Yannis Charalabidis

Benefits, Adoption Barriers and Myths of Open Data and Open Government

In this article, based on data collected through interviews and a workshop, the benefits and adoption barriers for open data have been derived. The results suggest that a conceptually simplistic view is often adopted with regard to open data, which automatically correlates the publicizing of data with use and benefits. Also, five “myths” concerning open data are presented, which place the expectations within a realistic perspective. Further, the recommendation is provided that such projects should take a users view.

Systematisation of Interoperability Body of Knowledge: the foundation for Enterprise Interoperability as a science

The recently posed challenge of developing an Enterprise Interoperability Science Foundation (EISF) prompted some academic agents to attempt a systematisation of the Interoperability Body of Knowledge (IBoK). Still in their embryonic stages, these efforts have sought to organise and aggregate information from very fragmented and disparate sources, and with different granularities of detail, distinct epistemology origins, separate academic fields, etc. This paper aims to distinguish between levels of specificity of the Interoperability academic work, which are often confused, by considering Models, Theories, and Frameworks. The paper revises these concepts within the context of the EISFs recent work. The results presented here, reflecting consultation with the expert community, provide the synthesis of the current state of play regarding the work developed by the Enterprise Interoperability (EI) at the European Commissions Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) cluster.

Policy making 2.0: From theory to practice

Abstract Government agencies are gradually moving from simpler towards more sophisticated and complex practices of social media use, which are characterized by important innovations at the technological, political and organizational level. This paper intends to provide two contributions to the current discourse about such advanced approaches to social media exploitation. The first is of practical nature and has to do with assessing the potential and the challenges of a centralized cross-platform approach to social media by government agencies in their policy making processes. The second contribution is of theoretical nature and consists in the development of a multi-dimensional framework for an integrated evaluation of such advanced practices of social media exploitation in public policy making from technological, political and organizational perspectives, drawing from theoretical constructs from different domains. The proposed framework is applied for the evaluation of a pilot consultation campaign conducted in Italy using multiple social media and concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program.

A goal-driven management framework for electronic government transformation projects implementation

Abstract As the implementation of e-Government projects is becoming increasingly important in both public and private organizations, the need to successfully tackle project management emerges. Without a project management framework, those who commission an e-government project, those who manage it and also those who work on it will not have the necessary tools to plan, organize, monitor and re-schedule tasks, responsibilities and milestones. The present paper outlines a goal-driven and knowledge-based framework to plan and manage the critical aspects of e-government projects. A specifically designed tool supports the framework application and a lighthouse project of the Greek public sector is presented to illustrate the application context, leading to reusable conclusions on achievements and problems faced.

Paving the Way to eGovernment Transformation: Interoperability Registry Infrastructure Development

During the last decades eGovernment has been a vivid, dynamic research and development area. As services are being transformed, electronic documents and web services appear every day in many countries, the involved stakeholders are in urgent need for an instrument to structure governmental administration processes, service composition and provision - in a way that eGovernment transformation can be constantly managed. This paper presents the creation of an eGovernment ontology, and the development of a knowledge-based registry of governmental services in Greece. This Registry is an advanced web portal, devoted to the formal description, composition and publishing of traditional, electronic and web services, including the relevant electronic documents, information systems and as well the process descriptions and the work-flow models in an integrated knowledge base. Through such a repository, the discovery of services by users or systems has been automated, resulting in an important tool for achieving interoperable eGovernment transformation.

Passive crowdsourcing in government using social media

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to develop a novel approach to e-participation, which is based on “passive crowdsourcing” by government agencies, exploiting the extensive political content continuously created in numerous Web 2.0 social media (e.g. political blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites and online forums) by citizens without government stimulation, to understand better their needs, issues, opinions, proposals and arguments concerning a particular domain of government activity or public policy. Design/methodology/approach – This approach is developed and elaborated through cooperation with potential users experienced in the design of public policies from three countries (Austria, Greece and the UK), using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques: co-operative development of application scenarios, questionnaire surveys, focus groups and workshops and, finally, in-depth interviews. Findings – A process model for the application of the proposed passive crowdsourcing approach...

Issues and Guiding Principles for Opening Governmental Judicial Research Data

The opening of data is considered to provide many benefits. However, opening up data by public bodies is a complex and ill-understood activity. Although many public bodies might be willing to open up their data, they lack any systematic guidance. In this paper, guidance is provided by investigating the publishing processes at the Dutch Research and Documentation Centre (WODC), which owns governmental judicial research data. We developed guidance by providing 1) a list of issues that play a role in deciding whether to open data, 2) an alternative to completely publishing data (i.e. restricted access) and 3) solutions for overcoming some of the issues. The latter include dealing with privacy-sensitive data, deletion policies, publishing after embargo periods instead of not publishing at all, adding related documents and adding information about the quality and completeness of datasets. The institutional context should be taken into account when using the guidance, as opening data requires considerable changes of organizations.

Public Policy Formulation through Non Moderated Crowdsourcing in Social Media

The emergence of web 2.0 social media enables the gradual emergence of a second generation of e-participation characterized by more citizens’ control, in which government agencies post content (e.g. short or longer text, images, video) to various social media and then analyze citizens’ interactions with it (e.g. views, likes/dislikes, comments, etc.). In this paper we propose an even more citizens controlled third generation of e-participation exploiting web 2.0 social media as well, but in a different manner. It is based on the search by government agencies for content on a public policy under formulation, which has been created in a large set of web 2.0 sources (e.g. blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites, online forums) by citizens freely, without any initiation, stimulation or moderation through government postings. This content undergoes advanced processing in order to extract from it arguments, opinions, issues and proposals on the particular policy, identify their sentiments (positive or negative), and finally summarize and visualize them. This approach allows the exploitation of the vast amount of user-generated content created in numerous web 2.0 social media for supporting governments to understand better the needs, wishes and beliefs of citizens, and create better and more socially rooted policies.

An empirical investigation of information systems interoperability business value in European firms

It is widely believed that the establishment of interoperability of the information systems (IS) of a firm with those of its collaborators (e.g. customers, suppliers, and business partners) can generate significant business value. However, this has been empirically investigated only to a very limited extent. This paper contributes to filling this research gap by presenting an empirical study of the effect of adopting the three main types of IS interoperability standards (industry-specific, proprietary and XML-based ones) on the four important perspectives/dimensions of business performance proposed by the balanced scorecard approach (financial, customers, internal business processes, learning and innovation). Our study is based on a large dataset from 14,065 European firms (from 25 countries and 10 sectors) collected through the e-Business Watch Survey of the European Commission. It is concluded that all three examined types of IS interoperability standards increase considerably the positive impact of firms information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure on the above four perspectives/dimensions of business performance; however, their effects differ significantly. The adoption of industry-specific interoperability standards has the highest positive effects, while XML-based and proprietary standards have similar lower positive effects. Furthermore, these effects of the industry-specific IS interoperability standards are quite strong, as they are of similar magnitude with the corresponding effects of the degree of development of firms intra-organizational/internal IS, and of higher magnitude than the corresponding effects of the degree of development of firms e-sales IS. These conclusions provide valuable empirical evidence of the multidimensional business value generated by IS interoperability, its big magnitude and its strong dependence on the type of IS interoperability standards adopted.

Combination of Interoperability Registries with Process and Data Management Tools for Governmental Services Transformation

Digital government applications are providing more and more electronic services on-line, for citizens and businesses worldwide. However, the new services are in many cases an exact electronic equivalent of existing manual services, thus failing to significantly reduce administrative burden and provide the promised productivity gains – both for the administrations and the final users. Interoperability Registries, as fully electronic repositories of the flow, the input and output documents and relevant standardization, pose as an infrastructure that can support electronic services composition and publishing. In the presented approach, the use of such registries is extended to cover the optimization of manual or electronic services towards citizens and businesses, through the use of Business Process Management and XML Authoring tools. Going beyond the current state of the art, the approach implies a model-driven transformation of service provision. The resulting infrastructure can then become a ubiquitous system, supporting service composition, automated execution and optimization.