Suchergebnisse

Nonprofit organizations are an important pillar of any society, which specifically serve under privileged sections of society. Modern Information and communication technologies have huge potential to benefit the working processes of such organizations but deploying software application in such settings is quite challenging. These challenges emerge due to shortage of skilled employees, limited funds and weak organizational structures. In order to further understand the technological implications in such settings this paper explores the websites of different nonprofit organizations of Pakistan to understand usability problems. In order to gather empirical data, it prepared questionnaire mainly focusing on Jakob Nielson's heuristics. These questionnaires were distributed to final year undergraduate students taking a Human Computer Interaction module. The findings highlight serious usability issues in these websites. These findings are helpful for the nonprofit organizations to improve these websites for better information access.

This article describes a theory-driven evaluation of one component of an intervention to improve the quality of health care at Ugandan public health centres. Patient-centred services have been advocated widely, but such approaches have received little attention in Africa. A cluster randomized trial is evaluating population-level outcomes of an intervention with multiple components, including 'patient-centred services.' A process evaluation was designed within this trial to articulate and evaluate the implementation and programme theories of the intervention. This article evaluates one hypothesized mechanism of change within the programme theory: the impact of the Patient Centred Services component on health-worker communication. The theory-driven approach extended to evaluation of the outcome measures. The study found that the proximal outcome of patient-centred communication was rated 10 percent higher ( p < 0.008) by care seekers consulting with the health workers who were at the intervention health centres compared with those at control health centres. This finding will strengthen interpretation of more distal trial outcomes.

Performance measurement is intended to improve public decision making and organizational performance. But performance measures are by no means always rational tools for problem solving; rather, they are also political instruments. The central question addressed in this article is how performance measurement affects public policy. The aim is to conceptualize the political consequences of performance measurement, and of special concern is how performance systems influence how political decisions are made, the kind of political decisions that are conceivable, and how they are implemented. The literature on the utilization of evaluation and performance measurement is applied to analyse how performance measurement systems affect the political process of goal-setting and implementation. The article concludes that performance measurement may have intended and unintended effects and that it seems to have a retroactive impact on the political decision-making process, as the focus on performance goals entails a kind of reductionism (complex problems are simplified), sequential decision-making processes (with a division in separate policy issues), and short-sighted decisions (based on the need to achieve operational goals). Hence, the politics of performance measurement requires further study.

This article investigates the European Union's evaluation system and its conduciveness to evaluation use. Taking the European Commission's LIFE programme as its case, the article makes an empirical contribution to an emerging focus in the literature on the importance of organization and institutions when analyzing evaluation use. By focusing on the European Union's evaluation system the article finds that evaluation use mainly takes place in the European Commission and less so in the European Parliament and the European Council. The main explanatory factors enabling evaluation use relate to the system's formalization of evaluation implementation and use; these factors ensure evaluation quality, timeliness and capacity in the Commission. At the same time, however, the system's formalization also impedes evaluation use, reducing the direct influence of evaluations on policy-making and effectively 'de-politicizing' programme evaluations and largely limiting their use to the level of programme management.