Designing boundary resources in digital government platforms for collaborative service innovation

Abstract

On the path to creating digital platforms, governments are opening organizational boundaries to cultivate cross-agency collaboration in public service innovation. This collaborative innovation takes place in the context of paradoxical tensions between openness and closeness, stability and flexibility, and generativity and control. The concept of boundary resources provides an instrument to balance these platform design paradoxes. Yet, little is known about designing boundary resources in digital government platforms. We contextualize the concept of boundary resources in digital government platforms to develop design theories. These design theories guide an action design research, where a national tax service platform was redesigned to enable cross-agency collaboration for service innovation. Design knowledge was thus generated into three design principles for the design of boundary resources in government platforms. These principles help in making design decisions by which government platform owners use different boundary resources to address the three paradoxes. We suggest that government platform owners cultivate collaborative platform ecosystems and define unified data standards to address the openness, design data modularity and interfaces for resourcing complementors, and use data relationships and accessibility as control points for securing the platform.