Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly important factor of everyday life. The progress of AI adoption continues to accelerate with increasing investments in AI techniques and applications worldwide. However, the use of AI is still not present in employee's daily life of German municipalities. Since this technology has a promising potential that German municipalities can also take advantage of, it is important to facilitate the transition of municipalities to AI. For this reason, we have conducted semi-structured expert interviews in twelve German municipalities to examine perceived challenges of AI adoption from employee's perspective. Using methods from Grounded Theory and Gioia we extended research regarding the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. Our results proof six and identified four additional perceived challenges of AI adoption in municipalities. With these results, we are able to extend literature on the use of AI in the public sector introducing perceived challenges of AI adoption from employee's perspective in municipalities extending the TOE Framework.
Public sector organizations are moving from digitalization toward digital transformation. However, this fast-paced and fundamental transformation can be difficult to manage with traditional approaches. One solution is the application of agile methods and adaptive governance. Currently, it is not clear whether the agile mindset can be successfully adopted by public sector organizations, which value stability over agility. To provide a much-needed example of how the agile approach can be introduced in the context of the public sector, this paper presents the findings of a single case study of a municipal IT department. The case shows how the IT department adopted an agile IT management approach in response to the growing demand for digital services and the effects of the digital transformation inside the IT department and throughout the municipality. The findings reveal that introducing agile IT management in public sector IT departments can help improve operational flexibility, collaboration, and customer service despite barriers, such as traditional operational structures, and resistance to change. Consequently, bottom-up agile experiments can drive large-scale agile transformations, especially if such transformations are also accepted at the organizational level.
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