Theresa A. Pardo

University at Albany, The State University of New York | UAlbany · Center for Technology in Government

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in government is receiving increasing attention from global research and practice communities. This article, introducing a Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence in Government published in the Social Science Computer Review, presents an overview of some of the main policy initiatives across the...

Cities throughout the world are changing. To respond to these changes mayors and other urban policy makers are investing heavily in innovations aimed at making their cities “smarter.” This essay presents the argument that making a city smarter rests on the capability of that city to create public value for those who live and work there. Such capabi...

This edited volume discusses smart cities and smart governance within the framework of the 22nd century sustainable city. Written by members of the Smart Cities Smart Government Research Practice Consortium (SCSGRPC), an international multidisciplinary consortium of researchers and practitioners devoted to studying smart governance, this book provi...

Open government has become an important strategy for administrative reform in the last decade incentivizing many countries around the world to design and implement initiatives related to information access, transparency, participation, and collaboration. However, there is limited clarity about the definition of open government and its main conceptu...

Previous research has shown that clarity of roles and responsibilities (CRR) influences the performance of individual organizations as well as inter-organizational efforts. In the context of cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS), CRR has been found to enable other important determinants of success, such as building trust among members, increasi...

We describe the experience of a sample of US state child welfare organizations that are implementing, or deciding to transition, to a new model of information system, now explicitly recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services of the US Federal Government. The new Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System was intended to replace...

Technical and organizational innovations such as Open Data, Internet of Things and Big Data have fueled renewed interest in policy analytics in the public sector. This revamped version of policy analysis continues the long-standing tradition of applying statistical modeling to better understand policy effects and decision making, but also incorpora...

Most studies about cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS) focus on private or public sector organizations only. There is limited research within regulated environments, which often requires information to be shared among multiple public, private and nonprofit organizations. This paper explores CBIS in different regulatory contexts, with a focus...

Cities around the world are facing increasingly complex problems. These problems frequently require collaboration and information sharing across agency boundaries. In our view, information sharing can be seen as an important dimension of what is recently being called smartness in cities and enables the ability to improve decision making and day-to-...

Digital government has been seen as a strategy to improve public services, foster engagement with citizens, and modernize government agencies. Regardless of the recognition of this important role in government transformation, there is no consistent evidence in terms of the determinants and results of digital government strategies. More specifically...

In our data-driven society, both public and private organisations are struggling with issues regarding privacy and personal data. On the one hand, consumers are required to hand over more and more personal data in return for (free) online services. On the other hand, regulations increasingly demand data minimisation and informed consent. Personal d...

We describe the experience of a sample of US state child welfare agencies currently deciding whether to transition to a new model of information system, now explicitly recommended by the US federal government. The new model is inspired by enterprise-level data intensive thinking and promises to enable states to design systems that complement state...

This ongoing research paper looks at the socio-technical nature of information sharing in the regulatory context as input to an agenda for future research focused on Cross-Boundary Information Sharing (CBIS) in financial market regulation (FMR). The characteristics found within the FMR environment create increased complexity as FMR actors try to sh...

Discussions about smart cities continue to attract much attention from researchers, practitioners and citizens at large. As the literature continues to grow the number of indicators and frameworks for "smartness" are becoming more robust and perspectives on what makes a city smart continue to evolve. This exploratory research analyzes text from 51...

There are many ways to define policy analytics. In fact, different terms are used for what could be considered the same phenomenon: the use of data and analytical techniques to make policy decisions. Policy analytics, policy modelling, and policy informatics are just some of the most used terms by scholars and practitioners. There is no clarity, ho...

This book provides a comprehensive approach to the study of policy analytics, modelling and informatics. It includes theories and concepts for understanding tools and techniques used by governments seeking to improve decision making through the use of technology, data, modelling, and other analytics, and provides relevant case studies and practical...

This article reports on data architecture that reduces information asymmetries to support public-private collaboration to govern product certification and inspection for promoting transparent markets and building consumer trust. The data architecture is a proof-of-concept set of data standards called the Certification and Inspection Data Infrastruc...

Information and information technologies have become ubiquitous in the public sector and it is difficult to think of a public problem or government service that does not involve them in some substantial way. Public management (PM) research now incorporates the effects of the availability and quality of data as well as the technologies used in the p...

We expand the current understanding of leadership's influence on the success of inter-organizational information sharing and integration (IIS) by testing and proposing direct and indirect relationships using structural equation modelling (SEM). We analyzed data from a national survey of 173 professionals from IIS projects in Public Health and Crimi...

The increasing number of certification schemes diminishes the utility of certifications as private regulation and creates several policy challenges. The undergoing efforts to help consumers verify the accuracy of information created by private regulation mechanisms such as certification are currently confronted with the complexities of certificatio...

In this chapter, we explore the impacts of key characteristics of Supply Chain Governance Systems in the development and diffusion of technology innovations that promote supply chain transparency and sustainable consumption and production. The model presented in this chapter was developed following group model building methods. Our simulation exper...

Sustainability has become an important focus for government, civil society, and the corporate community worldwide (United Nations Environment Programme 2011). Growing interest in addressing environmental deterioration and associated social inequality and economic challenges is shifting focus to this important issue. The lack of fresh water and arab...

Cross-Boundary Information Sharing (CBIS) has become increasingly important for public and private sector entities around the world. Studies critical to advancing what is known, have focused primarily on information sharing and integration among government entities at the same level of government or between governments from different levels. Within...

Our concluding chapter draws on the concepts and theories discussed in the book, particularly the concept of governance, collaboration, and the role of trust. The chapter focuses on the practicalities of information disclosure. It asks: how must this process be governed? A definition of governance as the process of steering a society toward a set o...

Global markets for information-intensive products contain sharp information asymmetries that lead to market inefficiencies resulting from consumer purchasing decisions that are based on incomplete information. Elimination or reduction of such information asymmetries has long been the goal of governments as well as various nongovernmental entities t...

This chapter introduces important concepts such as smart cities, innovation, technologies, and “smartness” in government. It argues that a concept of smart city should be more than the use of information technologies in local governments. The study and analysis of cities today requires a multidimensional and multifaceted concept and, therefore, mul...

Privacy, confidentiality, and information security constitute basic requirements for the design and implementation of IT-enabled platforms for information sharing such as the I-Choose platform described in this book. In this chapter, we discuss privacy and security issues from an organizational perspective along three dimensions: ownership, access...

This book reflects on the emerging trends, development, and challenges of policy on sustainability using information technology, and provides valuable insights to both research and practice communities. Sustainability has become an important focus for government, civil society and the corporate community world-wide. Growing interest in addressing e...

This study represents two critical steps forward in the area of smart city research and practice. The first is in the form of the development of a comprehensive conceptualization of smart city as a resource for researchers and government practitioners; the second is in the form of the creation of a bridge between smart cities research and practice...

This workshop is a working meeting of the Smart Cities and Smart Government Research-Practice Consortium. The main goal of the workshop is to continue conversations started since 2012 among teams of researchers interested in doing collaborative work by sharing protocols and data with the purpose of advancing knowledge in the area of smart cities an...

Information asymmetry between consumers and supply chain actors represents a major barrier to the expansion of sustainable consumption. Developing an interoperable data architecture that enables the integration of data regarding sustainability practices from disparate sources in sustainable supply chains is important for improving market transparen...

The governance of financial markets in the U.S. is structured around financial products which in some cases results in overlapping regulatory responsibility, intricate and complicated relationships among the various parties and role confusion. These intricate relationships are often complicated by informal and ad-hoc information sharing practices a...

This study explores the transformation of a city government led by a 311 program, which provides a consolidated channel for non-emergency services and information. The paper first discusses the concept of “smart city” as a foundation for the examination of the 311 non-emergency contact program as a practice of government innovation, and then presen...

We consider 311 non-emergency contact centers as city-level service integration initiatives. By using a cross-case study of 311 centers at New York and Philadelphia, we found critical success factors and challenges of service integration. This paper suggests multidimensional (technological, organizational, and cross-organizational) implications. St...

Although the principle of transparency and openness is not new, recent years have brought increased attention to the need for greater government and private sector accountability driven mostly by the open government, smart disclosure and open data movements. But opening data in the government and private sectors brings about a set of challenges tha...

During the interactive workshop, the MPA students used CTG’s public value framework to lead discussion examining the potential of log data in the form of increased system performance, increased efficiency,and effectiveness of the work force, and swifter responses to cyber security breaches, among others. The results of this workshop will help lay t...

This paper presents a preliminary exploration on the status of open government data worldwide as well as in-depth evaluation of selected open government data portals. Using web content analysis of the open government data portals from 35 countries, this study outlines the progress of open government data efforts at the national government level. Th...

Research and practice in the information systems (IS) field have been evolving over time, nourishing and promoting the development of applications that transform the relationships of individuals, corporations, and governments. Building on this evolution, we push forward a vision of the potential influence of the IS field into one of the most import...

Many cities are focused on becoming "smarter". They are exploring the power of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to become more efficient, effective, transparent, accountable and sustainable. However, there has not been a systematic effort to understand such city-level initiatives and the role they play in making cities smarter. A n...

Open data policies are expected to promote innovations that stimulate social, political and economic change. In pursuit of innovation potential, open data has expanded to wider environment involving government, business and citizens. The US government recently launched such collaboration through a smart data policy supporting energy efficiency call...

E-Government continues to be recognized as a key strategy for improving government services and the effectiveness of public policies and programs. A key component of e-government initiatives is the ability of multiple government and nongovernment organizations to share and integrate information across their traditional organizational boundaries. E-...

The research community is working to create new capabilities to share data and to deal with issues of data quality, standards, and protection, and ethical and responsible use of shared data. These issues have been found to influence the willingness of researchers to publish data created during the course of their research. We use the results of a s...

A 311 system provides quick and easy access to non-emergency municipal services and information through a consolidated channel. This study explores the operation of 311 contact centers in New York and Philadelphia and identifies critical success factors and challenges of municipal service integration. Having the right technology at the right time i...

The e-Government Emerging Topics minitrack provides a home for incubating new topics and trends in e-Government research. E-Government as an academic field is evolving, new directions of research and practice are emerging while others are becoming accepted as foundational. However, the foundations of the field still need to be spelled out more expl...

In this paper, we propose to view the concept of open government from the perspective of an ecosystem, a metaphor often used by policy makers, scholars, and technology gurus to convey a sense of the interdependent social systems of actors, organizations, material infrastructures, and symbolic resources that can be created in technology-enabled, inf...

Two important trends on openness are promoting improved accountability from government and private organizations. The case of private transparency finds its roots in consumer and other stakeholder movements. The open government movement in the US is looking for alternatives to "smart disclosure," which implies providing consumers with better inform...

This paper describes the transformation of a city government led by a 311 program, which provides a consolidated channel for non-emergency services and information. The paper first discusses the concept of "smart city" as a foundation for the examination of the 311 program as a practice of government innovation. The paper then presents the details...

In testimony on April of 2012 before the House Financial Services Committee, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman, Mary Schapiro, stated that effective information sharing between financial market actors and their regulatory bodies is critical to fulfilling the regulatory obligations of the SEC. The 2008 financial crisis is recogn...

This paper presents selected results from a study of technical, information, and knowledge exchange in Transnational Public Sector Knowledge Networks (TPSKNs). The study contributes to the growing base of theory relating to TPSKNs presented by Dawes, Gharawi, and Burke [7]. It explores the TPSKN formed between the United States Center for Disease C...

The 6th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2012, was held in Albany, New York, United States (US) from October 22-25, 2012. It was hosted by the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York under the patronage of the United States National Archives and Record Ad...

This study presents the first results of an analysis primarily based on semi-structured interviews with government officials and managers who are responsible for smart city initiatives in four North American cities—Philadelphia and Seattle in the United States, Quebec City in Canada, and Mexico City in Mexico. With the reference to the Smart City I...

This paper presents the challenges associated with developing a data architecture supporting information interoperability in the supply-chain for sustainable food products. We analyze information elicited from experts in the supply-chain for organic and fair trade coffee to identify relevant stakeholders and the issues and challenges connected with...

E-government initiatives have been stepping forward in governments of all levels around the world. One of the most important strategies that are being carried is that of providing citizens with a single entry point for services that involve different government entities. The Smart Cities and Service Integration project (hereafter, SmartCities) aims...

Dans cet article, nous abordons la notion de transparence gouvernementale et sa portée générale sur l’avenir de l’administration publique dans un contexte de cybergouvernement. Nous soutenons que l’Open Government Initiative de l’actuelle administration américaine estompe les différences conventionnelles entre cyberdémocratie et cybergouvernement p...

Policy makers and public managers want and need to know how well government programs perform, but few have the information to accurately and continuously evaluate them. The dynamic nature of public programs, and the traditional methods used to assess them, compound this problem. Performance measurement and performance-based decisions can be improve...

Facing economic pressure, social tensions, global competition and low public confidence, governments can no longer afford to address increasingly complex and interdependent public goals alone or step back and rely on the markets. Instead, they have to work through networks of state and non-state actors to organize existing resources, knowledge and...

The present article reports a study on the motivation for publishing research datasets in the open data linking intention and action in regard to publishing datasets. This research study was designed to broaden understanding of the behavioral nature of publishing research datasets by distinguishing between the intention to share and the action of s...

Making a city "smart" is emerging as a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid urbanization. Yet little academic research has sparingly discussed the phenomenon. To close the gap in the literature about smart cities and in response to the increasing use of the concept, this paper proposes a framework to...

The paper explores boundaries of cross-boundary information sharing and integration in the context of Taiwan e-Government by using an integrated framework of boundaries adopted from the literature. The discussion of the various boundaries provides a thorough lens to understand the complexity of cross-boundary information sharing and integration. Th...

This research provides a preliminary analysis of determinants of the likelihood of researchers to publish their research datasets online. The data is derived from a preliminary survey conducted as part of the DataONE project; an international federated data repository of ecological data. The survey of 1,329 researchers was conducted by the Usabilit...

This paper sees a smart city not as a status of how smart a city is but as a city's effort to make itself smart. The connotation of a smart city represents city innovation in management and policy as well as technology. Since the unique context of each city shapes the technological, organizational and policy aspects of that city, a smart city can b...

This paper reports on a research effort designed to begin to systematically identify the most critical computing and information technology-related challenges facing financial market regulation activities. Computing and information technology adaptation in financial markets create a paradox. Information technology is needed for effective governing...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a mapping of the evolution of the United Nation's (UN's) e‐Readiness assessments. The mapping highlights underlying assumptions and frames a set of recommendations for new secondary indicators to strengthen e‐Readiness indices. Design/methodology/approach This exploratory case study applies triangula...

Countries are often benchmarked and ranked according to economic, human, and technological development. Benchmarking and ranking tools, such as the United Nation's e-Government index (UNDPEPA, 2002), are used by decision makers when devising information and communication policies and allocating resources to implement those policies. Despite their w...

We consider open government (OG) within the context of e-government and its broader implications for the future of public administration. We argue that the current US Administration's Open Government Initiative blurs traditional distinctions between e-democracy and e-government by incorporating historically democratic practices, now enabled by emer...

The 2009 White House Open Government Directive set off a wave of planning and new initiative development among federal agencies designed to achieve the goals of this mandate, and has stimulated significant interest among state and local governments and open government advocates in their efforts. Federal initiatives have been directed at increasing...

This panel is a final report of the North American Digital Government Working Group (NADGWG). This group was formed in 2007 to advance electronic government research across geographic and political boundaries in the region. The panel will start with the introduction of the Comparative Transnational Research Agenda that was created by this working g...

This paper aims to outline the challenges, necessary dimensions of capability, and critical success factors enabling cross-boundary earth observational data sharing. Despite the profound benefits, integrating and bringing data together among researchers and across boundaries and domains presents tremendous challenges. This paper will review and int...

This poster reports on the preliminary results of a research project designed to systematically identify the most critical computing and information technology-related challenges facing financial market regulators. Drawing on in-depth interviews with professionals from the financial market regulation community, this study asks the question "what ar...

This conceptual paper discusses how we can consider a particular city as a smart one, drawing on recent practices to make cities smart. A set of the common multidimensional components underlying the smart city concept and the core factors for a successful smart city initiative is identified by exploring current working definitions of smart city and...

E-government advancements have not fully resolved the challenge of providing citizens with a single entry point for services that involve different government entities. The Smart Cities and Service Integration project (hereafter, SmartCities) aims to establish a framework for smart city service integration that would assist in the management of lar...

The end result of scientific collaboration is generating knowledge and simultaneously diffusing knowledge across expertise and geographical boundaries. In response, there have been significant increases in internationalization and cross-national characteristics of digital government research that give rise to the issues of multicultural research te...

The paper draws on a case study of Taiwan e-Government to explore cross-boundary information sharing in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions. The advantages and disadvantages of the different types of cross-boundary information sharing are discussed, and the influential moderators regarding what types are employed in a give situation are dis...

The paper explores the various boundaries of cross-boundary information sharing and integration in the context of Taiwan e-Government by using an integrated framework of boundaries adopted from the literature. The discussion of the various boundaries provides a thorough lens to understand the complexity of cross-boundary information sharing and int...

Creating effective information technology (IT) governance is an important, yet difficult undertaking that has taken on global significance. Despite the amount of literature and experience available, the complexity of establishing a governance framework continues to present a challenge to public sector officials. Systematic examinations of these eff...

International digital government research has increased in the last 10 years. However, international research comparing or analyzing relevant problems for the North American region is scarce. In an effort to lay the foundation for new research in the context of North America, this chapter presents a comparative analysis of policy and program priori...

Several known factors impact collaboration whenever multiple public organizations engage in information sharing and interoperability initiatives. However, few analyses exist on how to cope with the challenges faced in inter-organizational collaborations across nations. Based on the literatures on networked government, inter-organizational collabora...

This paper identifies a set of determinants of trust in government cross-boundary information sharing (CBI) initiatives. Although there are some studies that identify the antecedents of trust in collaboration, research about trust relationships in government interorganizational initiatives is lacking. Little attention, in particular, has been paid...

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009) promised strict accounting of all funds spent and the public ation of that information to the public in relative real-time. Th e federal requirements for reporting Recovery Act funds relie d heavily on the ability of recipients, primarily state governme nts, to capture, manage, and deliver the data...

Digital government research that compares or analyzes relevant problems for the North American region is scarce [1, 2]. As part of the work of the North American Digital Government Working Group, this poster presents a comparative analysis of policy and program priorities of digital government in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Common priori...