Gabriel Puron-Cid

Conceptualizing smartness in government: An integrative and multi-dimensional view

Abstract Smartness has recently emerged as a desirable characteristic of governments, cities, communities, infrastructures, and devices. Within the public sector, smart city has become a popular term and municipal governments around the world are using multiple strategies to become smarter. However, there is no consensus about what smartness means and how to identify its key components or dimensions. Some definitions highlight information technology and data, while others pay attention to sustainability, openness, innovation, or resiliency. Based on a review of current literature, this paper identifies multiple dimensions of smartness and proposes an integrative view that highlights how each dimension contributes to the understanding and development of smart governments. We argue that smartness should be conceptualized in a broad and multifaceted way. The framework we present serves as a foundation to understand and measure smartness in government and provides guidelines for the comprehensive development of smart governments. Some of the dimensions have been identified and studied explicitly in the realm of smart government. A number of other dimensions are embedded in the literature as individual characteristics of a good government; although they are not explicitly referenced in relationship to smart government, we argue that they are important components of a government being smart. The paper also suggests that public managers do not control all dimensions equally. Some dimensions could be seen as relatively direct outputs of their actions, while others could be better understood as outcomes that could be affected, but not solely determined, by strategic interventions or deliberate actions.

Factors for a Successful Adoption of Budgetary Transparency Innovations: A Questionnaire Report of an Open Government Initiative in Mexico

Available online 4 July 2014

Creating public value through Open Government: Perspectives, experiences and applications

More and more, technology and policy changes are stimulating innovative adoptions that promise to create and deliver public values through more effective public services and programs or smarter government decisions and policies. The availability of data and the effective use of new strategies and technologies, such as Big Data, semantic Web, social media, data visualizations and analytics, together with the adoption of open and collaborative approaches among government, industry, NGOs, and citizens provide new opportunities to enhance transparency and accountability of government operations, facilitate the co-design of services, generate new venues for citizen participation, streamline operations, and reduce costs, and consequently, promote technological innovations and economic development. What also have fueled the development are the Open Government Initiatives from the Obama administration, as well as similar open government initiatives of other States internationally. Since 2009, the US government and governments around the world have developed policy initiatives that promote disclosure of information held by both public and private entities [20,21]. Through the release of the Open Government Directive, the administration intended to promote transparency in government operations, participation from the public in decision making, and collaboration with multiple and diverse stakeholders [16]. The impact of the Directive efforts went beyond US and lead to an international effort of promoting open government through The Open Government Partnership [10]. However, open government initiatives overall have encountered many difficulties [22,27], and critics has pointed out that open government has a strong focus on technology solution instead of adapting organizational practices, policy and culture, lack of integration with existing legislation and regulation, lack of clear definition and measurable goals, divergent and ambiguous goals, and uncertain sustainability to the next administration [25,28]. In addition, the tradeoffs of transparency and national security, as well as economic return were criticized to be not carefully studied and articulated [4]. Similarly, after a few years into the implementation of open government policies, research remains limited in this area,

Opportunities and Challenges of Policy Informatics: Tackling Complex Problems through the Combination of Open Data, Technology and Analytics

Contemporary societies face complex problems that challenge the sustainability of their social and economic systems. Such problems may require joint efforts from the public and private sectors as well as from the society at large in order to find innovative solutions. In addition, the open government movement constitutes a revitalized wave of access to data to promote innovation through transparency, participation and collaboration. This paper argues that currently there is an opportunity to combine emergent information technologies, new analytical methods, and open data in order to develop innovative solutions to some of the pressing problems in modern societies. Therefore, the objective is to propose a conceptual model to better understand policy innovations based on three pillars: data, information technologies, and analytical methods and techniques. The potential benefits generated from the creation of organizations with advanced analytical capabilities within governments, universities, and non-governmental organizations are numerous and the expected positive impacts on society are significant. However, this paper also discusses some important political, organizational, and technical challenges.

Online Budget Transparency Innovation in Government: A Case Study of the U.S. State Governments

Accurate, timely, and useful budget information is critical for government and citizens to make the right budget choices to democratically govern budget operations, and address long-term fiscal challenges. While governments have increasingly adopted the concept of open government data (OGD) for greater government transparency and citizen engagement, the application of the OGD concept to enhancing government budget transparency is understudied. This paper examines online budget transparency innovation in government. First, we develop a normative public value framework for budget transparency. Second, this framework is applied to guide our empirical cross-case analysis of the reported best and worst U.S. state governments regarding the provision of online budget transparency websites. The results of our analysis challenge existing conceptual frameworks for budget transparency, which fail to recognize the important role of citizens in creating greater public value. More research is needed on online budget transparency innovation, with a focus on public value creation.

Understanding Public Value Creation in the Delivery of Electronic Services

Understanding public value creation through electronic services is a complex and important research problem. Recent attempts to understand electronic services value from the citizen perspective suggest that dividing service delivery in several stages could be a valuable approach to understand ways in which information technologies support value creation when providing electronic services. Therefore, we propose the use of this process model as a tool to analyze and define public value creation through electronic services. We show the potential value of the model using birth certificate requests as a hypothetical example. We conclude the paper by describing how we are applying the model to our current research.

From Technology to Social Development: Applying a Public Value Perspective to Digital Government in Local Governments in Mexico

The main goal of any digital government initiative is to create public value [34]. Although this sentence represents a powerful idea, there is no clear evidence about the causality route from technology to the creation of public value for citizens and businesses in a region. Local governments are more tangible examples of how digital government initiatives may transit from new ICT projects to benefits for citizens, governments and society. In theory, citizens may benefit by receiving more efficient and quality public services in a context of participation and transparency. Governments benefit by improving their strategic, regulatory and financial position to accomplish their mission. Society in general benefits from digital government initiatives by improving the quality of life in the region. However, understanding the causality routes from implementing digital government to improving public service delivery, and from these to the final creation of public value is complex and multifaceted. This article examines empirically these complex causality routes of digital government by adapting an integrative version of the public value framework and tests it by using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) techniques on a dataset of municipalities in Mexico. The results indicate that the framework was useful to capture the transition from digital government advance to the improvements of public services in terms of efficiency and quality in the context of participation and transparency. It was also suitable to represent the transition from the improvements of public services and the enhancement of participation and transparency to the creation of public value in government, but more investigation is required for uncover the causality route of the creation of public value in society. Several conclusions are drawn for local digital government implementation.

Inter-temporal analysis of e-government enactment: the cases of Mexico and Colombia

The literature has widely documented e-government benefits such as: efficiency, productivity, information access, and more participatory and democratic tools for citizens. However, various authors have also recognized failures and uneven adoption of e-government due to the complexity of the institutional arrangements, organizational forms and information technology in which e-government initiatives are implemented. Understanding the complex relationships between three components is critical for a successful implementation of e-government initiatives. The purpose of this study is to analyze the complex interaction of these three components by extending the enactment theory into an inter-temporal institutional model. This model is applied in two similar cases of e-government in Latin America and the Caribbean (Colombia and Mexico), with similar beginnings and goals but with unexpected different outcomes. The results of this analysis show that the enactment theory in an inter-temporal framework is a useful tool for advising toward a better implementation of e-government projects over time.

E-government success factors in the context of an IT-enabled budget reform: a questionnaire report

The adoption of e-government initiatives is not in vacuum. They are usually adopted in complex settings influenced by not only IT factors but other factors from different structures, such as contextual, organizational, collaboration, knowledge, and trust. These structures come from the context in which the egovernment project is embedded. The goal of this research is to explore the multiple factors from various structures involved in egovernment success using a contemporary case of an IT-enabled budget reform in Mexico. This study comprises a descriptive summary of answers from a questionnaire applied over federal and state government officials who participated in this initiative who adopted it into their daily practice. Due to the context of the IT-enabled budget reform, questions about the factors from different structures including the budgeting structure were analyzed. General characteristics and potential benefits of the egovernment initiative were also examined. The main motivation of this study is to extend our understanding of possible enablers and inhibitors that public officials face during the adoption of egovernment projects into work routines and different contexts. Derived from the questionnaire results, a selection of 11 “practical advices” were identified as useful for a successful adoption of egovernment projects.

Census big data analytics use: international cross case analysis

Despite the growing practices in big data and big data analytics use, there is still the paucity of research on links between government big data analytics use and public value creation. This multi-case study of Australia, Ireland, Mexico, and U.S.A. examines the state of big data and big data analytics use in the national census context. The census agencies are at varying stages in digitally transforming their national census process, products and services through assimilating and using big data and big data analytics. The cross-case analysis of government websites and documents identified emerging agency challenges in creating public value in the national census context: (1) big data analytics capability development, (2) cross agency data access and data integration, and (3) data security, privacy & trust. Based on the insights gained, a research model aims to postulate the possible links among challenges, big data/big data analytics use, and public value creation.