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This report describes how a diverse mix of individuals and organizations representing two countries, three states, multiple levels of government, private industry, academia, and the public were able to successfully organize and then respond to improve air quality along the U.S. and Mexican border. The focal point of this study is the Joint Advisory Committee for the Improvement of Air Quality in the Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua/El Paso, Texas/Doña Ana County, New Mexico Air Basin (the JAC). It was through the JAC that this diverse mix of key actors were able to navigate the complex web of political, cultural, legal, and economic factors that posed challenges to developing a unified response to this shared air quality problem. The JAC’s strategies and methods were powerfully shaped by the characteristics of the physical setting and the organizational and political context. Many of these strategies and methods have considerable promise for other air shed regions, but must be tailored to the unique physical and social situations of each one.

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Creating interoperability in the governmental context requires government leaders to take responsibility for improving the capabilities of government agencies to effectively partner with other agencies and governments as well as the private sector, non-profit groups, and research institutions. Governance is a foundational capability for creating and improving government interoperability. Recent research conducted by the CTG draws on a comparative case study of IT governance to illustrate that while effective governance structures include a consistent set of elements or capabilities, there are also a wide range of context specific issues that must be responded to in the governance design, development, and implementation processes.

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This report summarizes the results of a national survey of cross-boundary information sharing in the public sector conducted by the Center for Technology in Government (CTG). This national study, conducted by CTG and supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, was designed to understand how effective information integration and sharing occurs within and across boundaries of organizations. The purpose of the survey was to test the generalizability of a preliminary theoretical model of how policy, organizational, social, and technical factors interact to create criminal justice and public health information sharing capabilities. CTG developed this model based on the data collected and analyzed during earlier phases of the research project.

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Today, digital government (DG) research is being conducted all over the world. Most of this work is focused within the geographic and political contexts of individual countries. However, given the growing influence of global economic, social, technical, and political forces, the questions embedded in digital government research are now expanding to international dimensions. A reconnaissance study such as this one focuses on the defining characteristics of a topic rather an in-depth analysis. In this report, we describe the size, scope, variety, and trajectory of the field illustrated with selected studies and organizational profiles. This study is part of a multi-year effort funded by the United States (US) National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a framework for a sustainable global community of digital government researchers and research sponsors.

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New levels of capability for coordinated action across organizational boundaries are required in order for government to realize the transformative potential of technology and cope with new economic imperatives. This report outlines five recommendations for change developed through a collaborative, consensus-driven process conducted by CTG on behalf of the New York State CIO community. These recommendations are targeted at building new capability for enterprise information technology investment decision making for New York State. The recommendations extend existing enterprise IT governance capability by introducing a new level of transparency in decision making, increasing the opportunity for alignment of IT investments with New York State’s strategic priorities, and fostering the development of policies and standards to guide those investments.

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Over the last fifteen years, the role of IT in state government has grown in prominence, which has drawn attention to how IT is governed at the state level. This report reviews enterprise IT governance arrangements in thirteen states (California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia). These states were selected to create a diverse set of examples and to gain a broad picture of state enterprise IT governance efforts in the United States. There are a total of five data summaries included within the report. First is a high-level comparison of state enterprise IT governance elements. This comparison is followed by a more detailed overview of three enterprise IT governance components: state CIO Councils, state executive IT boards, and budgetary authority for IT decisions. Finally, the report concludes with in-depth profiles and models of state enterprise IT governance arrangements in each of the thirteen states. Together, these resources provide one of the most comprehensive reviews of public sector IT governance currently available.

Proceedings of 5th International Conference on e-Government, Oct 2009, pp.148-155
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Research has shown that clarity of roles and responsibilities (CRR) influences the effectiveness and performance of individual organizations as well as cross-boundary or interorganizational group efforts. Role clarity increases job satisfaction, commitment, and involvement and reduces tension and anxiety among organizational members, which results in lower staff turnover rates in organizations. In addition, CRR has been found to enable other important determinants of success in cross-boundary information sharing (CBI), such as building trust among members of CBI initiatives. However, few studies attempt to understand the determinants of CRR in a CBI initiative. Using data from semi-structured interviews from eight U.S. state and local government public health and criminal justice information sharing cases, this paper seeks to fill this gap by examining these determinants.

This is an electronic version of an Article published in Public Administration Review, Volume 69, Issue 3 (p 392-402) © 2009 the American Society for Public Administration, May 2009, twelve pages
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Public managers confront tangled problems every day across all policy domains and levels of government, and they need to be ready to deal with them through networked forms of engagement and action. Knowledge networking—the ability to create public sector knowledge networks (PSKNs) suitable for addressing these problems—requires a certain set of skills and attitudes, as well as interpersonal and other kinds of trust. Network development processes that emphasize early, open dialogue and examination of assumptions and expectations do better than those that rush forward with a fixed IT solution in mind. Those that adapt and learn from experience are more likely to succeed in achieving their substantive project and networking goals. Finally, to be sustainable as organizational forms, knowledge networks need some legal foundation, access to resources, supportive policies, and innovative forms of leadership.

In Albert Meijer, Kees Boersma, Pieter Wagenaar (Eds.), ICTs, Citizens & Governance: After the Hype! . pp.180-197. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Sharing information across organizational boundaries is central to efforts to improve government operations and services. However, creating the capability necessary to enable information sharing across the boundaries of organizations is among the most difficult types of information technology projects. New knowledge about information sharing is required; in particular, new understanding about how government, non-governmental and private sector organizations come together to share information is necessary. This chapter draws on the experiences of key actors in three states in the United States as they organized to create new capability to share information as part of their responses to the West Nile virus outbreaks. The cases highlight the gap between expectations and reality, providing opportunity to more fully understand the gaps between expectations (the hype) about ICTs and the reality facing government practitioners who seek to use ICTs to share information. Examining the cases in terms of four contexts of information integration and sharing provides a more specific understanding about the gaps between these expectations and the reality (after the hype). The lessons learned in the context of public health include the central role of information sharing and the implications of resource constraints on data capture and use capability in the context of an outbreak management and surveillance effort. Insight into the interdependence of system design and process support and improvement in the context of public health surveillance was also found to be critical to future planning of public health surveillance systems. This chapter serves to reemphasize to both researchers and practitioners the need to close the gap between expectations and reality; the point is made again through the cases that closing the gap depends on strategies that draw on technology, process, interorganizational, and political perspectives and resources.