Joined-Up ICT Innovation in Government: An analysis of the creation of eIDM systems from an Advocacy Coalition and social capital perspective

This chapter introduces the subject of this thesis – joined-up ICT innovation in the public sector. The first section demonstrates that scientists and policy makers fully agree that ICT innovation should be a joint effort involving multiple public sector actors. To solve today’s urgent social problems, specific government agencies have to jointly rethink and improve practices – including their ICTs. However, as section two demonstrates, there are some severe barriers to joined-up ICT innovation. Evaluation studies consistently show that government agencies often fail to realize cooperative change. The third section provides a review of literature that attempts to explain the difficulties. The conclusion is that current public administration theories merely provide a fragmented picture of determining variables. The Advocacy Coalition Framework is introduced as it aims to overcome this theoretical fragmentation. The framework offers a broad overview of all kinds of factors that determine policy change. A confrontation between the variables of the model and innovation literature reveals strong similarities, which indicate that the model can also be applied to ‘innovation’. The fourth section identifies a critique of the social subsystem of the model. Social capital theory is introduced in order to address this critique as it can contribute to the operationalisation of the Advocacy Coalition Framework and hence strengthen its explanatory value. In section five, the unit of analysis is confined to a specific joined-up ICT innovation, namely the joint development of electronic identification systems. Section six defines the central research question, which combines the key elements: (a) the difficulties of joined-up ICT innovations, (b) the use of the Advocacy Coalition Framework to explain those difficulties and (c) social capital theory to enhance the framework. The chapter concludes with the theoretical and social relevance of the study