Barriers to Interorganizational Information Sharing in e-Government: A Stakeholder Analysis

Abstract

Government agencies often face trade-offs in developing initiatives that address a public good given competing concerns of various constituent groups. Efforts to construct data warehouses that enable data mining of citizens' personal information obtained from other organizations (including sister agencies) create a complex challenge, since privacy concerns may vary across constituent groups whose priorities diverge from agencies' e-government goals. In addition to privacy concerns, participating government agencies' priorities related to the use of the information may also be in conflict. This article reports on a case study of the Integrated NonFiler Compliance System used by the California Franchise Tax Board for which data are collected from federal, state, and municipal agencies and other organizations in a data mining application that aims to identify residents who under-report income or fail to file tax returns. This system pitted the public good (ensuring owed taxes are paid) against citizen concerns about privacy. Drawing on stakeholder theory, the authors propose a typology of four stakeholder groups (data controllers, data subjects, data providers, and secondary stakeholders) to address privacy concerns and argue that by ensuring procedural fairness for the data subjects, agencies can reduce some barriers that impede the successful adoption of e-government applications and policies. The article concludes that data controllers can reduce adoption and implementation barriers when e-government data mining applications rely on data shared across organizational boundaries: identify legitimate stakeholders and their concerns prior to implementation; enact procedures to ensure procedural fairness when data are captured, shared, and used; explain to each constituency how the data mining application helps to ensure distributive fairness; and continue to gauge stakeholders' responses and ongoing concerns as long as the application is in use.

Information and data quality in business networking: a key concept for enterprises in its early stages of development

“…Recently, studies in the area of digital government have also identified new and enhanced participation discourse using digital channels and quality data (Yao and Murphy 2007;Fedorowicz et al 2010).…”

Effective Practices for Interagency Data Sharing: Insights from Collaborative Research in a Regional Intervention

“…Thus, data sharing has the potential to increase the capacity of governments to make progressive social interventions (McGuirk and O'Neill ). Yet, a sizeable literature attests to the difficulties of government agencies acting collectively (Dawes et al ; Fedorowicz et al ; Gil‐Garcia et al ; Kwon and Feiock ). At the outset we highlight one difficulty, the task of working together.…”

E-government

“…One important consideration in designing and deploying eauthentication solutions is the balance between access, security, authentication, and privacy. Fedorowicz et al (2010) proposed, based on stakeholder theory, a typology of four stakeholder groups (data controllers, data subjects, data providers, and secondary stakeholders) to address privacy concerns and argued that by ensuring procedural fairness for the data subjects, agencies can reduce some barriers that impede the successful adoption of e-government applications and policies. Smith and Jamieson (2006) described key drivers and inhibitors in e-government information system security and found the key implementation issues include awareness, active management support, training, and appropriate funding based on data collected from a broad cross-section of government organizations.…”