Abstract
Governments have come under increasing pressure to promote horizontal flows of information across agencies, but investment in cross-agency interoperable and standard systems have been minimally made since it seems to require government agencies to give up the autonomies in managing own systems and its outcomes may be subject to many external and interaction risks. By producing an agent-based model using 'Blanche' software, this study provides policy-makers with a simulation-based demonstration illustrating how government agencies can autonomously and interactively build, standardize, and operate interoperable IT systems in a decentralized environment. This simulation designs an illustrative body of 20 federal agencies and their missions. A multiplicative production function is adopted to model the interdependent effects of heterogeneous systems on joint mission capabilities, and six social network drivers (similarity, reciprocity, centrality, mission priority, interdependencies, and transitivity) are assumed to jointly determine inter-agency system utilization. This exercise simulates five policy alternatives derived from joint implementation of three policy levers (IT investment portfolio, standardization, and inter-agency operation). The simulation results show that modest investments in standard systems improve interoperability remarkably, but that a wide range of untargeted interoperability with lagging operational capabilities improves mission capability less remarkably. Nonetheless, exploratory modeling against the varying parameters for technology, interdependency, and social capital demonstrates that the wide range of untargeted interoperability responds better to uncertain future states and hence reduces the variances of joint mission capabilities. In sum, decentralized and adaptive investments in interoperable and standard systems can enhance joint mission capabilities substantially and robustly without requiring radical changes toward centralized IT management.
Highlights
1.1 The dominant structural forms in all the governments have been stovepipe organizational units, so information systems have been optimized to form agency-centric vertically integrated systems
7.1 While these modeling exercises are highly abstract, speculative and merely suggestive, the results demonstrate that when autonomous agencies build more mission-centric IT portfolios, invest in standard systems modestly, and build more mission-centric relationships with other agencies, an encouraging evolutionary trajectory can be produced without any central commander
Small investments in standard systems improve a wide range of interoperability remarkably, but such untargeted interoperable capacities with lagging operational capabilities improve joint mission capability less remarkably
Summary
1.1 The dominant structural forms in all the governments have been stovepipe organizational units, so information systems have been optimized to form agency-centric vertically integrated systems. Hypothesis 1: Decentralized investments in interoperable and standard systems by autonomous agencies can substantially improve joint mission capabilities.
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