CISE-IIS: Creating a Knowledge Foundation for Citizen Services Research Programs in Government

Suny At Albany, Albany NY

Investigators

Abstract

Both the need and the opportunities for governments to understand and respond to citizens expectations have grown enormously. Technical innovation and social forces are creating a kind of perfect storm of new data for government agencies to cope with, coming from a convergence of rapidly expanding web-based service delivery, exploding capability of social media and mobile devices for network-based citizen feedback, and policy initiatives promoting greater use of network-based applications and infrastructure to promote transparency and citizen engagement. Government agencies are thus challenged with gathering, integrating, and interpreting rapidly growing, diverse data flows both to and from citizens across the knowledge life cycle, and using the results to improve performance. It is not clear what computational, analytical, and organizational capabilities agencies will need to cope with this expanding scale of citizen engagement, or what theory and research methods are most appropriate to understand the information received. The complexity of shifting interactions among technical and social developments requires understanding and strategies somewhat beyond our existing knowledge base. Service providers will need improved computational and analytical skills, strategies, and assessment methods, in short a new set of integrated computational and organizational capabilities. Researchers will need new frameworks to guide inquiry. The purpose of this project is therefore to build out the knowledge base available to government agencies and researchers. This will be done by assembling and reviewing existing research and best practices, building a research agenda for future work, and developing methods to enhance agency capabilities to conduct citizen research programs. The research team will collaborate with a Federal agency (General Services Administration - Office of Citizen Services) to identify the goals and capability issues from the agency perspective, and to develop the research agenda for building agency capabilities. This includes conducting pilot-type scale research with OSC to build capacity and test methods. Intellectual Merit This research addresses a critical problem that extend across information systems and organizational studies: How to gather, integrate, and interpret complex, dynamic data flows in ways that lead to enhanced organizational capabilities and improved performance. Theory that treats organizational capability and performance improvement recognizes the importance of information, but does not deal adequately with the capability or design of systems supplying the information. The wide range of technical challenges to integrating information across diverse sources are well recognized but the path to interoperable and adaptive systems remains largely unmapped. The research in these areas crosses organizational studies, computer and information science, and public administration. Broader Impact Government agencies face an information environment that is vital to the success of their programs and at the same time challenges their capacity to cope with the volume and diversity of flows. They are expected to provide ever greater information to the public and at the same time seek and respond to ever greater levels of public engagement and feedback. There is a real prospect of rapidly growing public demand for both engagement and access, spurred by improved communication capability and stimulated by more responsive agency behavior. New information system strategies are needed to cope with such increases in scale and complexity. This research will respond to this need by treating the information systems themselves as integrated organizational and computational entities. This approach will provide an enhanced knowledge base for developing these improved systems as well as the capabilities for information gathering and integration strategies in the organizations themselves.