Government information sharing and integration: Combining the social and the technical

TLDR

ICTs can transform government operations and citizen interactions, yet inter‑organizational information sharing raises privacy, political, and technical challenges that are especially critical after disasters and fragmented policymaking, making cross‑boundary data exchange essential for efficient services and decision making. This special issue explores government information sharing and integration as a socio‑technical phenomenon, presenting diverse theoretical perspectives, disciplinary approaches, and practical applications to guide agencies toward cross‑organizational data integration. The issue compiles theoretical frameworks, disciplinary viewpoints, and case studies that illustrate how agencies can design and implement integrated information systems. The collection demonstrates that government information sharing yields real benefits—enhanced productivity, better decision making, reduced duplication, stronger enforcement, higher data quality, and integrated services—by leveraging shared databases.

Abstract

Information and communication technologies (ICT’s) have the potential greatly to transform how government works and how it relates to citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders. One such transformative capability of ICT’s is to facilitate government information sharing and integration in a networked environment. Integrating government information has raised important concerns about citizens’ privacy and the possibility of government to exercise greater surveillance on citizens. However, the need to share government information and to interoperate between diverse information systems has been highlighted, not least after events such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters, and by the fragmented nature of policy making and service provisioning revealed following those events that contributed to the administrative burden for citizens and businesses. The ability to share information across organizational boundaries is a pre-requisite for efficient processing of citizen services and for effective decision making by multiple collaborative environments. Government information sharing offers a real opportunity to share databases and make decisions based on more complete information [12]. It also offers important benefits such as increased productivity, improved decision making, lower administrative burden (information is already held somewhere in government and not duplicated), better enforcement (greater information availability), higher information quality (resulting in fewer mistakes), and integrated services [4,6,13,19,34,43]. However, inter-organizational information sharing and integration is a complex and difficult task facing a myriad of political, organizational, legal and technical challenges including lack of political support, lack of financial resources, citizens’ privacy and confidentiality concerns, and poor technical skills, among others [22,36,37]. This special issue contributes to a practical and theoretical conversation about government information sharing and integration as a socio-technical phenomenon by presenting multiple theoretical perspectives, disciplinary approaches, and practical applications. Scholars from different theoretical traditions propose that in order to realize the most important benefits from the use of ICT’s in government, agencies should integrate their information across organizational