Approaches to Good Data Governance in Support of Public Sector Transformation Through Once-Only

Abstract

The Once Only Principle (OOP) drives current public sector modernization through the reduction of administrative burdens. It requires public authorities not to ask citizens and companies to repeatedly provide information to the public authorities. Instead, public authorities shall share and re-use data among themselves in due respect of data protection regulation. The sharing and re-use of sensitive and non-sensitive data among public administrations demands for broad acceptance by all stakeholders. Trust and transparency are key success criteria in such data-driven public sector transformation. Establishing proper governance mechanisms for the data infrastructures that enable the sharing and reuse in public service provisioning, and that provide the necessary transparency and trust levels is expected to effectively improve public service. This research investigates approaches for establishing a good data governance in OOP settings tackling the sharing and re-use of sensitive or personal data. Geographical focus is on the European Union and Switzerland.

Once-Only Principle Good Practices in Europe

“…A customer-centric approach conveys the proposition of creating value for society and economy. As the once-only principle demands that citizens and businesses will only have to provide certain standard information to the public agencies once, public authorities are in need to share and re-use sensitive and personal data to reduce administrative burden for citizens and businesses [16,33,34,58,59]. However, sharing and re-use of such data must be done with due respect of data protection regulations [19], as otherwise trustworthiness of public service provisioning would be hampered tremendously.…”

“…Furthermore, digital transformation is not a smooth process, and digital tools do not per se contribute to before mentioned success factors. Since the digital transformation in government is considered to be a quite complex endeavour, coordination and engagement concepts as well as overarching architectures to enable secure and trustworthy access to data and information in inter-agency information sharing are further success criteria [25,27,59].…”

“…To facilitate the successful implementation of the once-only principle, appropriate collaborative governance models are needed, which clearly define the responsibilities and roles of actors on different levels of governance. Of particular relevance are interoperability governance and public service governance, which both need to be aligned as spotted in [13,54,57,59].…”

The Once-Only Principle: A Matter of Trust

“…During the lifetime of the TOOP project it become clear that there is not much literature about the OOP aside of the papers that are produced by the members of the project [2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Therefore, it was the main motivation for this book to provide information from the context of the TOOP project to enable or deepen the discourse amongst policymakers, researchers, administrators, and vendors so that understanding, cooperation, future research, and development can emerge.…”

Drivers for and Barriers to the Cross-border Implementation of the Once-Only Principle

“…This accounts for the significant changes imposed by the OOP in organizational structures and workflows. The required level of collaboration and coordination between different organizations, one core aspect of the OOP (e.g., Wimmer et al 2020), is bound to face a number of organizational and administrative barriers affecting organizations' will and capacity to implement OOP. The most common barriers faced during implementation of OOP at a national level have been found to include governmental silos and lack of communication between government departments, the complexity of changes in organizational structures, working practices and cultures, and concerns about high implementation costs (Gallo et al 2014).…”