Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8.3.2.1 The Road Sign Database
The RSD contains all road signs, their characteristics, and road positions. The oppor-
tunity to launch this IS politically was a huge traffic obstruction in Bruges. A bridge
was hit by a truck as there was no road sign about the bridge's height. The Flemish
department for Mobility and Public Works created the database and inventoried
the road signs. It then asked its 308 municipalities (for the municipal roads) and the
Flemish Agency for Roads and Traffic (for the regional roads) to keep the database
up-to-date. However, they do not (Vlaams Parlement, 2008).
8.3.2.2 The Environmental Complaints
Registration and Monitoring System
The Flemish environmental department created ECREMOS (MKROS in Dutch)
because a central digital overview of environmental complaints was lacking. This
IS contains complaints of Flemish municipalities that signed an agreement with
the Flemish government. The police and the Flemish environmental inspection
were asked to use ECREMOS. Environmental complaints cover odor nuisance,
light/noise/soil, and air pollution. Registration in this IS was one of a series of envi-
ronmental policy criteria: If municipalities met these criteria, they were rewarded
financially. The agreement ended in December 2013. In 2014, municipalities were
asked to keep ECREMOS up-to-date without financial rewards. The Flemish gov-
ernment assumed that ECREMOS was sufficiently accepted. However, the use of
this IS dropped severely.
8.3.3 Data Collection
Researchers' bias can be counteracted by using multiple sources (Benbasat et al.,
1987). We employed a multiple data collection method during our case studies: The
sequence of events of the cases is reconstructed via legislation, policy documents,
and interviews. The implementation of an IS typically takes place over a longer
period of time, and it involves multiple actors and may be influenced by unexpected
events. A case study methodology is therefore well suited to identify key events and
actors and for linking them in a causal chain.
For both cases, the same 130 municipalities were questioned by the same
researcher. They were asked about their system usage, their satisfaction with it, and
if they wanted to change anything. We first interviewed 20 municipalities face-to-
face. We noticed that respondents did not use the system or seemed not very fond
of it. Was this also the case for other municipalities? We additionally questioned
110 Municipal Civil Servants by telephone with standardized open questions. We
interviewed the actual users of the IS: mobility civil servants for the RSD and envi-
ronmental civil servants for ECREMOS. Overall, we interviewed more than one
third of the Flemish municipalities. Although the results could be slightly different
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