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Governments create and collect enormous amounts of data, for instance concerning voting results, transport, energy, education, and employment. These datasets are often stored in an archive that is not accessible for others than the organization’s employees. To attain benefits such as transparency, engagement, and innovation, many governmental organizations are now also providing public access to this data. However, in opening up their data, these organizations face many issues, including the lack of standard procedures, the threat of privacy violations when releasing data, accidentally releasing policy-sensitive data, the risk of data misuse, challenges regarding the ownership of data and required changes at different organizational layers. These issues often hinder the easy publication of government data.

Data represents a key asset in virtually any aspect of society and economy. Open Data in particular represents a source of immense value, as social capital (Lampoltshammer & Scholz, 2017) as well as an asset for business cases. Governments and their public administrations are generating and collecting during their service a plethora of different kinds of data, as well as an enormous amount in terms of volume. To tab into the potential this data holds in terms of stimulating economy, as well as the development and enhancement of governmental service for the benefit of the public (see Fig. 6.1), a sophisticate Open Data Infrastructure is required.

Evaluation of Open Data is a systematic determination of open data merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards (Farbey, Land, & Targett, 1999). It is an essential procedure trying to ignite a learning and innovation process leading to a more effective data exploitation. Examples of questions to be answered by open data evaluation could be: what is the current status of published data against the best practices identified, how effectively these data are published or used, what are the most valuable data for users, what are the problems and barriers discouraging the publication and use of open data and in which extend these barriers affects users’ behaviour towards data usage. The answers on these questions will affect the next developments of an open data portal or initiative and the publication procedure.

In developing open data policies, organizations aim to stimulate and guide the publication and use of data and to gain advantages from this. Often open data policies are guided by a high-level directive, such as those of the United States (Obama, 2009b) and the European Commission (European Commission, 2013c). Open data policies are important, as their purpose is often to ensure the long-term availability of government information to create transparency and thereby to contribute to citizens’ rights to public access to government information. This right is considered a fundamental tenet of democracy (Allen, 1992). Moreover, open data policies have the potential to increase the participation, interaction, self-empowerment and social inclusion of open data users (e.g. citizens) and providers alike, stimulating economic growth and innovation and realizing many other advantages.

Part 1: E-Government Foundations; International audience; The introduction of ICT is requiring public administrations to transform their organizations to take advantage of these technologies. Despite its significance, no studies so far collected quantitative evidence on (i) how and the extent to which this transformation is currently underway and (ii) which drivers and barriers are hindering and leading this transformation process. This article aims at filling this gap by surveying Dutch public administrations. In total, 46 responses from different organizations were collected that provide insight into their transformation efforts. Findings show that digital transformation efforts had only a partial impact at the organizational level: processes, employees’ duties and tasks and information systems are going through a deep transformation, whereas the social system seems to be less affected by the transformation process. Moreover, the analysis results suggest that external drivers are the main motivation for organizational transformation, and that expected internal barriers do not de facto result in digital transformation. These counterintuitive results suggest that in public administrations only exogenous input result in a sense of urgency and that the perceived barriers to transformation can be overcome if there is sufficient external pressure.