Mark de Bruijne

From clouds to hailstorms: a policy and administrative science perspective on safeguarding public values in networked infrastructures

This paper analyses how public values are achieved in Dutch infrastructures and distinguishes four crucial stages in decision making processes: the advocacy process, the political process, the bureaucratic process and the provision process. An important conclusion of this paper is that the character of public values undergoes significant changes in each of these stages of the decision-making process, generally from more abstract notions to more concrete. With the level of abstraction, the content of the public value also tends to shift from stage to stage. We conclude that a balanced repertoire of safeguarding mechanisms should address the various stages.

Assuring high reliability of service provision in critical infrastructures

Vital services that are provided through critical infrastructures such as electricity and mobile telecommunication present us with a paradoxical development: society demands increasing levels of reliability of these services as we grow more dependent on them, while at the same time the conventional organisational means with which to ensure those high levels of reliability are being dismantled. Developments such as liberalisation, technological innovation and outsourcing have made the provision of highly reliable services through critical infrastructures increasingly the product of networks of organisations, rather than individual or a limited set of organisations. A key question for next generation critical infrastructures is therefore: how can networks of organisations, many with competing goals and interests, provide highly reliable services in the absence of conventional forms of command and control and in the presence of rapidly changing circumstances, technologies and demands? This paper reports on extensive field research that suggests the answer to complexity, and institutional change may be found in real time.

Determining the Effects of Data Governance on the Performance and Compliance of Enterprises in the Logistics and Retail Sector

In many of today’s enterprises, data management and data quality are poor. Over the last few years, a new solution strategy has emerged, known as data governance: an overarching methodology that defines who is responsible for what data at what point in a business process. Although positive effects on the business performance and compliance of enterprises are seen in practice, a substantiated method for determining the effects of data governance has not yet been developed. This paper reports on explorative research to develop such a specification method. Through a conceptualization of data governance based on literature, case study analysis of clients of a large consultancy firm and interviews with representatives of companies that have recently implemented data governance, an effect specification framework was developed. Using the interviews, initial steps towards validation were performed.