The development and implementation of E-governance have various issues and challenges, such as severe financial constraints, re-engineering of the existing bureaucratic processes and unavailability of skilled professionals in advanced networking technologies. While the development of applications was constrained due to the disposable resources available with the government, the utilization of such application was constrained due to limited access to the Internet in the developing countries and lack of skill of the citizens as users. The government has to face a number of challenges and address issues while adopting Internet Technology to serve the citizens. Anchal Singh in the paper "Role of Information Technology in Enabling E-Governance" has highlighted some of the issues and challenges. Though the developing countries have reported significant investments in telecommunications, it is not yet clear how these investments will quickly facilitate the common citizen to have an improved access to the Internet. For example, in India though both the private and public investments in the telecommunication sector started sometime back, the reliable and dependable access to the Internet still remains unfulfilled even for people staying in cities.

As organizations specialize in their respective core competencies, there is a scope for outsourcing all or part of the Information Systems (IS) services. There are various reasons why do companies prefer to outsource their products or services. One reason could be that an outsourcing vendor can share its information assets and resources such as mainframes and staffs across various companies and achieve economies of scale. Here, the strategy revolves around cost reduction. The second reason could be that by outsourcing IS function to a third party which has expertise in the required field, it should be possible to deliver better quality services to the internal and external customers. Better quality is achieved through implementing systems that are more reliable and have appropriate features. Here, the strategy is to focus on quality improvements and customer satisfaction. The third reason could be that through executing appropriate contract, organizations can put more pressure on the supplier, instead of doing the same on the internal developers, to deliver a quality product on time. The strategy here is to reduce the risk of failure of the project. Yet, another reason could be that a company can concentrate on its own expertise rather than getting distracted by IS development. This may not workout in some industries such as the financial services sector where IS linked to its core activities. Again the strategy is to enable the organizations to focus on core business. P Sashikala in the paper "Competitive Advantage Using Information Systems Outsourcing: A Framework", has brought out strategic and operational advantages of outsourcing by identifying the underlying drivers for the IS outsourcing decisions. Various processes involved in implementing the outsourcing projects were discussed with emphasis on building relationship with the outsourcers and adding values to the products or services rendered to the customers.

Taguchi's loss function is based on the assumption that each product whose quality characteristics deviate from its intended target value imposes a loss which may be measured in economic values. It recognizes a customer's desires to have a product with consistent quality and a producer's desire to produce a cost-effective product and thereby minimizing the loss to the society. The loss to the society includes both the costs incurred during the production process and during the usage of the product by the customer such as repairing and maintenance costs, and the opportunity costs, etc. The concept of total loss function proposed by Taguchi has drawn attention of both the manufacturing engineers and the financial analysts to look at the quality control process in a fundamentally different way. While the traditional method of computing the quality cost is confined only to the number of parts rejected or reworked, the new approach has an additional dimension of quality concern that a poorly conceived and designed product incurs loss to the society from the developmental stage and continues to incur loss until steps are taken to improve its functional performance. Nikhat Afshan and Sunil Bhardwaj in their article, "Advanced Application of Taguchi's Loss Function", have overviewed various applications in which the loss function approach yielded the implementation of processes to enhance the quality of products and services while minimizing the overall losses.

E-readiness indicates the state of a country's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and the ability of its citizens, organizations and governments to use the same for their benefit. E-readiness index denotes the ranking of a country based on a large number of quantitative and qualitative parameters related to a country's social, political, economic and technological development factors. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has been publishing annual e-readiness ranking of the world's largest economies since 2000 and evaluating the technological, economic, political and social assets of the countries. Fuzzy logic based methods were used for building tools to measure e-readiness of a country since the logic allows to handle heterogeneous indicators with imprecise values assigned to them. L Pradhan, B B Mohapatra, S Dehuri and A K Panda in "Integration of Fuzzy and Genetic Algorithm for E-Readiness" have proposed a hybrid method of using genetic algorithm and fuzzy logic to measure the e-readiness index. The integration of these two methods optimizes the large number of rules involved. The effectiveness of the hybrid method proposed is demonstrated using the compiled data and published by the EIU. The accuracy of the proposed method is done by tabulating the comparative performance of the proposed method with the average score obtained by EIU.

-- M Raja
Consulting Editor