Agile innovation management in government: A research agenda

Abstract

Governments are facing an information technology upgrade and legacy problem: outdated systems and acquisi tion processes are resulting in high risk technology projects that are either over budget or behind schedule. Re cent catastrophic technology failures, such as the failed launch of the politically contested online marketplace Healthcare.gov in the U.S. were attributed to an overreliance on external technology contractors and failures to manage large scale technology contracts in government. As a response, agile software development and modular acquisition approaches, new independent organizational units equipped with fast reacting teams, in combination with a series of policy changes are developed to address the need to innovate digital service delivery in govern ment. This article uses a process tracing approach, as well as initial qualitative interviews with a subset of exec utives and agency level digital services members to provide an overview of the existing policies and implementation approaches toward an agile innovation management approach. The article then provides a re search framework including research questions that provide guidance for future research on the managerial im plementation considerations necessary to scale up the initial efforts and move toward a collaborative and agile innovation management approach in government.

Barriers to open e-learning in public administrations

“…In this regard, an extended agile development concept in Government should be extended to elicit culture-contextual barriers. This finding supports the claim of Mergel (2016) and suggests a way how to elaborate and integrate barrier development in agile processes. Second, the role of allowed time (by rule) as well as involvement of leaders in other departments turned out as crucial barriers.…”

“…However, agile methods need to be embedded into organizational strategies, culture and processes. Mergel (2016) points out that policy and management pillars of the organization need to be addressed apart from the software development team. She highlights that change should address the mindset, a "culture of prototyping and experimentation" (Mergel 2016:522), that shapes leadership as well as commitment to contribute from employees (Mergel 2016).…”

“…OER development, as argued out in the next section, has a strong focus on related culture and organizational change processes. Generally, agile methods in Government and OER development share the core steps and outputs from an eliciting phase, planning of releases and sprints, doing sprints, evaluating and iteration orienting on Mergel (2016) and . In this regard, experiences from agile OER development may benefit towards agile processes in Public Administrations as well as cultural change.…”

“…Gallop, 2012). These changes can occur on different levels: policies, (work) processes including project management (Crawford & Helm, 2009) as well as specific software development processes and corresponding technologies (Mergel, 2016). The concept of Adaptive Governance is strongly related: Janssen & von der Voort (2016) show the different aspects of how to make decisions and handle changes on different levels amongst them organizational governance, governance of programs and governance of software projects.…”

“…Once open practices are encultured, sharing digital resources online may spill over and benefit agile approaches and goals of the development team as, for example, yet to be seen for the product source code (cf. Mergel, 2016). Informing OER implementation by agile methods in Government may thus perform as a fruitful bottom-up approach that builds familiarity with open, flexible practices and principles from the beginning of implementation processes.…”