Development paths towards open government – an empirical analysis among heritage institutions

Abstract

In the face of the growing digitization of society, a series of transformations are taking place in the public sector that have been described as the second generation of e-government development. The present article traces how these transformations have been anticipated by successive generations of e-government maturity models and critically assesses existing stage models. Based on a survey among 1560 heritage institutions in 11 countries, an empirically validated maturity model for the implementation of open government is presented. The model uses innovation diffusion theory as a theoretical backdrop. While the model is at odds with the unidimensional nature of the Lee & Kwak Open Government Maturity Model (Lee & Kwak, 2012), the findings suggest that the transformative processes predicted by various e-government maturity models are well at work. They result in increasingly integrated services, participative approaches and an emerging collaborative culture, accompanied by a break-up of proprietary data silos and their replacement by a commonly shared data infrastructure, allowing data to be freely shared, inter-linked and re-used. In order to put our findings into perspective, we take stock of earlier discussions and criticisms of e-government maturity models and offer a new take on the issue of stages-of-growth models in the field of e-government. The proposed approach rests on the assumption of an evolutionary model that is empirically grounded and allows for varying development paths.