Government as a platform, orchestration, and public value creation: The Italian case

Abstract

E-Government literature has discussed how the adoption of the Government as a Platform (GaaP) can help public administration to produce more efficient public services. However, since little attention has been given to the impact of GaaP on public value creation more research is needed to analyse whether the GaaP is effective to help the government to deliver public services that fulfil social expectations and, hence, public value. Indeed, efficiency does not guarantee public value. Besides efficiency, public value incorporates citizens' variegated expectations and needs that change over time and that are sometimes rival. For these reasons, the delivery of public value is often challenging for public agencies. The aim of this paper is to explain how the GaaP configuration can help public administration to deliver public value better. The paper finds that the modularity of the platform configuration and different ecosystems that support public agencies need to be orchestrated to support the effective creation of public value. The authors analyse the case of the Italian GaaP initiative to discuss the importance of the orchestration of the GaaP characteristics to improve the coordination among public agencies and enable the co-production of services with external actors, in order to deliver public value better. The findings show that the orchestration of the GaaP configuration characteristics can enable Italian public administration to deliver public value, but also that, if the GaaP is not properly orchestrated, it can constrain the creation of public value.