research-article

'Each in Their Own Garden': Obstacles for the Implementation of Open Government in the Public Sector of the German-speaking Region

Authors:

Ralph Schöllhammer,

Judith SchossböckAuthors Info & Claims

ICEGOV '15-16: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

Pages 291 - 300

https://doi.org/10.1145/2910019.2910105

Published: 01 March 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The utilization of new technologies by the public sector differs from the one by private companies and individuals. Regarding technologies that enable transparency, openness and outside participation (those usually associated with the term Open Government), not only a limited knowledge of the relevant technologies and capabilities, but also cultural and organizational factors can hinder their implementation. In this study we analyze such factors and ask about their relevance in the German speaking region. In the working group Open Government in the interdisciplinary research cooperation ISPRAT e.V. researchers used a methodological mix of qualitative and quantitative data. Four focus groups and six telephone interviews within different levels of management in the public sector were conducted to identify the relevant factors. Furthermore, a representative quantitative survey was extended by study-specific questions. As result, three key areas regarding the potential cultural and organizational barriers are presented: information cultures and divergent interests in agencies, limited innovation potential in organizational cultures and limited communication of strategies. From this analysis, further implications and some recommendations are derived.

References

[1]

Henry L. Stimson Center 2008. New Information and Intelligence Needs in the 21st Century: Threat Environment. Washington: Henry L. Stimson Center.

[2]

Peters, M. 2009. Creativity, Openness and User-Generated Cultures. In Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education, edited by Peters, M., Ghiraldelli P., Žarnić, B., Gibbons, A. http://eepat.net/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=creativity_and_openness.pdf (accessed December 22nd, 2015).

[3]

Parycek, P. and Sachs, M. 2010. Open Government: Information Flow in Web 2.0. European Journal of ePractice no. 9, 1-12. http://www.etudasportal.gov.hu/download/attachments/7995452/European+Journal+epractice+Volume+9.5.pdf (accessed December 22nd, 2015).

[4]

Parycek, P.; Schossböck, J. (2015). Adopting a New Political Culture: Obstacles and Opportunities for Open Government in Austria. In: Götz, N., Marklund, C. (Eds.), The Paradox of Openness. Transparency and Participation in Nordic Cultures of Consensus, Brill, Leide, 121--136.

[5]

Parycek, P., Schossböck, J., Piswanger, C.M., Harm, R. 2012. A Temperature Check on Open Government: Accessing Parliamentarians' Attitude towards Democratic Concepts. In CeDEM12: Proceedings of the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government, Krems: Druckwerk Krems, 241--253.

[6]

Open Definition. Defining the Open in Open Data, Open Content and Open Services. www.opendefinition.org (accessed December 22nd, 2015).

[7]

Choo, C.W., Bergeron, P., Detlor, B. & Heaton, L. 2008. Information culture and information use: an exploratory study of three organizations. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(5), 792--804.

Digital Library

[8]

Micklethwait, J. and Wooldridge, A. 2014. The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State. The Penguin Press, New York, NY.

[9]

Peled, A. 2014. Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange. MIT Press, Boston, MA.

Digital Library

[10]

Orlikowski, W.J. and Iacono, C.S. 2001. Research Commentary: Desperately Seeking the "IT" in IT Research---A call to Theorizing the IT Artifact. Information Systems Research 12, 2 (2001), 121--134.

Digital Library

[11]

Chadwick, A. and May, C. 2003. Interaction between States and Citizens in the Age of the Internet:"e-Government" in the United States, Britain, and the European Union. Governance 16, 2 (2003), 271--300.

[12]

Meijer, A. and Löfgren, K. 2015. The Neglect of Technology in Theories of Policy Change. International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age 2, 1 (2015), 75--88.

[13]

Abramson, J.B., Orren, G.R., and Arterton, F.C. 1990. The Electronic Commonwealth: The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democratic Politics. Basic Books, Inc., New York, NY.

Digital Library

[14]

Carpenter, D.P. 2001. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1862--1928.

[15]

Evans, P.B. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Digital Library

[16]

Fukuyama, F. 2013. What is Governance? Governance 26, 3 (2013), 347--368.

[17]

DiIulio, J.J. (1994). Principled Agents: The Cultural Bases of Behavior in a Federal Government Bureaucracy. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 4, 3 (1994), 277--318.

[18]

Hilgartner, S. 2000. Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.

[19]

Krause, G.A. and Douglas, J.W. 2005. Institutional Design versus Reputational Effects on Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from US Government Macroeconomic and Fiscal Projections. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 15, 2 (2005), 281--306.

[20]

Stone, D. 2012. Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. W.W. Norton & Co, New York, NY.

[21]

Wilson, J.Q. 1989. Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. Basic Books, New York, NY.

[22]

Parycek, P.; Schöllhammer, R.; Schoßböck, J. (2016). Governmental Ideation Systems. In: Arne Carlsen, Matej Cerne, Anders Dysvik und Miha Skerlavaj (Eds.), Capitalizing on Creativity at Work: Fostering the Implementation of Creative Ideas in Organizations: S. NA, Edward Elgar Publishing Inc., Cheltenham.

[23]

Meijer, A. and Löfgren, K. 2015. The Neglect of Technology in Theories of Policy Change. International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age 2, 1 (2015), 75--88.

[24]

Moore, John. 2011. The Importance of Culture Change in Open Government. Customer Think, 17 April 2011. http://www.customerthink.com/blog/the_importance_of_culture_change_in_open_government (accessed December 22nd, 2015).

[25]

Fawcett, S.E., Wallin, C., Allred, C., and Magnan, G. 2009. Supply Chain Information-Sharing: Benchmarking a Proven Path. Benchmarking: An International Journal 16, 2 (2009), 222--246.

[26]

Kamal, M.M. IT Innovation Adoption in the Government Sector: Identifying the Critical Success Factors. Journal of Enterprise Information Management 19, 2 (2006), 192--222.

[27]

Brody, S.D. 2003. Measuring the Effects of Stakeholder Participation on the Quality of Local Plans Based on the Principles of Collaborative Ecosystem Management, Journal of Planning Education and Research 22(4): 407--19.

[28]

Brabham, D. C. 2009. Crowdsourcing the Public Participation Process for Planning Projects. Planning Theory 2009 8: 242.

[29]

Abram, S. and Cowell, R. 2004. Learning Policy: The Contextual Curtain and Conceptual Barriers, European Planning Studies 12(2): 209--28.

[30]

Alfasi, N. 2003. Is Public Participation Making Urban Planning More Democratic? The Israeli Experience', Planning Theory & Practice 4(2): 185--202.

[31]

Nance, E. and Ortolano, L. 2007. Community Participation in Urban Sanitation: Experiences in Northeastern Brazil, Journal of Planning Education and Research 26(3): 284--30.

[32]

Parycek, P.; Rinnerbauer, B.; Domnik N. 2015. Informationsfreiheit im Rechtsvergleich: Österreich, Hamburg, Slowenien. In: Schweighofer, E. et al. (Eds.), Tagungsband des 18. Internationalen Rechtsinformatik Symposions, IRIS 2015, Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft, Wien.

[33]

Fraunhofer-Institut für Offene Kommunikationssysteme, 2015, ISPRAT, internal project report.

[34]

Initiative D21 e.V. (Ed.), 2015, eGovernment Monitor, 2015, Nutzung und Akzeptanz von elektronischen Bürgerdiensten im internationalen Vergleich, July 2015. http://www.initiatived21.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/150715_eGovMon2015_FREIGABE_Druckversion.pdf (accessed January 18th, 2016).

[35]

Sturges, J. E., Hanrahan, K. J. 2004. Comparing Telephone and Face-to-Face Qualitative Interviewing: A Research Note, Qualitative Research 4, Nr. 1, 107--18.

[36]

Krueger, R.A. and Casey, M.A. 2015. Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, CA.

[37]

Stewart, D.W. and Shamdasani, P.N. 2015. Focus Groups: Theory and Practice. SAGE, Los Angeles, CA.

[38]

Atteslander, P. 2008. Methoden der empirischen Sozialforschung. 12th edition, Schmidt Verlag Berlin.

[39]

Carey, M.A. 1995. Comment: concerns in the analysis of focus group data. Qualitative Health Research 5, 4 (1995), 487--495.

[40]

Morgan, D.L. 1997. Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.

[41]

Morgan, D.L. 1995. Why things (sometimes) go wrong in focus groups. Qualitative health research 5, 4 (1995), 516--523.

[42]

Peled, A. 2011. When Transparency and Collaboration Collide: The USA Open Data Program. Journal of the American society for Information Science and Technology 62, 11, 2085--2094.

Digital Library

[43]

Chun, S.A. and Cho, J.-S. 2012. E-Participation and Transparent Policy Decision Making. Information Polity 17, 2 (2012), 129--145.

Digital Library

[44]

Evans, A.M. and Campos, A. 2013. Open Government Initiatives: Challenges of Citizen Participation. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 32, 1 (2013), 172--185.

[45]

Hood, C. and Heald, D. 2006. Transparency: The Key to Better Governance? Oxford University Press/British Academy, Oxford.

[46]

Rowe, G. and Frewer, L.J. 2000. Public Participation Methods: A Framework for Evaluation. Science Technology Human Values 25, (2000), 3--29.

[47]

Lee, G. and Kwak, Y.H. 2012. An Open Government Maturity Model for Social Media-Based Public Engagement. Government Information Quarterly 29, 4 (2012), 492--503.

[48]

Harrison, T.M., Pardo, T.A., and Cook, M. 2012. Creating Open Government Ecosystems: A Research and Development Agenda. Future Internet 4, 4 (2012), 900--928.

[49]

Robertson, K. 1999, Secrecy and Open Government: Why Governments Want you to Know. Macmillian, Houndsmill et al.

[50]

Harlan, Y., Robinson, D. G. 2012, The New Ambiguity of "Open Government". UCLA Law Review Discourse, 178, 180--208.

[51]

Swedberg, R., Agevall, O. 2005. The Max Weber dictionary: key words and central concepts. Stanford Social Sciences, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 18--21.

[52]

Hwang, Y. 2011. Measuring information behaviour performance inside a company: a case study. Information Research Vol. 16 (2), 2011. http://www.informationr.net/ir/16-2/paper480.html (accessed January 18th, 2016).

[53]

Birkinshaw, P. 2010. Freedom of information and its impact in the United Kingdom. Government Information Quarterly, Vol. 27 (4), 312--321.

[54]

Jaeger, P. T., Bertot, J. C. 2010. Transparency and technological change: Ensuring equal and sustained public access to government information. Government Information Quarterly, Vol. 27 (4), 371--376.

[55]

Scassa, T. 2014. Privacy and Open Government. Future Internet 2014, 6, 397--413.

[56]

McDermott, P. 2010. Building open government. Government Information Quartlerly Vol. 27 (4), 401--413.

Cited By

Ayinde LAstuti HHussain SHerdiyanti A(2023)Investigating Factors Influencing Open Government from a Country’s PerspectiveInformation for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_16(221-241)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_16

'Each in Their Own Garden': Obstacles for the Implementation of Open Government in the Public Sector of the German-speaking Region
1. Social and professional topics

Recommendations

The Use of Open Government Data to Citizen Empowerment
ICEGOV '15-16: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

To this date, governments, civil society organizations, and private sector representatives consider Open Government Data as a building block for open government, as they see it as a key enabler of improved service delivery, transparency, and public ...
Towards an expanded and integrated open government data agenda for India
ICEGOV '13: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

The paper analyses the recently approved and implemented government data policy (National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy) in India, and identifies the possibility and need of expanding and integrating it within the larger national e-governance ...
Russia on the way to open data: current governmental initiatives and policy
dg.o '15: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

Russia for a long period has not been regarded by the outer world as a country with open data. Recent governmental initiatives provoked by President's Decree 2012 are up to change notably the landscape and disclose large data to the society. The ongoing ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

ICEGOV '15-16: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

March 2016

453 pages

ISBN:9781450336406

DOI:10.1145/2910019

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

ICEGOV '15-16

ICEGOV '15-16: 9th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

March 1 - 3, 2016

Montevideo, Uruguay

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

1
Total Citations
View Citations
110
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)7
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ayinde LAstuti HHussain SHerdiyanti A(2023)Investigating Factors Influencing Open Government from a Country’s PerspectiveInformation for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_16(221-241)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_16

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten