Abstract
Focusing on inter-organizational information sharing in criminal justice, it is found that, while poor project management leads to unsuccessful inter-organizational information sharing, a recipe for success is more demanding as it requires both compatible technologies and good project management implemented either by means of a top-down approach of strategic alignment or an emergent approach of bottom-up alignment. Though unplanned, the latter approach may lead to mistakes that are more correctable than the large mistakes stemming from top-down, deliberate planning. The study is an analysis of context-mechanism-outcome configurations of inter-organizational information sharing activities within criminal justice systems and demonstrates the causal asymmetry between positive and negative cases. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed by highlighting the causal role of different types of governance structure in a crisp set configurational fashion.
Highlights
Information sharing is the bedrock for smart governance (Gil-Garcia & Sayogo, 2016) and for effective Public Safety Networks (PSNs) (Fedorowicz, Sawyer, & Tomasino, 2018)
Despite the small number of cases under investigation, our findings reveal the causal asymmetry between positive/successful cases (i.e., Austria, Estonia, and Finland) and negative/unsuccessful cases (i.e., Denmark, Italy, and Portugal) because the causes leading to the presence of the outcome of interest are very different from those leading to its absence (Fiss, 2011)
Driven by conflicting findings concerning the role of centralized governance structure in its contribution towards successful inter-organizational information sharing initiatives, we have discovered the causal asymmetry between positive and negative recipes
Summary
Information sharing is the bedrock for smart governance (Gil-Garcia & Sayogo, 2016) and for effective Public Safety Networks (PSNs) (Fedorowicz, Sawyer, & Tomasino, 2018). The fact that technical governance can be a key contributor to effective inter-organizational information sharing for one stream of literature (Fedorowicz et al, 2018) and a nonstatistically significant predictor for another stream (Gil-Garcia & Sayogo, 2016) raises the issue of validity. Section six brings the paper to a close with a summary of key findings, their theoretical, methodological, and practical implications, as well as the limitations of this study
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