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Part 3: Open Data: Social and Technical Aspects; International audience; Public organizations in the role of publishers publish data for anyone to reuse, which can lead to benefits. However, the process descriptions for this publishing work focus on one or a few issues, which leaves out important areas and decisions. Little seems to be known about variations between publishers based on one common point of comparison. Therefore, this paper presents a comparison between two publishers: Namur (Belgium) and Linköping (Sweden). The comparison is based on a process framework, seven in-depth interviews, document studies, and a verification meeting with one respondent. We learned that the OGD manager is an agent of change who need to balance implementation and guidance, the orthodox method of e-mail registration can be used to engage users and monitor impact, the organizational unit for OGD is cross-organizational, and the publisher process framework could be used as ex-ante strategic guidelines and context-specific recommendations.

Part 1: E-Government Foundations; International audience; Several policies for e-government, both on national and supranational levels, express visions and claims for more advanced exploitation of digital opportunities. The paper contributes through a problematization of the idea of utilizing digital opportunities and a conceptualization of this into the polarity of overexploitation vs. underexploitation of digital opportunities. It is based on a qualitative and diagnostic case study on the digitalization of medical certificates and theoretically informed by affordance theory and activity theory. Digital arrangements in the case study are investigated and different types of digital affordances and constraints are revealed. There are examples of surplus of affordances (i.e. overexploitation), lack of affordances and affordances with embedded constraints (i.e. underexploitation), and useful affordances (i.e. adequate exploitation). The application of the affordance and constraint concepts is, in the paper, done through a two-step staging: 1) General characteristics of digital technology give affordances for design. 2) The resulting digital artifacts will have different properties and these properties give affordances but also constraints for use. The resulting conceptualizations are discussed in relation to normative, regulative and other institutional aspects concerning digitalization in the public sector. This is conceptualized in a graphical model describing policy and other pre-conditions, designed digital artifacts, and workpractice effects.

Part 2: E-Government Services and Open Government; International audience; Smart policing refers to the application of data-driven approaches by police authorities. Although the concept is not new, the vast availability of potentially relevant data sources in policing calls for a critical and consolidated review of the literature. To synthesise the evidence on smart policing, we present a systematic review of 112 articles across all relevant disciplines. Earlier work has concentrated on social media communications or predictive policing while this review identifies several new applications associated with new forms of data and their corresponding roles to policing. We develop a framework to show the connections between smart use of data and police approaches and strategies. We discuss how smart policing can be an area of increased interest in digital government and public management research.

Part 2: E-Government Services and Open Government; International audience; Governments aim to digitalize public services. Whereas initially they worked in isolation, nowadays they increasingly link different building blocks together to realize integrated public services. This evolution poses challenges concerning the governance of public services. The purpose of this paper is to identify governance challenges in inter-organizational digital public service delivery. To do this, we investigated a case study that deals with the creation of digital invoicing services in Belgium. The findings show seven groups of governance challenges that incorporate technical, organizational and inter-organizational factors. Governance challenges can be external, related to the environment and the users, as well as internal, related to the digitalization objectives and governance dynamics. Moreover, as public services evolve over time, so do governance challenges, suggesting that governance regimes may have to evolve accordingly to maintain coordinated service delivery.

Part 2: E-Government Services and Open Government; International audience; Technical debt is created when software engineers knowingly or unknowingly introduce shortcuts or unsuitable choices in the development or maintenance of the software system, that will have a negative impact on the future evolution of the system until corrected. Therefore, it is crucial to manage established debt particular in the public sector. The aim of this study is to introduce Technical debt to the field of Digital Government. We create an overview of the state of the art of the knowledge on technical debt management, the methods applied to gain this knowledge, and propose a research agenda to Digital Government scholars. We conduct a systematic literature review, which focuses on the concept of technical debt management. Forty-nine papers published within 2017–2020 are selected and analyzed. We identify several gaps in the existing literature: 1) an absence of theory explaining the relation of events, 2) a shortage of studies conducted in the public sector, 3) and an absence of specific techniques such as observation to study actual technical debt management behavior.

Part 5: Smart Cities; International audience; The transition of our society towards a sustainable, low-carbon reality is challenging governments at all levels to establish, implement and monitor policies that can realize this transition. In the Netherlands, cities are developing data-driven policies to ensure that the urban environment will make the transition from the use of natural gas to sustainable alternatives. However, the collection and (re-)use of data is not without its challenges, which may hamper policymaking, and thereby the ambitions for the transition. Therefore, this paper explores barriers to the data collection and use for the urban heat transition, based on literature and practice. First, an overview of barriers is derived from literature. Subsequently, we interview policy makers of eight frontrunner cities to explore which barriers they encounter in practice. We find that cities need different data in different phases of the strategy development, and that the main barriers for the collection and re-use of data are the required amount of effort and time, and the experienced difficulties to take decisions based on data that is poor in quality, level of detail and topicality.

Part 3: Open Data: Social and Technical Aspects; International audience; Public administration is one of the largest producers and collectors of data in several domains. Bearing in mind that one of the main pillars of public transparency is the release of social value through government data, and that this right remains a challenge for citizens, in this work we implemented a methodology that uses techniques and Answers and Information Retrieval to retrieve data sets and respond to questions from citizens on a Brazilian open government data portal. Using metrics of information retrieval evaluation, such as accuracy and recall, we obtained satisfactory results in applying the proposed methodology.

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.

Part 4: AI, Data Analytics, and Automated Decision Making; International audience; The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to lead to a severe recessionary economic crisis with quite negative consequences for large numbers of firms and citizens; however, this is an ‘old story’: recessionary economic crises appear repeatedly in the last 100 years in the market-based economies, and they are recognized as one of the most severe and threatening weaknesses of them. They can result in closure of numerous firms, and decrease of activities of many more, as well as poverty and social exclusion for large parts of the population, and finally lead to political upheaval and instability; so they constitute one of the most threatening and difficult problems that governments often face. For the above reasons it is imperative that governments develop effective public policies and make drastic interventions for addressing these economic crises. Quite useful for these interventions can be the prediction of the vulnerability of individual firms to recessionary economic crisis, so that government can focus its attention as well as its scarce economic resources on the most vulnerable ones. In this direction our paper presents a methodology for using existing government data in order to predict the vulnerability of individual firms to economic crisis, based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Furthermore, a first application of the proposed methodology is presented, based on existing data from the Greek Ministry of Finance and Statistical Authority concerning 363 firms for the economic crisis period 2009–2014, which gives encouraging results.

Part 2: Adoption; International audience; Online household e-waste collection services are emerging as new solutions to disposing household e-waste in China. This study aims to investigate the adoption of online household e-waste collection services in China. Based on the previous technology diffusion theories (e.g., TAM, UTAUT), a research model with six research hypotheses was proposed in this research. The research model was empirically tested with a sample of 203 users of online household e-waste collection services in China. The results indicated that five of the six research hypotheses were significantly supported. And the most significant determinant for the behavioral intention to use online household e-waste service was effort expectancy. However, facilitating condition did not have significant impact on users’ behavior of using online household e-waste collection services.

Part 3: Big and Open Data; International audience; Operational business intelligence (OpBI) integrates data of business processes to analyse their performance in relation to organizational goals. The consequent decision-making concerns a timely recognition and execution of actions to maintain performant business processes. OpBI systems can be designed according to a firm-specific definition of requirements guided by considerations from business model, business process and information system perspective. However, there is no approach to link the design of OpBI jointly with characteristics of business models and business processes, yet. The paper uses therefore an action research method and proposes a business approach that combines e3value with the work system framework to set up conceptual application designs for an OpBI-reliant decision support. We report on results of a long-term research project to demonstrate the development and application of our approach in four different business scenarios. The findings include implications towards a business-oriented application design of OpBI systems.

Part 2: Adoption; International audience; The population is rapidly ageing in countries such as Finland. However, little research has been conducted to better understand older travellers’ use of Internet and mobile devices. This qualitative study aims at exploring young-elderly (aged 60–75) travellers as potential users and actual users of the Internet with mobile device during trips. The results identify a range of possible drivers and barriers for the use of Internet with mobile devices and their impact on the travel experience during trips. The study also suggests that there is a substantial number of young-elderly travellers that are quite advanced in their mobile usage behaviour.

Part 2: Adoption; International audience; This study aims to explore whether Jordanian customers’ perceptions on intention and adoption of Mobile banking (MB) services varies according to their demographic characteristics. As per the prior literature, five demographic factors, namely age, gender, income, education and customer’s experience with computer and Internet have been considered in the current study. The required data were collected from the field survey questionnaires administered to a convenience sample of Jordanian banking customers. The major statistical results (mean and standard deviation) demonstrate that the customers’ perceptions on intention and adoption of MB are likely to vary due to customers’ demographic differences. According to the current study’s findings, it was also noticed that despite the fact that the most of the sample respondents express a high intention to adopt MB, the adoption rate for the majority of MB services was low.

Part 4: E-Business, E-Services and E-Society; International audience; The online shopping is increasing rapidly because of its convenience to buy from home and comparing products from their reviews written by other purchasers. When people buy a product, they express their emotions about that product in the form of review. In Indian context, it is found that the reviews contain Hindi text along with English. It is also found that most of the Hindi text contains opinionated words like bahut achha, bakbas, pesa wasool etc. We have tried to find out different Hindi texts appearing in product reviews written on Indian E-commerce portals. We have also developed a system which takes all those reviews containing Hindi as well as English texts and find out the sentiment expressed in that review for each attribute of the product as well as a final review of the product.

Part 1: Keynote Panel; International audience; Governments have always retained public service data internally in their own systems with only limited information provided to the public and other stakeholders such as the business, charitable and NGO communities. However, the rapid advancement of ICTs coupled with electronic publishing via the Internet in the last decade in particular has enabled governments to exploit the potential of wider distribution and use of such data previously held in internal systems. The panellists will discuss how Big, Open and Linked Data (BOLD) can be utilized to drive innovation and what obstacles and challenges may be encountered. Empowering citizens, potential mis-use in identity theft, policy manipulation or market distortion, and the need to combine open data with closed sources will be discussed.

Part 2: Adoption; International audience; This study aims to examine the factors that affect consumer adoption of social commerce technologies in the context of Saudi Arabia. The factors descriptively explored in this research include: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, hedonic motivation, habit, trust, consumer innovativeness, information quality and behavioural intention. The survey data utilised in this research was collected through a self-administered questionnaire within a convenience sample. The results obtained through a descriptive analysis confirmed that Saudi consumers perceive the abovementioned factors as important and they have strong behavioural intention to use social commerce technologies.

Part 3: Big and Open Data; International audience; Governments are producing significant public data that, if made open, is expected to create enormous social and commercial value as well as improve the civil governance. Unleashing the true power of open public data requires a much better understanding of its ecosystem than is known currently. This paper surveys the global open data landscape by taking into account the Open Data Barometer (ODB) ranking system and its three sub-indexes - readiness, implementation and impact. These indexes are compared and analyzed on the basis of income levels of the ODB ranked countries. Finally, using air quality open data, data availability in developing countries like China is compared with countries of better practices such as UK and US. The comparison helps in understanding the current situation and barriers in opening data in China.

Part 2: Adoption; International audience; The Internet of Things (IoT) has high promises and might provide many benefits, yet has been given scant attention in e-government literature. Within the IoT, physical objects, “things”, are networked and connected to the Internet. These “things” are able to identify themselves to and communicate with other devices or “things”. There are many impediments blocking the adoption of IoT, and there is limited insight in these barriers. In this paper, impediments for the adoption of IoT are investigated by conducting a literature review and carrying out two case studies. The impediments found in literature were confirmed and extended using the case studies. Results show that impediments are interrelated and occur on the strategic, tactical and operational level. For adoption the impediments needs to be addressed in concert. Research on e-governance can benefit from understanding these interrelated impediments.

Part 3: Big and Open Data; International audience; Similarity search in the big data environment is a challenging task. Patient Similarity search (PaSi) is an important issue in healthcare network and data. The results of PaSi search may be highly useful for drawing different conclusions and decisions to improve healthcare systems. Such findings can also be useful for choosing the treatment paths for new patients. In this paper, we propose a MapReduce based framework as a solution to the PaSi problem in the context of a healthcare network imagined to be implemented considering the healthcare centers of India. It is assumed that such a healthcare network will be implemented in future over the Government of India cloud known as GI cloud or ‘MeghRaj’. The paper also discusses the associated implementation challenges of the proposed framework and the query handling approach for the proposed framework to solve the PaSi problem is stated. Finally, the paper outlines the future scope of the work.

Part 2: Adoption; International audience; Utilising Mobile Internet (M-Internet) services would increase socio-economic benefits. Hence, it is necessary to consider the factors that may increase the adoption of M-Internet services within the context of Saudi Arabia. This research aims to examine potential users’ intentions towards different variables that may be significant for supporting higher usage of M-Internet services in the domain of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This study embraces the following variables: perceived risk, innovativeness; performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, perceived value, hedonic motivation and behavioural intention. Data was collected by means of a questionnaire on a convenience sample that consisted of 600 subjects with a response rate of 69.5 %. The findings gathered from a descriptive analysis suggested that the related variables are perceived as significant by participants and they have strong behavioural intention to use M-Internet services.

Part 3: Big and Open Data; International audience; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other players in the social media world have been on the rise during the last couple of years. In contrast to their popularity, their underlying business models are vague and often only linked to advertising. In this explorative study we identify new revenue sources for social media service providers besides advertising. Based on three use cases with Facebook, Tencent, and LinkedIn, we identify three possibly fruitful ways to extend existing social media business models. Subsequently, a survey with 301 respondents changes perspectives on the user’s willingness to pay in order to identify usage-related differences evoked by cultural and external circumstances. Four derived hypotheses lead the way to avenues of further research especially in terms of Big Data analytics with new e-commerce trends like Facebook’s Buy Button.