Public sector readiness for digital preservation in New Zealand: The rate of adoption of an innovation in records management practices

Recent legislation in New Zealand has placed statutory obligations on its government organizations to introduce sound records management practices and to ensure long-term access to their digital records. To obtain a base level of knowledge on current digital preservation practices and on awareness of digital preservation issues, an online survey was conducted of the nation's government organizations in March 2006. The survey, which achieved a response rate of 42.4%, found that most organizations were knowledgeable about basic aspects of their digital resources but their awareness of digital preservation was generally low, and digital preservation activity was modest overall. To identify possible reasons for this situation, Rogers' (Diffusion of innovations. 5th ed. New York: Free Press. 2003) Diffusion of Innovations model is used to discuss digital preservation as an innovation and the level of readiness for digital preservation as the innovation's rate of adoption. The paper concludes by using Rogers' model as the basis for making recommendations aimed at helping the government's lead agencies to increase New Zealand's public sector readiness for digital preservation.     

One tool to rule? – A field experimental longitudinal study on the costs and benefits of mobile device usage in public agencies

With the rising number of mobile technologies used in work- and private-life domains, opportunities, and challenges of mobile device usage in daily lives arise. Against this background, we strive to investigate how corporately provided mobile devices, i.e., tablets, affect work-life conflict and innovation behavior of public sector employees over time. We analyze employees in German public agencies due to their high intrinsic motivation goals alongside strict working schedules, regulations, and payments in contrast to the employees of the private sector. Our research pursues a sequential explorative multi-method approach of conducting a field experiment with qualitative and quantitative data. Twenty employees were divided into two equal groups: 1.) employees with tablets, 2.) employees without tablets. After analyzing the interviews and survey data using methods from grounded theory, we found that a) digital competences can create a bottleneck for employees' innovation behavior, b) corporately provided mobile devices (COPE) decrease employees work-life conflict despite increasing their workload, and c) COPE-IT can support innovation behavior of employees in public agencies, assisting them in keeping up their efficient work when work demands are high. All these effects can be mediated by the development of employee's ownership towards their COPE-IT.     

What can open innovation be used for and how does it create value?

Societies face difficult challenges which require responses that go beyond the innovation capability of most public sector organisations. Open approaches to public sector innovation that exploits digital technologies have been proposed for some years to close this gap, but our knowledge of the use and outcome of using open innovation in this context is limited. This research takes stock of the study and use of these approaches by investigating the purposes for which public sector organisations use open innovation, and how it creates value. The research question is answered through a systematic literature review and an analysis of publicly available data about the open innovation projects referred to in that literature.The research identifies five different purposes of using open innovation. It also suggests that public sector organisations primarily use open innovation to pursue one specific purpose: innovation in society. When using open innovation for this purpose, public sector organisations attempt to create value by improving citizens' quality of life and the quality of neighbourhoods. They do this primarily by co-specialising IT and other resources in society (e.g. the transportation system) and by using the outcome of this co-specialisation process to change citizen behaviour, capabilities and experiences (e.g. encouraging citizens to use the transportation system more efficiently or making citizens feel more safe when using the transportation system).This research indicates that open innovation is generally not used to open up public sector organisations or to give citizens more influence in public sector or democratic processes. The research also indicates that open innovation, until now, has primarily been used to solve minor problems, and not large scale wicked problems in society. The research suggests a framework for value creation from open innovation initiatives that pursues innovation in society. This framework might help public sector organisations increase value creation and solve wicked problems using open innovation, and might help researchers to focus future open innovation research on essential knowledge gaps.     

Proactivity in digital public services: A conceptual analysis

Public organizations are looking for new ways to use digital technologies to increase the efficiency of their internal processes and improve their interactions with clients, whether citizens or businesses. In response, scholars suggest that public organizations be proactive in digital public services such that the organizations approach their clients, rather than the other way around. In the most extreme form of proactivity, clients do not have to do anything to receive a public service. Although various examples of proactive public services are in use, how proactivity changes the conceptual understanding of digital public services remains unclear. Therefore, we derive the changes that proactivity causes in a conceptualization of digital public service by means of a conceptual analysis through the lens of a seminal theoretical work on proactivity. The results indicate that proactivity can ensure equal accessibility to a subset of public services, rely on more comprehensive integration of IT systems on the back end, and change how value is co-created in the service process. We formulate the changes as propositions that future work can investigate empirically and discuss proactive digital public services as a way to reduce clients' administrative burden. We contribute to theory by clarifying the conceptual changes in digital public services that proactivity invokes and call for joint research by scholars of public administration, information systems, and service management to relate the research streams of administrative burden and proactive digital public service.     

Digital government transformation as an organizational response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Many public organizations struggle to adapt to digital transformation. Whereas previous research has identified internal drivers of change, an unpredictable factor from the external environment such as the COVID-19 pandemic can trigger public innovation. In this study, we aim to investigate if and how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the digital government transformation. In more detail, we explore how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected different organizational aspects that are expected to be affected by a digital transformation. Findings from case studies of ten organizations from the Austrian federal administration indicate that the pandemic has not only led to an increased use of technological means but also influenced various organizational aspects such as employees' attitudes toward technology and organizational culture toward innovation. In particular, organizations heavily affected by the pandemic have benefited from a greater degree of digital transformation. Consequently, the pandemic has influenced a spirit of innovation and accelerated the speed of digital transformation.     

Transforming the communication between citizens and government through AI-guided chatbots

Driven by ‘success stories’ reported by private sector firms, government agencies have also started adopting various Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in diverse domains (e.g. health, taxation, and education); however, extensive research is required in order to exploit the full potential of AI in the public sector, and leverage various AI technologies to address important problems/needs. This paper makes a contribution in this direction: it presents a novel approach, as well as the architecture of an ICT platform supporting it, for the advanced exploitation of a specific AI technology, namely chatbots, in the public sector in order to address a crucial issue: the improvement of communication between government and citizens (which has for long time been problematic). The proposed approach builds on natural language processing, machine learning and data mining technologies, and leverages existing data of various forms (such as documents containing legislation and directives, structured data from government agencies' operational systems, social media data, etc.), in order to develop a new digital channel of communication between citizens and government. Making use of appropriately structured and semantically annotated data, this channel enables ‘richer’ and more expressive interaction of citizens with government in everyday language, facilitating and advancing both information seeking and conducting of transactions. Compared to existing digital channels, the proposed approach is appropriate for a wider range of citizens' interactions, with higher levels of complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. In close co-operation with three Greek government agencies (the Ministry of Finance, a social security organization, and a big local government organization), this approach has been validated through a series of application scenarios.     

Public value creation in digital government

Public value theory offers innovative ways to plan, design, and implement digital government initiatives. The theory has gained the attention of researchers due to its powerful proposition that shifts the focus of public sector management from internal efficiency to value creation processes that occur outside the organization. While public value creation has become the expectation that digital government initiatives have to fulfil, there is lack of theoretical clarity on what public value means and on how digital technologies can contribute to its creation. The special issue presents a collection of six papers that provide new insights on how digital technologies support public value creation. Building on their contributions, the editorial note conceptualizes the realm of public value creation by highlighting: (1) the integrated nature of public value creation supported by digital government implementations rather than enhancing the values provided by individual technologies or innovations, (2) how the outcome of public value creation is reflected in the combined consumption of the various services enabled by technologies and (3) how public value creation is enabled by organizational capabilities and configurations.     

On the barriers for local government releasing open data

Due to expected benefits such as citizen participation and innovation, the release of Public Sector Information as open data is getting increased attention on various levels of government. However, currently data release by governments is still novel and there is little experience and knowledge thus far about its benefits, costs and barriers. This is compounded by a lack of understanding about how internal processes influence data release. Our aim in this paper is to get a better understanding of these processes and how they influence data release, i.e., to find determinants for the release of public sector information. For this purpose, we conducted workshops, interviews, questionnaires, desk research and practice based cases in the education program of our university, involving six local public sector organizations. We find that the way data is stored, the way data is obtained and the way data is used by a department are crucial indicators for open data release. We conclude with the lessons learned based on our research findings. These findings are: we should take a nuanced approach towards data release, avoid releasing data for its own sake, and take small incremental steps to explore data release.     

Revisiting social media institutionalization in government. An empirical analysis of barriers

Social media have become a common organizational resource of governments and public administrations in different contexts. Previous authors have stated that social media institutionalization encompasses a process including stages from experimentation to complete command of the innovation. However, an understanding of barriers to social media institutionalization in public administration needs to be developed. In this article we focus on exploring what factors operate as barriers of the social media institutionalization process. Methodologically, we use a mixed-methods strategy combining different sources of data for triangulation purposes, including a survey on social media conducted to Spanish largest local governments. Based on this data, and following the literature on social media institutionalization, we construct a Social Media Institutionalization Index (SMI). Our SMI is founded on a set of variables measuring to what extent social media have been embedded in public sector organizations. Also, we conducted a case study in a city council based on semi-structured interviews. Our results suggest that social media institutionalization has not been fully developed in our sample of local governments. In addition, different variables (including security, lack of resources for maintenance, control and evaluation, organizational culture, or absence of governance framework) are perceived by public managers as institutionalization barriers, whereas the governance scheme of social media seems to be the critical variable. At the same time, we emphasize that some inhibitors might be overvalued by public employees. This article encourages future avenues of comparative research and practical recommendations to public managers leading social media in the public sector.     

Digital transformation toward AI-augmented public administration: The perception of government employees and the willingness to use AI in government

Government employees play a critical role in adopting and using new technologies in government, and their attitude and willingness to use them matter in creating a sustainable and meaningful digital transformation. This study explores how the perception of government employees shapes the willingness to support the use of AI technologies in government. Based on a survey data on current government employees in the U.S., our analysis reveals that the willingness to implement and use AI technologies in government was contingent upon a series of positive and negative perceptions about the new technologies, long-term outlook on the role of AI technologies in society, and the familiarity and experience in using some form of AI applications in the past. In particular, the perception of AI enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the work and a positive and longer-term outlook on AI's future about human labor (as an assistant or a competitor), the perception of the technology's ultimate harm or benefit (does it harm or benefit humanity), its ability to eventually make ethical and moral judgments influenced the willingness to support AI technologies in government. A substantial proportion of the government employees in the survey sample responded that they had experienced using some form of AI applications in their work and this familiarity had a strong positive influence on their support for AI. Our findings point to the importance of training the government employees in AI technologies to improve their understanding and perception about the new technologies as well as their potentials in government that will foster a culture of innovation toward sustainable and impactful digital transformation.     

Defining digital transformation: Results from expert interviews

Digital transformation approaches outside the public sector are changing citizens' expectations of governments' ability to deliver high-value, real-time digital services. In response to the changing expectations and triggered by supranational agreements, governments are changing their mode of operation to improve public service delivery, be more efficient and effective in their designs, and achieve objectives such as increased transparency, interoperability, or citizen satisfaction. However, beyond the availability of consultancy reports, there is little systematic insight into the way that public administrators themselves are currently defining digital transformation in their own day-to-day practices, how they are approaching digital transformation projects, and what their expected outcomes are. We provide an empirically-based definition of digital transformation derived from expert interviews and develop a conceptual framework with reasons for, processes to, and expected outcomes of digital transformation in the public sector.     

Joining forces for public value creation? Exploring collaborative innovation in smart city initiatives

Creating public value is a key goal of public administrations, both in their daily business and in the growing field of smart government and smart cities, which focuses on IT-enabled innovations in the public sphere. However, many public administrations still struggle with such innovations due to complex technologies, high investments, and the numerous stakeholders involved. To address this issue, some local governments in continental Europe have turned to collaborative innovation approaches, partnering with (semi-)public utility companies in the hope that their additional innovation assets will boost innovativeness. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how exactly such collaborations should be governed to ensure that the focus remains on creating public value, as utility companies may have their own agendas. To explore this question, we conducted a comparative case study in the context of smart city initiatives with four cases in Swiss local governments. Drawing on agency and stewardship theory, we then propose a model of public-value-focused collaborative innovation, enabling us to explore various collaboration characteristics and their effects on public value creation. Our findings suggest that both agency- and stewardship-based collaborations increase innovativeness. However, while agency collaborations tend to produce smart city innovations that mainly serve the utility companies' business interests, stewardship relationships lead to innovations that are focused more on public value creation. As such, our study extends the literature on the effects of collaborative innovation on public value, and it provides practical recommendations on how such collaborative innovation should be designed.     

Business process management capabilities in local governments: A multi-method study

Business Process Management (BPM) is a topic of greatest relevance to government innovation. While the concept originally stems from the private sector, public sector organizations have established BPM capabilities and are in the move of developing these further. Despite the importance of the phenomenon, literature does however not yet provide a comprehensive picture of BPM capabilities in governments. In this paper, we thus examine BPM capabilities on the local government level by means of an intertwined quantitative survey and (representative) qualitative in-depth case study. We identify a set of BPM challenges and reflect on the power of prevalent BPM capability assessment and development models, mostly maturity models, to provide good guidance. We suggest taking into account organizational positions in order to overcome the significant shortcoming of the ‘maturity’ concept, especially the focus on convergence towards an “ideal” state. Thus, we argue for developmental models following divergence theories. Implications for practice and potentially fruitful avenues for future research are discussed in the light of our findings.     

Determinants of cyber-incidents among small and medium US cities

Cyber-incidents threaten the confidentiality, efficiency, and integrity of digital information systems, causing privacy risks, economic losses, and reputational damages, and exposing managerial limitations. Although these phenomena are becoming more frequent in public agencies, research to date has mainly focused on private sector organizations and individuals. In this study, we contribute to the broader literature on cyber-incidents by exploring the drivers of both security breaches and unauthorized data disclosures in public organizations. Drawing from routine activity theory, we develop hypotheses on the determinants of cyber-incidents in departments in small and medium-sized US cities and test them using data from a national survey of public managers. Our findings suggest that both environmental and organizational factors are key determinants of cyber-incidents in city government. The results demonstrate the application of routine activity theory to public sector organizations and identify external and internal elements related to cyber-incidents in city government departments.     

Assessing social media use in Dutch municipalities: Political,institutional, and socio-economic determinants

Social media enables public sector organizations to connect with citizens. Next to this, it can help organizations provide more detailed and useful information. But to what extent is social media used by local governments for interaction purposes, and what factors influence this? In this article, we study how Dutch local governments use Twitter for interaction, linking this to political, institutional, and socio-economic determinants. We find that politically fragmented municipalities use Twitter more for interaction, suggesting that political multiplicity forms a stimulus for more online engagement. Moreover, municipalities that have a Twitter account for a longer time make more advanced use of its functions, implying that municipalities with longer experience are better acquainted with a platform's strengths and weaknesses. Finally, municipalities with a higher presence of people in the age group 20–65 as well as municipalities with more higher-educated people use their social media more for interaction. The same counts for municipalities with more ICT workers.     

Technological frames,CIOs, and Artificial Intelligence in public administration: A socio-cognitive exploratory study in Spanish local governments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) policies and strategies have been designed and adopted in the public sector during the last few years, with Chief Information Officers (CIOs) playing a key role. Using socio-cognitive and institutional approaches on Information Technologies (ITs) in (public) organizations, we consider that the assumptions, expectations, and knowledge (technological frames) of those in charge (CIOs) of designing AI strategies are guiding the future of these emerging systems in the public sector. In this study, we focus on the technological frames of CIOs in the largest Spanish local governments. Based on a survey administered to CIOs leading IT departments, this article presents original data about their technological frames on AI. Our results: (1) provide insights about how CIOs tend to focus on the technological features of AI implementation while often overlook some of the social, political, and ethical challenges in the public sector; (2) expand the theory on AI by enabling the construction of propositions and testable hypotheses for future research in the field. Therefore, the comparative study of technological frames will be key to successfully design and implement AI policies and strategies in the public sector and to tackle future challenges and opportunities.     

An attention-based view of AI assimilation in public sector organizations: The case of Saudi Arabia

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been suggested to have transformative potential for public sector organizations through enabling increased productivity and novel ways to deliver public services. In order to materialize the transformative potential of AI, public sector organizations need to successfully assimilate AI in their operational activities. However, AI assimilation in the public sector appears to be fragmented and lagging the private sector, and the phenomena has really limited attention from academic research community. To address this gap, we adopt the case study approach to explore three Saudi-Arabian public sector organizations and analyze the results using the attention-based view of the organization (ABV) as the theoretical lens. This study elucidates the challenges related AI assimilation in public sector in terms of how organizational attention is focused situated and distributed during the assimilation process. Five key challenges emerged from the cases studied, namely (i) misalignment between AI and management decision-making, (ii) tensions with linguistics and national culture, (iii) developing and implementing AI infrastructure, (iv) data integrity and sharing, and (v) ethical and governance concerns. The findings reveal a re-enforcing relationship between the situated attention and structural distribution of attention that can accelerate the successful assimilation of AI in public sector organizations.     

The public library as social infrastructure for older patrons: Exploring the implications of online library programming for older adults during COVID-19

Public library systems' websites were often the sole means for older patrons to access library services and programming during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study integrated Pauwels' (2012) framework to analyze 25 Ontario public library systems' websites for evidence of their available programming for older adults during the early months of COVID-19. The 640 identified programs for older adults revealed a number of patterns, including issues regarding visibility and representation of older patrons on library websites as well as assumptions surrounding older adults' access to technologies. Discussions consider three implications for public libraries as they reopen and create new virtual spaces “postpandemic”: questioning (re)distributions of resources that support both virtual and in-person services, questioning implicit assumptions that digital connection will foster social connection, and questioning the effects of the library as a virtual space on feelings of social connectedness.     

Developing health website quality assessment guidelines for the voluntary sector: outcomes from the Judge Project

Background: This paper describes the Judge project, the aim of which was to explore the need for health website quality assessment guidelines for the voluntary sector. Such guidelines would enable health consumers to assess the quality of health sites and assist support groups to produce their own good quality sites. The project was a partnership between the Information Management Research Institute, School of Informatics, Northumbria University and Contact a Family. It was supported by the Health Foundation. Methods: The views of health consumers and support group members and workers were obtained by focus groups (35 attendees) and questionnaires (55 responses). They were asked questions about quality issues and concerns about Internet health information and any help they needed with judging the quality of health websites. Results: The results supported the need for guidelines. The guidelines were written to reflect the requirements of health consumers and support groups articulated from the focus group and questionnaire data. They were then disseminated via a website. Conclusions: There is a need to improve communication and information exchange between health consumers and professionals and official organizations; publicise support groups to patients and carers; set up local Webs of Trust, linking together voluntary and statutory organizations within a locality. Professionals and official organizations in the public sector should make information provision to patients and health consumers a priority. Information provision should be embedded in the clinical setting via guidelines, protocols and administrative structures. Professionals should be trained in the role of information and how to provide it in appropriate ways. Support groups should use the Judge guidelines to assist them in producing good quality websites. Support groups should promote the Judge guidelines to health consumers, to help them make their own quality judgement about health‐information websites.     

Government innovation through social media

Social media in government is becoming one of the major trends in Electronic Government (e-government) research and practice worldwide. During the last few years, several authors have addressed the potential of social media for the innovation of public sector organizations. Most of these contributions have focused on the technical dimensions of social media, while other aspects have not attracted equal attention. In contrast, this introductory article interrogates the role of social media in the basic areas of e-government: government information flows and the availability of government information; the use of information technology to create and provide innovative government services; the impact of information technology on the relationships between the governed and those governing; and the increasing importance of information policies and information technologies for democratic practices. Accordingly, the next few pages propose and develop three dimensions of social media in government: tools, goals, and topics. We think that these dimensions could help to better understand the use of social media in government settings. Then, after a brief review of current trends in social media and government research, we present the articles included in this special issue. Finally, we present some practical lessons and suggest ideas for future research. This special issue could be seen as a starting point for the development of innovation through social media in public administrations around the world.