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{{Paper
|id=Vol-3049/paper32
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|title=Barriers of Government as a Platform in Practice
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3049/Paper32.pdf
|volume=Vol-3049
|authors=Peter Kuhn,Matthias Buchinger,Dian Balta
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/egov/KuhnBB21a
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==Barriers of Government as a Platform in Practice==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3049/Paper32.pdf
Barriers of Government as a Platform in Practice
Peter Kuhn*, Matthias Buchinger**, Dian Balta***
*fortiss GmbH, Research Institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software-intensive systems, Munich,
Germany
**fortiss GmbH, Research Institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software-intensive systems, Munich,
Germany
***fortiss GmbH, Research Institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software-intensive systems, Munich,
Germany
Abstract: Government as a Platform (GaaP) is a promising approach to digital transformation in
the public sector that aims at creating efficient and user-friendly services by the use of network
effects and co-creation. Several countries like the UK and Italy already pursue the GaaP approach.
However, introducing GaaP remains challenging, especially in federal states. This poster presents
barriers of the introduction of GaaP in the project of a federal agency in Germany. The barriers
help understand the applicability of GaaP in practice and motivate future research on potential
measures to overcome those barriers.
Keywords: Government as a Platform, digital transformation, federal states
Acknowledgement: This research is based partly on the project KoGaaP, which was funded by
FITKO, AöR, Frankfurt, Germany.
1. Situation and Complication
Platforms in the public sector are associated with benefits and public value via integration, efficiency
and innovation, but also user-friendly public services [1]. Platforms and platform ecosystems can be
described as compromising "a platform owner that implements governance mechanisms to facilitate
value creating mechanisms on a digital platform between the platform owner and an ecosystem of
autonomous complementors and consumers" [2]. In his seminal work "Government as a Platform"
(GaaP) Tim O'Reilly proposes lessons learnt on how to adapt such a platform approach to the public
sector [3]. Countries like UK [4] and Italy [5] already pursue the approach and the EU emphasizes
its benefits .
However, the implementation of GaaP in practice remains challenging. In particular, in federal
states where decisions and implementations need consensus and coordination of multiple parties
[6]. Often there is no single entity that can "own" the Platform and the introduction of a GaaP
approach needs consensus in such states.
Copyright ©2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
308 Posters
2. Resolution and Methodology
This poster presents preliminary results from a use case from Germany. Based on a systematic
literature review and data from the use case we analyze the factors and mechanisms that hindered
the success of the project and identify the underlying barriers.
The use case is a project by the federal government agency FITKO to introduce a platform
approach to the IT infrastructure that is used for forwarding applications from the portal of one state
to the business application of another. To this end, the agency aims at a standardized API interface
and delivery service that allows an ecosystem of portals to work on the same platform infrastructure.
3. Results
Barrier 1: It remains unclear what GaaP means in practice. The working groups of the project
revealed that the agency has clear ideas about the technical components and interfaces of the project
but struggled to define what exactly the platform is and what it boundaries are.
Barrier 2: The GaaP approach is hard to communicate. In the course of the project the term
platform was often associated with a web-site or a tangible artefact; a platform for government [7].
The more fundamental approach that considers “government as a platform” is not tangible and,
thus, harder to explain.
Barrier 3: Unclear where to start and how. Despite the guidelines from O'Reilly, the chicken-egg
problem of platforms extended also to the project of the use case. Should the project start with the
interface specification or the creation of an ecosystem?
Barrier 4: Difficulty to define the platform boundary. In the investigated use case the accessibility
of the API from outside of the government network was a much debated issue. This is embedded in
the general discussion on openness vs. control of platforms.
4. Implication and Future Work
Government as a Platform is a promising approach for the efficiency and user-friendliness of
government. However, for the introduction of GaaP in practice it is necessary to understand the
barriers that hinder its implementation. Further work should evaluate the barriers in other use cases
and develop measures to overcome them.
References
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O’Reilly, T.: Government as a Platform. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization. 6, 13–40 (2011).
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Generation Federalism in Germany. In: 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,
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government-Which-are-we-getting, last accessed 2021/01/04.
About the Authors
Peter Kuhn, Matthias Buchinger, Dian Balta
Peter Kuhn, Matthias Buchinger and Dian Balta work at fortiss gGmbH, the research institute of the Free
State of Bavaria for software-intensive systems. They are part of the research group Open Data &
Information Management and focus on the engineering of information systems and processes that support
the platformization in the government domain.