Guest editorial
| Published date | 12 November 2018 |
| Pages | 354-356 |
| Date | 12 November 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-11-2018-075 |
| Author | Pedro Isaías,Tomayess Issa,Piet Kommers |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information & communications technology |
Guest editorial
Digital economy and the role of technologies, people and processes in society
Don Tapscott’s wrotein 1997 the best-seller titledThe Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in
the Age of Networked Intelligence. In the Digital Economy, three key aspects emerge –
technologies, people and processes. This special issue aims to address technologies (i.e.
Information Systems/Information Technologies, digital smart technologies), people and
processes within Digital Economy initiatives, such as e-Business, e-Learning and e-Society
Developments. The three key aspectsmentioned –technologies, people and processes –are
crucial for the development and growth of the current and future Digital Economy.
Information and Communication technology is being deployed to assist people and entities
to cooperate more meaningfully within and across different fields. Its disruptive potential
transforms the core of central areas of society and provides them with unprecedented
opportunities for reinvention and improvement. As the Digital Economy evolves via
innovation and progressive thinking, it finds answers to the challenges that arise in a
society that is a permanentstate of change.
This special issue of the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society
entitled “Digital Economy and the role of Technologies, People and Processes in Society”
comprises a collection of five papers that depict forward-looking research on the various
facets of technology and its impact on several areas of society, namely business and
education. The guest editors selected these papers from the Internet Technologies and
Society 2017 Conference (ITS 2017) and the International Conference on Educational
Technologies 2017 (ICEduTech 2017), which were both held in Sydney, Australia. The
selection of the papers was based on their conference version’sreviews and their suitability
to the purview of the journal. The original conference papers have been extended
significantly and resubmittedto peer review to ensure a high publication standard.
The first contribution “Frameworkfor enhancing online working- together relations”,by
Ana Hol, Mousa Abu Kashef and Athula Ginige proposes a novel frameworkto identify the
effectiveness of existing technological applications in the context of working-together
relations. Collaborative work is central for the operational routines of private, public and
non-profit institutions. As technology evolves to facilitate innovative approaches to
communication and collaboration, it is important to assess how successful they are in
serving the users collaborative practices and needs. With the aim of identifying the
characteristicsthat determine the success of online applications in supportingusers to work-
together, the authors performedan inductive analysis of pertinent literature and 21 working-
together online applications.Their findings highlighted four categories of working-together
relations: networking, coordination, cooperation and collaboration. Those categories were
then organised in view of ninecharacteristics (relationship style, time commitment,primary
focus, mutual sharing of resources, sharing of turf, level of trust, risks and responsibilities,
rewards and achieving a common purpose) and four primary processes (exchanging
information, altering activities, sharing resources and enhancing the capacity of another).
The authors further determined that three characteristics were particularly influential for
working-together relations: trust, risk and rewards. The successful applications for
collaboration showed that mechanisms for risk minimisation assumed a predominant role
until the moment where trust was established. At the same time, highrewards are likely to
cause users to take higher risks. Reflecting about the interaction among these three
JICES
16,4
354
Journalof Information,
Communicationand Ethics in
Society
Vol.16 No. 4, 2018
pp. 354-356
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1477-996X
DOI 10.1108/JICES-11-2018-075
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