A Realist Perspective on AI-era Public Management

Recent years have witnessed a number of significant ideas and approaches to addressing the shortcomings of the New Public Management paradigm. Three of these recent ideas, which include Digital Era Governance, Public Value Management, and New Public Governance, emphasise partnerships collaboration and engagement of citizens; performance governance and innovation and recognize the transformational potentials of digital technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the digital technologies attracting the greatest interest in public administration in terms of its potential impact. There are already a number of reports on how AI is being deployed in the public sector with good outcomes. By employing a realist review approach, this study investigates the specific mechanisms across post-NPM, organisational, individual and innovation contexts which are associated with positive outcomes from AI initiatives in the public sector. The study further examined the specific applications of AI initiatives within Post-NPM agendas. Our findings provide some empirical evidence for a better understanding of the conditions and where to target AI-based solutions in post-NPM context for positive outcomes

From experimentation to public service delivery in social media. An analysis of institutionalization dynamics in Dutch local governments

Social media is being used by a large part of local administrations. As a highly disruptive adopted innovation, it is important to understand the process of institutionalization through empirical variables. This paper studies the Dutch case to analyze to what extent social media technologies have being institutionalized within major city councils in Netherlands. The study tries to answer the following research question: What is the level of institutionalization of social media in Dutch city councils with more than 50,000 inhabitants? Taking this into account, this work is based on two analytical levels: on the one hand, it performs a comparative analysis of Dutch city councils that responded to a survey on social media institutionalization. On the other hand, based on previous descriptive empirical results, the paper studies Utrecht as a case of success to analyze the level of social media institutionalization through Social Network Analysis and automated natural language processing with data crawled from Twitter. Overall, results show that social media institutionalization in Dutch city councils has been high, developing decentralized practices with formal commitments for social media use and with a high sense of leadership, showing interesting participatory and public service delivery logics. At the same time, the case of Utrecht confirms that a high level of institutionalization requires management capabilities and goals definition and implementation, including a conversational approach to citizens, and an emerging approach to public service delivery

Towards a Smart Sustainable City Roadmap : Identifying Competency Gaps

This workshop of the CAP4CITY (Erasmus+ Strengthening Governance Capacity for Smart Sustainable Cities) project is to promote and stimulate the discussion and networking in the area of Digital Government. Smart Sustainable Cities and related concepts of Digital, Intelligent and Smart Cities represent a progression of how cities around the world apply digital technology to serve their populations, pursue sustainable socio-economic development, and transform themselves in the process, and require strong capacity for public governance in the digital world. In order to identify the gaps concerning missing knowledge and training needs in this area we propose to validate a Smart Sustainable Cities roadmap through a scenario-building approach.Trabajo publicado en Chen, Y. C., Salem, F., Zuiderwijk, A. (eds.). dg.o 2019: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. Association for Computing Machinery: New York, 2019.Facultad de Informátic

The changing role of Customs:Customs aligning with supply chain and information management

The World Customs Organization (WCO) Framework of Standards to Secure andFacilitate Global Trade (SAFE) introduced concepts of supply chain supervision and authorised operator schemes. While it has been implemented in many countries, supply chain supervision still requires further exploration and development. In this article we present a vision on how the role of Customs could change in the coming years, taking into account innovations in supply chain management and information technology. We present how the Customs Administration of The Netherlands adapts their supervision, based on these innovations. The innovations range from the data pipeline to collect extra data to cross-validate customs declarations, the use of big data and data analytics, new advances in detection technology, handheld apps to check goods and drones to support surveillance

Problem Conceptualization as a Foundation of Data Analytics in Local Governments: Lessons from the City of Syracuse, New York

The use data and data analytics (DA) has been attracting the attention of academics and practitioners in the public sector and is sometimes seen as a potential strategy for process and service innovation. While research on the many possible uses of data have clearly increased - open data, big data, data analytics- empirical research on the socio-technical process that local governments followed when using data analytics to improve services and policies is still scarce. Based on existing literature about data analytics in the public sector and the data lifecycle concept, this paper examines how data analytics is actually used in a local government and what are the main steps in this process. It analyzes the experience of a mid-size American city that had a dedicated task force to data analytics use to support decision making at the local level – Syracuse, New York. Findings suggest that data analytics as a process not only involves data analysis and representations (such as visualizations), but also data collection and cleaning. Further, it seems clear that the conceptualization of the problem is a critical step in producing meaningful data analytics, but also in thinking about innovations even when data is not readily available

Distributed Ledger Technology for the systematic Investigation and Reduction of Information Asymmetry in Collaborative Networks

Costs, risks and inefficiencies in Collaborative Networks (CNs) resulting from information asymmetries have been discussed in the scientific community for years. In this work, supply chain networks, as common representative of CNs, are used as object of investigation. Therein, problems and requirements of interorganizational information exchange are elaborated as well as the potential role Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) could play to address them. As major challenge, convincing all relevant network partners to resolve asymmetric information by sharing sensitive data is identified. To face this issue, the value of shared information is prioritized as a motivational aspect. Finally, we propose a search process to systematically assess the benefits of information sharing in collaborative networks. To coordinate and implement this process regarding the derived requirements of CNs we propose system components based on DLT design patterns

Smart Technology and the Emergence of Algorithmic Bureaucracy:Artificial Intelligence in UK Local Authorities

In recent years, local authorities in the UK have begun to adopt a variety of ‘smart’ technological changes to enhance service delivery. These changes are producing profound impacts on the structure of public administration. Focusing on the particular case of artificial intelligence, specifically autonomous agents and predictive analytics, a combination of desk research, a survey questionnaire, and interviews were used to better understand the extent and nature of these changes in local government. Findings suggest that local authorities are beginning to adopt smart technologies and that these technologies are having an unanticipated impact on how public administrators and computational algorithms become imbricated in the delivery of public services. This imbrication is described as algorithmic bureaucracy and it provides a framework within which to explore how these technologies transform both the socio‐technical relationship between workers and their tools, as well as the ways that work is organized in the public sector

Populism, Twitter, and COVID-19: narrative, fantasies, and desires

10.3390/socsci10080294During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on the construction of social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes the fantasmatic dimension of political discourse from Donald Trump's and Jair Bolsonaro's Twitter accounts between 1 March and 31 May. To do so, it applies a Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The study findings show that in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the main beatific and horrific subjects remain the core populist signifiers: the people and the elite. While Bolsonaro's narrative was predominantly beatific, centered on the government, Trump's was mostly horrific, centered on the elite. Trump signified the pandemic as a subject and an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed it as a circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined the people as working people, therefore their concerns about the pandemic were focused on the people's ability to work

Policy making and artificial intelligence in Scotland

The article presents an exploratory qualitative single case study about whether and how artificial intelligence (AI) is used by the Scottish Government, about the key concerns relating to its usage, and about obstacles to, and drivers of AI usage. Besides the academic literature and published reports, the analysis rests on 12 semi-structured interviews. Interviewees include Scottish Government employees, experts from academia and representatives of commercial and non-commercial AI and Big Data organisations. The article finds that the Scottish Government has, so far, made little use of AI. Currently, AI is used in very limited ways in process automation and for gaining ‘cognitive insights’ with the human in control. There are no ‘strategic’ AI applications where advanced reasoning and ‘decision-making by algorithm’ play a role. Data-driven e-policy making is not currently on the cards. The reasons are the Scottish Government’s wariness of AI, a lack of ‘digital maturity’ (concerning Big Data and digital infrastructure, but also expertise) in the public sector, and ethical concerns around the use of AI. Governments need to conduct a debate about the extent of AI usage to avoid ‘AI creep’ in their institutions and to assure that AI does not have negative consequences for democracy