This chapter explores the role of data governance in digital organizations, emphasizing the distinction between data and information as foundational to value creation. While traditional organizational models emphasized information derived from structured interpretation of data, contemporary developments have shifted focus toward data as a dynamic and strategic asset. The authors introduce a typology that classifies organizations along two dimensions – data first vs. information first and anarchy vs. governance – resulting in four ideal types: info-anarchy, data-anarchy, infocracy, and datacracy. Each type reflects differing degrees of division of labor, collaboration, and cultural attitudes toward data and information. Drawing on these degrees, this chapter illustrates how organizations can assess their current data governance maturity and design appropriate transition strategies. These include redistributing work, governing cross-unit collaboration, and fostering cultural change. The authors explain that the primary challenges in data governance are no longer technological but organizational, requiring ongoing effort to balance autonomy and standardization while enabling data-driven innovation. Ultimately, effective data governance entails developing organizational capabilities that transform data into actionable information and fostering a culture that sees data as a valuable, shared resource.

Design Science Research (DSR) frequently develops artefacts in isolation from users. We propose moral principles to establish standards of good conduct for DSR researchers concerning community needs. The research question is: What moral principles can guide DSR researchers in reusing, developing, and sharing knowledge within the community? Drawing on perspectives of virtue, deontology, and consequentialism, our proposed moral principles focus on understanding community needs, constructing valuable knowledge, reusing existing knowledge, and co-educating the community.

One recognized benefit of Open Government Data (OGD) publishing by municipalities is improvements and newopportunities for public action transparency and citizen participation (CP). However, compared to OGD-driveneconomic value creation, the integration of OGD into CP projects has received little attention. As a result, thereis still limited understanding of the value such CP projects deliver for the municipality publishing OGD and forthe citizens. After analyzing unexploited data from a study we previously conducted, we identify qualities of CPprojects associated with higher added-value for the municipality and the citizens.

Improvements in citizen participation are among the core benefits often attributed to the publication of Open Government Data (OGD). However, our specific understanding of the range of added value that OGD can bring to citizen participation projects remains limited. In this paper, we employed the Repertory Grid Technique with eight practitioners to gather examples of citizen participation projects utilizing OGD and to understand how OGD adds value to these projects. Through this approach, we identified ten qualities associated with higher OGD added-value and conceptualized six archetypes that describe how OGD can be integrated into citizen participation projects. Our findings enhance existing conceptualizations of OGD use in citizen participation and provide practitioners with a comprehensive and detailed overview of potential OGD applications and key qualities to consider for improving their participation projects.

The public sector is actively pursuing digital transformation to ensure continuous operations and relevance. While existing research has outlined essential prerequisites for successful digital transformation, there is recognition of willful ignorance concerning these prerequisites. Public servants may in other words deliberately avoid understanding the necessary conditions for digital transformation, often driven by strategic motives such as evading responsibility and/or accountability. The phenomenon of willful ignorance constitutes an important yet under-researched area within the study of digital government. To close this gap, we investigate the latent factors of willful ignorance in public sector digital transformation, utilizing three sets of national panel data focused on digital transformation prerequisites. Employing exploratory factor analysis on an initial sample, we construct a factor model, subsequently assessing its validity through confirmatory factor analysis on two additional samples. Our research identifies and validates latent factors associated with willful ignorance in the digital transformation of the public sector. Building on these findings, we propose a mid-range variance theory termed “digital transformation decoupling”. By integrating this theory with existing knowledge, we present a set of propositions to guide future research in the realm of public sector digital transformation.

Open government data (OGD) is commonly referred to as public organizations sharing data for anyone to reuse. Previous research has spent considerable time on understanding the individuals, organizations, socio-technical systems, and resources; included are barriers, risks, and resistance. The validity of the underlying idea is often taken for granted, while in practice, actors follow myths, the rhetoric is paradoxical, and researchers request evidence for the benefits. This study has the purpose of interrogating the OGD idea by using the metaphors of needs, wants, and wishes. Based on an analytical framework, 18 public documents were identified and analysed from various contexts. It is identified that the idea needs (1) implemented principles to make data reusable, (2) data from others, and (3) for data to be needed when actors satisfy other needs; while it wishes (1) reuse of data realizes benefits and (2) public organizations possess large quantities of reusable data. This paper did not identify any wants of the OGD idea. The paper concludes that the OGD idea conflates its principles with data, attaching sought benefits to data for which it is deficient. Giving rise to a situation where the wrong means are related to the wrong ends. This situation is unsatisfactory, as such this paper proposes a new way to understand OGD.

Open Government Data (OGD) pose that public organisations should freely share data for anyone to reuse without restrictions. However, the rawness of this data proves to be a challenge for data or information seekers. OGD-based solutions, such as interactive maps and dashboards, could help seekers overcome this difficulty and use OGD to satisfy needs, helping them to work effectively, solve problems, or pursue hobbies. However, there are several challenges that need to be considered when designing solutions, such as seekers wanting to solve problems rather than consuming information and aiming for quick wins over quality. Previous research has classified OGD solutions, focusing on general concepts. The next step is to reveal helpful patterns in OGD solutions, helping seekers. This paper presents a taxonomy with 24 criteria to classify these patterns. It was tested on 40 OGD solutions, and the resulting classifications were grouped in a cluster analysis, identifying 16 key criteria and 6 clusters. The clusters are (1) simple-personalised, (2) proactive multi-visual, (3) lightly-facilitated exploration, (4) facilitated data-management, (5) facilitated information exploration, and (6) horizon solutions. One unexpected finding is that helpful patterns do not cluster following themes, types, or purposes of solutions. Another finding is that the importance of key criteria varies between the clusters.

Information seekers express information behaviour (IB) when they seek or utilise information, which can help them work effectively, solve problems, or pursue hobbies. They can distil information from data. A growing source of data is open government data (OGD). While OGD is too raw for direct use, OGD solutions can help seekers to interpret and act on OGD. Previous OGD research lacks knowledge about the match between seekers’ IB and OGD solutions’ design. Therefore, this paper explores offered help of OGD solutions to seekers’ IB, assuming a general set of IB since it tends to propend between technologies. This paper used qualitative content analysis to analyse OGD solutions, aiming for saturation. First, a code frame was built from previous IB research. Second, 74 OGD solutions were selected through purposive sampling. Third, 37 OGD solutions were subsume coded, because of saturation, whereas the remaining 37 OGD solutions were checked for negative cases. The findings show that an OGD solution can help a seeker by (1) providing a base or frame for interpretation, (2) taking a proactive or active role in the distillation of information from OGD, and (3) contextualising its help to a seeker’s life. The findings unravelled the assumed general set of IB to reveal a new possible data behaviour (DB); where a seeker focuses on transforming and distributing information, distilled from OGD, to possibly satisfy the needs of other seekers.

The rhetoric related to benefits of Open Government Data (OGD) seems to lack anchor in practice affecting practitioners and empirical evidence restraining academia. This rhetoric could be hard to see for those already persuaded. As such, the rhetoric could contain inconsistencies that are based more on myths than facts, contributing to the slow pace of OGD development. OGD is sometimes based on dogmatic rhetoric that is overly simplistic, which hides significant benefits and blocks potential audiences from seeing the practical applications of OGD. The purpose of the present study was to analyse the persuasiveness of present OGD arguments from a rhetorical perspective to identify rhetorical patterns. We conducted desktop research, investigating the rhetoric of eight websites emphasising OGD benefits. Our findings include four common patterns of the rhetoric involving persuasion and dissuasion. The rhetoric contains paradoxes of promises and discoveries, which we categorised as the grand quest, promised opportunities, tribal solidarity, and the silver bullet patterns. A further finding was two mythical paradoxes: (1) promises versus discovery and (2) proving while arguing.