Abstract not found

The adoption and effective use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has the potential to yield significant benefits in the least developed countries (LDCs), which are recognized as the most vulnerable in the international community. The aim of this study was to investigate strategies to advance the use of ICT in the public sector in LDCs, with the aim of improving services and outcomes for government and citizens. A multi-level framework for analysis was developed, consistent with a structuration-type theoretical approach. A meta-analysis of data gathered in a UN study of egovernment readiness was performed, focussing on the developing countries that have greatly improved their relative positions recently. In general, the findings support the multi-level approach. At the national level, a low level of economic development, poor infrastructure and political unrest are inhibitors of public sector ICT progress. At a base level, access by individuals and organizations to ICT tools and IT-related education is necessary for e-government to be feasible. Some strategies were observed to be linked to progress with e-government across a number of developing countries: leadership and willingness to initiate change within the government sector, an incremental, step-by-step approach to development, and some sensitivity to local and cultural needs.

Information security policies can be considered as guidelines and used as a starting point to create a security structure within an organization. Although practitioners continuously emphasize the importance of such policies, information system scholars have not paid the required attention to this context from the cross-cultural perspective. The purpose of this study is to look at the cultural and institutional differences of a multinational company (MNC) and its subsidiaries, and discuss how these differences affect the MNC’s strategy to enforce corporate information security policies to its subsidiaries in different cultural settings. The proposed framework considers the effects of the cultural distance, national economy, institutional distance, and stickiness of the knowledge transfer on the process of enforcing information security policies from the parent company to its subsidiaries.