Abstract
Countries are struggling to develop data exchange infrastructures needed to reap the benefits of e-government. Understanding the development of infrastructures can only be achieved by combining insights from institutional, technical and process perspectives. This paper contributes by analysing data exchange infrastructures in the Netherlands and Estonia from an integral perspective. The institutional design framework of Koppenjan and Groenewegen is used to analyse the developments in both countries. The analysis shows that the starting points, cultures, path dependencies and institutional structure result in different governance models for data exchange infrastructures. Estonia has a single – centrally governed – data-exchange infrastructure that is used by public and private parties for all kinds of data exchanges (including citizen-to-business and business-to-business). In contrast, the institutional structure in the Netherlands demands a strict demarcation between public and private infrastructures, resulting in several data exchange infrastructures. While there are examples of sharing infrastructure components across various levels of the Dutch government, public infrastructures cannot be used for business-to-business or citizen-to-business data exchange due to the potential for market distortion by government. Both the centrally governed Estonian model and the decentrally governed Dutch model have pros and cons on multiple levels.
Highlights
Countries are struggling to develop data exchange infrastructures needed to reap the benets of e-government
The analysis shows that the starting points, cultures, path dependencies and institutional structure result in dierent governance models for data exchange infrastructures
This paper argues that, in order to understand what contributes to the success of e-government, we need to consider the institutional design as well as the design process of developing data-exchange infrastructure
Summary
Demands on public services are increasing at a fast pace, partly due to the widespread availability of new technologies and higher expectations from digitally-savvy citizens. For the sake of this paper, a data exchange infrastructure is dened as the whole of standards, technical components, services and governance framework in place for data exchange These are by nature socio-technical constructs[7, 8], which makes them hard to understand from a single point of view. The Tax administration uses a dierent data exchange infrastructure with the private sector and other government agencies (called Digipoort)[21] than the customs authority (called Single Window for Maritime and Aviation)[22]. Across different sectors such as health, energy and education, dierent data exchange infrastructures are used.
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