshad A., Florida Atlantic University, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Department of Sociology
- Abstract/Description
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There has been a stunning build-up of prisons and a growing trend in prison privatization in the last 30 years, including the rise of maximum security units. The goal of my dissertation is to understand the ideological, historic, political, and economic processes behind the changes in the criminal justice system of the United States. I analyze this problem from multiple angles—labor and policy history, discourse and public opinion, and race in America. The aim of this analysis is to uncover...
Show moreThere has been a stunning build-up of prisons and a growing trend in prison privatization in the last 30 years, including the rise of maximum security units. The goal of my dissertation is to understand the ideological, historic, political, and economic processes behind the changes in the criminal justice system of the United States. I analyze this problem from multiple angles—labor and policy history, discourse and public opinion, and race in America. The aim of this analysis is to uncover the reasons why crime legislation became progressively more punitive, reaction to African Americans gains in post-Civil Rights more hostile, and the manifold ways in which these phenomena drive the expansion of the prison system and its increasing privatization. In the process of this expansion, a racial caste system which oppresses young African Americans and people of color has become recast and entrenched. Specifically, I offer the notion that in the last three decades, punitive crime legislation focused on African Americans and served to deal with labor needs and racial conflict with harsher penal legislation; in doing so, it depoliticized race, institutionalized racial practices, and served the interests of private prison businesses in new ways oppressive ways. Using interdisciplinary methods which weave together qualitative and quantitative analysis, I find that punitive crime policies in the last thirty years used the concept of crime as political currency by government officials in order to appear tough on crime, and by business representatives interested in exploiting the prison industry. The conflation of business and political interests, and the recasting of crime as a race problem, served to taint public institutions and media dissemination with racist imperatives which stereotyped poor African Americans. The end result is a constant re-positioning of young black males as fodder for economic exploitation. The dissertation also addresses the high cost of imprisonment and the multiple social problems brought from shifting inmates from wards of the State to profit-making opportunities in the hands of private entrepreneurs. The result is high numbers of recidivism, and a growing underclass of people who will always be unemployed or underemployed and return to low income communities that suffer from the endless cycle of poverty and imprisonment.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2014
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00004218, http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00004218
- Subject Headings
- Corrections -- Contracting out, Prison administration, Prisons and race relations, Privatization
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- Title
- Optimizing Investments in Apparel Supply Chains: A Decision Model for Country Selection.
- Creator
- Kra, Jason E., Menachof, David, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Information Technology and Operations Management, College of Business
- Abstract/Description
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Supply chain challenges have been significantly affected by both demand and supply on a global level. The selection of manufacturing countries has become critical to firms and their boards, even more so coming out of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The present study focuses on how firms select countries and regions to de-risk future global apparel sourcing, as countries that have been dependable in the past may not be in the future based on frequent environmental jolts, legacy supply chain...
Show moreSupply chain challenges have been significantly affected by both demand and supply on a global level. The selection of manufacturing countries has become critical to firms and their boards, even more so coming out of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The present study focuses on how firms select countries and regions to de-risk future global apparel sourcing, as countries that have been dependable in the past may not be in the future based on frequent environmental jolts, legacy supply chain failures, shifting government policy, and extreme volatility. The result of this study is a decision model for manufacturing country selection. This research was focused on the apparel industry; however, further research may indicate that it is applicable to other industries. A group of criteria was selected, the relative significance of these criterion was determined using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The AHP methodology was applied in a case study as a decision-making tool to enable decision-makers to assess the most suitable countries for manufacturing country selection. The result of this study is a decision model for manufacturing country selection based on multiple criteria weighted by industry experts using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). In developing the model we utilize data from 61 countries representing over 95% of all the global apparel exports, with criteria utilized originating from 10 indices.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2023
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00014226
- Subject Headings
- Supply chain management, Business logistics, Decision making, Contracting out
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- Title
- Democratic accountability for outsourced government services.
- Creator
- Keeler, Rebecca L., College for Design and Social Inquiry, School of Public Administration
- Abstract/Description
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Public administration scholars have raised serious concerns about loss of democratic accountability when government services are outsourced to private forprofit businesses because of the very different values and missions of the two sectors. Particular concern for democratic accountability arises when administrative discretion is delegated to governments' private sector agents. Furthermore, if contractors may adversely impact individual rights or interests, or may adversely impact vulnerable...
Show morePublic administration scholars have raised serious concerns about loss of democratic accountability when government services are outsourced to private forprofit businesses because of the very different values and missions of the two sectors. Particular concern for democratic accountability arises when administrative discretion is delegated to governments' private sector agents. Furthermore, if contractors may adversely impact individual rights or interests, or may adversely impact vulnerable populations, special democratic responsibilities arise. It is these three features of outsourcing transactions that constitute the elements of the proposed framework used in this research in order to assess need for heightened attention to democratic accountability. Some scholars argue for application of constitutional and administrative law norms to some government contractors., Public service ethics and transparency requirements found in administrative law are heavily value-laden and mission-driven. If applied to certain government contractors, they can help to bridge the sectors' mission and value differences, thus enhancing democratic accountability for the services performed by governments' private sector agents. This research offers an analytical framework for identifying features of outsourcing transactions that call for enhanced democratic accountability measures such as ethics and transparency requirements, and explores the application of ethics and transparency requirements to governments' contractors. Contracts and laws governing three Florida local government service categories were subjected to close systematic textual and legal analysis: residential trash collection, building code inspection, and inmate health care., The analysis revealed circumstances calling for greater attention to democratic accountability in that the selected outsourcing transactions delegated to contractors the authority to exercise police power, make public policy, and commit expenditures of public funds. Contracts and laws haphazardly required contractors to abide by public service ethics and transparency requirements, thus beginning to adapt the mission and value system of their private sector agents to those of government.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2010
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/FAU/1927311
- Subject Headings
- Contracting out, Privatization, Public administration, Decision making, Public contracts, Management
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- Title
- Municipal privatization: a case study of Sandy Springs, Georgia.
- Creator
- Stubbs, Tyler., Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College
- Abstract/Description
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Governments across the country have been outsourcing traditional government services at an ever-increasing rate. Researchers debate the efficiency of privatization, and evidence exists both for and against increased private production of public goods. At the local level of government, a growing trend is privatization in the form of public-private partnerships. To determine the efficiency of these partnerships between municipal governments and private companies, this study examines the "most"...
Show moreGovernments across the country have been outsourcing traditional government services at an ever-increasing rate. Researchers debate the efficiency of privatization, and evidence exists both for and against increased private production of public goods. At the local level of government, a growing trend is privatization in the form of public-private partnerships. To determine the efficiency of these partnerships between municipal governments and private companies, this study examines the "most" privatized city in the United States, Sandy Springs, Georgia. I compared spending in Sandy Springs to five similar nearby cities and derived cost estimates of government services. I found that the "Sandy Springs Model" of local government lowered costs and increased efficiency when compared to traditional municipalities.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2008
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/FAU/210003
- Subject Headings
- Municipal government, Municipal services, Contracting out, Privatization, Government business enterprises, Management
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- Title
- An analysis of accountability in public-private health care programs serving vulnerable populations.
- Creator
- Cleare, Thomas W., School of Public Administration, College for Design and Social Inquiry
- Abstract/Description
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References to accountability are common throughout public administration literature. However, a clear model to assess accountability in government programs is not fully developed. This research fills this gap and provides policymakers with a tool they can use to assess accountability in both public and contracted programs and enables them to make more informed contracting-out decisions. In addition, the Integrated Accountability Framework introduced in this research will serve as a guideline...
Show moreReferences to accountability are common throughout public administration literature. However, a clear model to assess accountability in government programs is not fully developed. This research fills this gap and provides policymakers with a tool they can use to assess accountability in both public and contracted programs and enables them to make more informed contracting-out decisions. In addition, the Integrated Accountability Framework introduced in this research will serve as a guideline for how public administrators can improve accountability in the programs they administer and oversee. For the public and private health care programs analyzed in this study, the findings indicate that the publicly delivered programs provided more accountability to the vulnerable populations served than the contracted-out health care programs.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2011
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/FAU/3169917
- Subject Headings
- Health services administration, Public administration, Moral and ethical aspects, Municiipal services, Contracting out, Administrative responsibility
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- Title
- An assessment of the organizational effectiveness of faith-based and secular community development corporations in the provision of economic development and other services.
- Creator
- Yacinthe, Natacha Jasmine, Florida Atlantic University, Washington, Charles W.
- Abstract/Description
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This dissertation develops an approach and a model for assessing the effectiveness of faith-based and secular community development corporations (CDCs) in the provision of economic development and other services. This dissertation contends that faith-based and secular CDCs are essentially comparable entities whose characteristics and functions are virtually indistinguishable, thus to speak of organizational effectiveness of CDCs is sufficient to encompass both faith-based and secular CDCs....
Show moreThis dissertation develops an approach and a model for assessing the effectiveness of faith-based and secular community development corporations (CDCs) in the provision of economic development and other services. This dissertation contends that faith-based and secular CDCs are essentially comparable entities whose characteristics and functions are virtually indistinguishable, thus to speak of organizational effectiveness of CDCs is sufficient to encompass both faith-based and secular CDCs. The study uses an empirical approach, directed by the literature, to discover the characteristics and functions of faith-based and secular CDCs, the extent to which they are involved in economic development activities, and to determine the key factors that are presumed to contribute to their effectiveness. A regression model is developed employing variables and data resulting from a survey of CDCs in the South Florida area to predict and explain the variance in the subjective rating of the perception of organizational effectiveness by executive directors and managers of CDCs in the study population. The study tests a number of hypotheses that are designed to explain the influence of certain variables on organizational effectiveness and discovers a number of factors that are statistically significant in influencing perceived effectiveness. It proposes future areas of research that build upon the current research and may lead to even better understanding of the factors influencing organizational effectiveness of CDCs.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2004
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/12106
- Subject Headings
- Human Services--Contracting Out--United States, Church Charities--Government Policy--United States, Federal Aid to Human Services--United States, Church and State--United States, Community Development--United States, Economic Development Projects--United States
- Format
- Document (PDF)