Marianne Fraefel

Organizational Requirements for Building Up National E-Government Infrastructures in Federal Settings

The present paper focuses on the interplay between the organizational dimension of e-government and the development of national e-government infrastructures. The discussion is aimed at clarifying whether and how a decentralized vs. central development of re-usable basic services raises different requirements with regard to establishing inter-organizational arrangements and coordination. Current challenges in the development of decentralized, federal Switzerland are compared to other federal and non-federal countries, based on document analysis and interviews with e-government experts in Switzerland, selected European countries and Canada. Against this background, an organizational framework is developed that is aimed at overcoming common obstacles for developing an integrated e-government approach across national tiers in Switzerland. The cross-country comparison reveals considerable similarity regarding pressing challenges. The framework may therefore be suited as a theoretical model for further analyses on the guidance, design and governance of e-government infrastructures. Practitioners might apply it as an analytical tool.

Inter-organizational cooperation in Swiss egovernment

In Switzerland inter-organizational cooperation is a cornerstone of the national e-government strategy. Based on existing frameworks, the authors examine different stakeholders perspectives towards cooperative e-government within the Swiss federal system. The discussion of pronounced barriers and enablers is based on various sets of data: A document analysis and interviews with the program office on the national level, data from surveys among egovernment officers across federal levels and a case study conducted at the concrete operative level. The analysis aims at reflecting the relevance of different aspects of cooperation for the development of e-government, contributes to validating existing analytical approaches and provides suggestions for further research.

Big Data in the Public Sector. Linking Cities to Sensors.

In the public sector, big data holds many promises for improving policy outcomes in terms of service delivery and decision-making and is starting to gain increased attention by governments. Cities are collecting large amounts of data from traditional sources such as registries and surveys and from non-traditional sources such as the Internet of Things, and are considered an important field of experimentation to generate public value with big data. The establishment of a city data infrastructure can drive such a development. This paper describes two key challenges for such an infrastructure: platform federation and data quality, and how these challenges are addressed in the ongoing research project CPaaS.io.

Conceptualizing a national data infrastructure for Switzerland

A national data infrastructure (NDI) provides data, data-related services and guidelines for the re-use of data to individuals and organizations. It facilitates efficient sharing of data, supports new business models, and is thus a key enabler for the digital economy, open research, societal collaboration and political processes. While several European countries have taken steps to set up data infrastructures cutting across institutional silos, approaches vary, and there is no common understanding of what a NDI exactly comprises. In Switzerland, activities are still at a conceptual stage. In order to foster a shared vision of what a NDI is about, stakeholder interviews were carried out with representatives of public administration, research, civil society, and the private sector. There is broad consensus among key stakeholders that a NDI is to be conceived as a nationwide distributed technical infrastructure allowing the sharing of data, based on predefined rules. Our findings also suggest that the notion of a NDI should be approached from four perspectives: a big data, a base register, an open data, and a mydata perspective. For its implementation, effective coordination across several dimensions (ethical, legal, political, economical, organizational, semantical, and technical) is crucial, which calls for a truly multidisciplinary approach.