ICT-enabled co-production of public services: Barriers and enablers. A systematic review

ABSTRACT: Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being heralded by governments and international organizations as a means of augmenting co-production of public services and a number of major initiatives are being rolled out around the world. In parallel to these activities, a body of scholarly work is emerging that investigates the extent to which ICTs enable, or, pose a barrier to, public service co-production. This paper performs the first systematic review of this emerging literature, and provides insights into the main structural and cultural factors which act as an enabler of, or barrier to, ICT-enabled co-production across government and citizens world-wide.The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 726755

Integrating Across Sustainability, Political, and Administrative Spheres: A Longitudinal Study of Actors’ Engagement in Open Data Ecosystems in Three Canadian Cities

Over the last decade, cities around the world have embraced the open data movement by launching open data portals. To successfully derive benefits from these initiatives, various individual and organizational actors need to engage with them. These actors undertake activities supporting data publication and dissemination in open data ecosystems. In this paper, we focus on enhancing the IS community’s contribution to the open data movement by conducting a longitudinal, qualitative archival analysis of open data initiatives in three Canadian cities: Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal. Combining two complementary models of open data and information ecosystems, we explore how actors engage in and across the sustainability, political, and administrative spheres to influence open data initiatives. Our findings suggest most actors operate in a single sphere but that some can operate across two or all three spheres to become ecosystem anchors. Through these sphere-spanning efforts, ecosystem anchors help to shape the way in which open data initiatives evolve. We provide a theoretically grounded explanation of processes in successful open data initiatives and suggest new directions for practice

Street-Level Bureaucrats und Intermediäre: Beziehung auf Augenhöhe?

Der Artikel untersucht die Beziehung zwischen Verwaltung und Intermediären, also von Klienten beauftragte Dritte, die die Interaktion mit den Verwaltungen übernehmen. Hierbei wird die ambivalente Rolle diskutiert, die diese Intermediäre im Zusammenwirken mit den Street-Level Bureaucrats (SLB) einnehmen. Auf Basis einer vergleichenden Fallstudie zweier Politikfelder werden Faktoren identifiziert, die die Interaktion zwischen beiden Akteuren charakterisieren. Auf Basis einer transaktionskostentheoretischen Perspektive werden vor allem die Spezialisierung und die Aggregationsfunktion von Intermediären als Vorteile für SLB identifiziert, wodurch Prozesse schneller und effizienter abgewickelt werden können. Darüber hinaus prägen aber vor allem zwei Faktoren die Interaktion maßgeblich: Das Selbstbild der Street- Level Bureaucrats sowie das Vertrauen in den Intermediären. Das dynamische Zusammenspiel dieser Faktoren wird in der vorliegenden Studie beschrieben.This article investigates the relationship between administrations and intermediaries, third parties that are assigned by clients to take care of interactions with administrations. Hereby, the quite ambivalent role of those intermediaries is discussed. Building on data from a comparative case study, we identify factors that shape the nature of the interaction. From a transaction cost perspective, specialization as well as aggregation yield benefits for the street-level bureaucrat such as acceleration of processes. Beyond that, two factors stand out in characterizing the relationship: the self-perceived role of street-level bureaucrats as well as the trust in the specific intermediary. The dynamic interaction of both factors is described in the present study