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Enhancing Public Sector Service Efficiency by Electronic Commerce

Anna Sell, Erkki Patokorpi, Pirkko Walden, Enhancing Public Sector Service Efficiency by Electronic Commerce. The Electronic Journal of e-Government 4(1), 37-48, 2006.

Abstract:

In Finland the public sector has the principal responsibility for providing for welfare services. The outsourcing of public sector services has been more moderate in Finland than in countries like Great Britain, and as a rule only parts of service production have been outsourced and the municipal authorities have still been involved in, or at least retained a certain degree of control over, the actual production processes.
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In December 2000, the city of Turku, Finland, outsourced its open care grocery shopping to an online grocery retailer. The city officials expected that an outside e-commerce player would among other things bring time savings so that the open care service would be able to focus on caring for the elderly and the disabled at home. This paper examines the expected and realized effect of electronic commerce on the efficiency of the grocery shopping service from the viewpoint of the three main stakeholders: the customers, the employees and the management. The findings are based on employee and customer surveys as well as interviews with the open care management. The research combines both quantitative and qualitative methods. The statistics show that by outsourcing grocery shopping to an electronic commerce player has improved the efficiency of open care, but this efficiency translates into different experiences to each stakeholder. Based on the ethnographical materials the traditional efficiency criteria of outsourcing are partly reinterpreted in order to do justice to all stakeholders.
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The online grocery service has been in many ways a success. Together the private entrepreneur and the social services of Turku have discovered a hidden online market. Although the financial resources and manpower have stayed virtually the same at the same time as the number of customers and the workload has increased, outsourcing has helped in directing the resources where they are most needed: the hard core of open care.

BibTeX entry:

@ARTICLE{jSePaWa06a,
  title = {Enhancing Public Sector Service Efficiency by Electronic Commerce},
  author = {Sell, Anna and Patokorpi, Erkki and Walden, Pirkko},
  journal = {The Electronic Journal of e-Government},
  volume = {4},
  number = {1},
  publisher = {Academic Conferences Limited},
  pages = {37-48},
  year = {2006},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Mobile Commerce

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