Appraising the impact and role of platform models and Government as a Platform (GaaP) in UK Government public service reform: Towards a Platform Assessment Framework (PAF)

Abstract

The concept of "Government as a Platform" (GaaP) (O'Reilly 2009) is coined frequently, but interpreted inconsistently: views of GaaP as being solely about technology and the building of technical components ignore GaaP's radical and disruptive embrace of a new economic and organisational model with the potential to improve the way Government operates-helping resolve the binary political debate about centralised versus localised models of public service delivery. We offer a structured approach to the application of the platforms that underpin GaaP, encompassing not only their technical architecture, but also the other essential aspects of market dynamics and organisational form. Based on a review of information systems platforms literature, we develop a Platform Appraisal Framework (PAF) incorporating the various dimensions that characterise business models based on digital platforms. We propose this PAF as a general contribution to the strategy and audit of platform initiatives and more specifically as an assessment framework to provide consistency of thinking in GaaP initiatives. We demonstrate the utility of our PAF by applying it to UK Government platform initiatives over two distinct periods, 1999-2010 and 2010 to the present day, drawing practical conclusions concerning implementation of platforms within the unique and complex environment of the public sector.

The potential impacts of digital technologies on co-production and co-creation

“…Coupled with Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data analytics, nudges could be based on data regarding a person's health, location, past preferences or any other characteristic. In essence, whenever co-production depends on digital platforms (Brown et al 2017), the processing technologies enable the platform owners to influence citizens' and professionals' motivation to co-produce, in either direction.…”

Artificial intelligence (AI) in strategic marketing decision-making: a research agenda

“…The boundary between public and private expenditure and the data that arises from it is shifting as government becomes more involved in enabling service provision, as in the case of smart cities , where information platforms used to manage services may be partly or wholly government owned. Indeed, the idea that public sector information platforms may be arenas in which private as well as public sector organisations compete to provide public services has been aired extensively -the so-called "government as a platform" (Brown et al, 2017). So, public expenditure is certainly not excluded from this paper, though some aspects of use of AI might be more constrained by political decisions, data protection and regulation.…”

How to manage ICTs mediated co-production: a Public Value Perspective

“…Open Data requires a dedicated infrastructure usually based on an APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) platform and a format of the data that enables third parties to access the data [13].From an organizational perspective, coproduction requires the adoption of new production processes that go beyond the boundaries of the organization [1,37]. For example, specific procedures and support have to be designed in order to manage the ecosystem of applications and services that are based on Open Data [8]. From an evaluation perspective [36] the co-produced services need a different type of evaluation because the value delivered is co-produced with external actors.…”

“…This gap in the literature has created negative implications among public managers that have developed their organizational strategies focusing mainly on a specific perspective without considering the other dimensions [8]. The lack of a comprehensive understanding of the organizational strategy has had negative impact on the success of co-production projects [14,29].…”

“…ICTs mediated co-production has been widely debated in the public sector literature from different perspectives: the legal and policy making perspective [4][5][6] has discussed the regulations which are necessary to enable co-production; the organizational perspective [3,[7][8][9][10] has discussed the organizational changes necessary to implement co-production; the technical perspective [11][12][13] has described how technologies should be designed to enable coproduction; the performance oriented perspective [14] has discussed how to measure the effectiveness of co-produced services. All these perspectives correspond to the different organizational dimensions that affect the success of the production of a public service.…”