Big Data and government: Evidence of the role of Big Data for smart cities

Abstract

Scholars are becoming increasingly interested in whether and how government use of Big Data will affect public policy outcomes. Despite such growing scholarly interests, however, little evidence exists on the role Big Data can play in improving government service. We undertake one of the first quantitative studies revealing the potential utility and limitations of ''Big Data-based policymaking'' by exploring its recent use by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. In 2013, the government introduced the ''Owl Bus''-a late-night bus system-the routes of which were selected based on government analyses of Big Data relating to citizens' late-night taxi and mobile phone use. The findings suggest that the average number of passengers utilizing the Owl Bus routes was significantly greater than that on other daytime bus routes with comparable characteristics. That said, we also present the potential limitations of evidence-based policymaking in general, especially when politics and equity considerations are factored in.

Big Data Analytics in Australian Local Government

“…However there are barriers for both local government and citizens, the former including privacy issues, and the latter the so-called digital divide, which can make the data virtually useless to a majority of possible users without the technical skills and resources to use it. Recent Korean research on big data in government is reported in [22,23]. Kim et al analyzed the role of big data in the governments of leading nations including the US, UK, Japan, Korea, Australia, and Singapore [22].…”

“…They found that all leading nations (including Australia) are exploiting big data approaches to the vast amounts of data they collect and have initiated large projects to enhance the efficiency of government operations. Hong et al described the Seoul metropolitan transport system's application of big data to optimize public transport [23].…”

An orchestration approach to smart city data ecosystems

“…Among varied entities, local and regional government authorities are usually identified as the largest steward of city data with data stored across various legacy systems both in-house, and in systems commissioned by external vendors (Malomo and Sena, 2017;British Standards Institution, 2015). Further to these public actors, a network of industry and government-backed SMEs, service delivery providers, think-tanks and other intermediary organisations are usually critically involved with city data projects (Cohen et al, 2016;Hong et al, 2019;Malomo and Sena, 2017;Snow et al, 2016). Altogether, these organisations, the city data and their interactions can be conceptualised as a smart city data ecosystem.…”

Technical considerations when implementing digital infrastructure for social policy

“…For example, effective integration of big data into health sector processes has been shown to enable patient-centric services, early detection of spread of disease, monitoring of hospital quality and improvement of treatment methods (Archenaa & Anita 2015) as well as the establishment of e-health integrated platforms (Black et al 2014). Big data is also being increasingly integrated into policymaking in diverse areas such as the prevention of child sexual abuse (Broadley 2018) and design of smart cities (Hong et al 2019).…”

“…1.2 | Technical challenges of using big data in social policy and research There are significant challenges associated with incorporating big data into social policy and research. The exponential growth of big data in such a short period of time means there is limited research into how big data can actually improve government service (Hong et al 2019). In particular, how to weigh the potential benefits of big data in social policy and research against the significant technical and organisational resources required to safely and securely integrate it remains an open question (Carney 2019).…”