J. Ramon Gil-Garcia

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• Ph.D. Public Administration and Policy
• Director at University at Albany, State University of New York

Amid rapid urbanization, cities have to reinvent themselves (e.g., become 'smart') in response to complex problems, evolving quality of life demands, and a need to spur innovation and entrepreneurship. While prior research supports a holistic view of smart cities stressing various success factors, less is known about the role of community organizat...

Disseminating information to the public is critical in emergency management. Thanks to technological advances in recent decades, governments can instantly reach citizens through multiple channels. Existing research on emergency messaging indicates that the effectiveness of messaging depends on multiple factors, including receivers' characteristics,...

Collaboration is increasingly perceived as essential for digital transformation in the public sector. Transforming services and internal operations through the use of information and communication technologies frequently requires the engagement of multiple stakeholders beyond government agencies. This is particularly important in the specific case...

This research proposes a framework for the negative impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) in government by classifying 14 topics of its dark side into five socio technical categories. The framework is based on a systematic literature review and highlights that the dark side is predominantly driven by political, legal, and institutional aspects, b...

Emergency messaging is crucial in saving lives and avoiding property damage during natural or human-made disasters. Advancements in digital technologies have expanded the ability of emergency managers to reach citizens, particularly through the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system, which notifies citizens in a specific geographic area via their ow...

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...

Social media institutionalization entails the formalization of these digital platforms within the routines, rules and procedures of public organizations. The institutionalization of social media in government is an important process, as it may help to seize the disruptive affordances of these platforms and generate important benefits. However, ther...

Las tecnologías emergentes tienen el potencial de transformar la administración pública de una forma inimaginada. En este sentido, este documento se enfoca en analizar a las tecnologías emergentes en gobiernos locales usando la metodología PRISMA. Las preguntas que guían la investigación son: ¿cuáles son las tecnologías emergentes utilizadas por lo...

Given that information plays a decisive role in emergency management, scholars have been interested in how government agencies, first responders, and the general public could effectively acquire and disseminate emergency-related information. Existing research has made significant contributions in distinguishing various types of information-sharing...

Cities around the world are attempting to become smarter by using data and technology to improve internal operations, make better decisions, and increase the quality of life. This technology-intensive use frequently comes with large investments in the ICT infrastructure necessary for smart city initiatives, which may not be financially viable in th...

Creating public value is becoming increasingly important for digital government projects. This article proposes and tests a research model to improve our understanding of how value is created. Using a survey and structural equation modeling, this research explores the interactions among institutions, collaboration, and value creation. Although expl...

Artificial intelligence has become an important tool for governments around the world. However, it is not clear to what extent artificial intelligence can improve decision-making, and some policy domains have not been the focus of most recent studies, including the public budget process. More specifically, budget allocation is one of the areas in w...

With urbanization, cities around the world have experienced increasingly complex issues that are difficult to solve using traditional strategies. So, many local governments have started smart city initiatives in order to address community issues, improve quality of life, achieve sustainable development, and, overall, make their cities smarter. As a...

Previous studies have identified leadership as an essential factor influencing inter-agency collaboration and information sharing in government settings. This study argues that some unique characteristics of inter-agency information sharing (IIS) initiatives across different jurisdictions and levels of government call for particular types of leader...

Government agencies at the national, regional and local levels are proposing open data as a strategy to increase transparency, strengthen accountability, and promote economic development, among other goals. However, little is understood about the actual use of open data, particularly how open data portal users engage with open datasets. This study...

Citizen-government interactions through performance information have recently gained attention in public administration. To enhance these interactions, governments utilize interactive information presentations to deliver information, in the hope of allowing citizens to make informed decisions. However, there is little empirical evidence on whether...

Open government data has led to public policy innovation in pursuit of various expected benefits. One of the intended goals of open data innovation to improve transparency and accountability. However, our current understanding of open data innovation and its ability to generate transparency and accountability is limited, particularly with regard to...

Different definitions, frameworks and dimensions have been proposed in the literature to identify the best pathways for the development of government websites. Using these frameworks, several measurements and rankings to assess digital government success have been developed. Although these models have helped to understand the influence of many crit...

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...

Local governments face complex challenges and are increasingly pressured to find innovative strategies to address them. Recently, they are leveraging data analytics and a number of policy modeling techniques to respond to those challenges. While a lot of attention is given to smart initiatives and data analytics endeavors in big cities, not enough...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2021, held in Granada, Spain, in September 2021, in conjunction with the IFIP WG 8.5 IFIP International Conference on Electronic Participation (ePart 2021) and the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government Confere...

Governments around the world are investing a great amount of resources on the development of an information society. These investments are particularly important as an attempt to close digital divides among countries and regions within countries. However, there is no clear evidence that suggests that current Information and Communication Technology...

When analyzing the causes that lead to digital government success or failure, state of the art research is often divided into two main areas: (1) implementation of these initiatives by government agencies and (2) their adoption by citizens, as some of the most important users. Each of these two perspectives has its own concepts, measurements, and t...

Recent disasters have highlighted the gap between existing urbancentric resilience models and the needs of rural communities, which are frequently marginalized. Large rural constituencies, encompassing vast and sparsely populated areas, lack broadband connectivity and rely predominantly on volunteer-based emergency workforce. The above are some of...

To respond to new challenges of urban growth, including development and sustainability issues, governments are attempting to take advantage of new digital technologies to deliver better services and improve their policies and managerial practices. The literature in Smart Cities is still scarce in the basic understanding of the organizational transf...

Open government is expected to promote important changes related to transparency, participation, and collaboration in the public sector. This article analyzes the open government policy-making process in Madrid. In order to explain the adoption process of open government as a public policy, this study uses the “multiple streams framework,” original...

Resumen: Se estudia por qué algunos países tienen políticas más estrictas para el control del tabaco que otros. Se analizaron tres casos que confirman dos hipótesis del marco de las coa-liciones promotoras (ACF por sus siglas en inglés). En todos los casos, las políticas se intensificaron, en gran medida, debido a las perturbaciones externas de tip...

The pressure to adopt information technologies has clearly reached the judicial branch of government. General trends toward greater transparency and more openness in the public sector have pushed judges, ministers, and lawyers to use emergent technologies and to provide more information online. In fact, judicial agencies have created their own webs...

Public budgeting is at the core of any government, since decisions about how to use resources affect all areas of public policy and government programs. With emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, new opportunities may exist to improve the public budgeting process. Although recent research has focused on many topics related to public b...

Open government initiatives attempt to strengthen the relationship between public information disclosure and citizen engagement. Yet empirical assessments suggest they frequently miss their mark, thus highlighting a gap in open government knowledge: while a strong emphasis is placed on institutions in shaping the flow of government information and...

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...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most recent examples of a technology that has the potential to bridge the cyber world and the physical world. The IoT can be understood as the integration of a great number of small devices (including many types of sensors, which are components capable of detecting changes in its environment and converting...

Blockchain technology is attracting the interest of professionals and academics across a variety of disciplines, including the interdisciplinary field of digital government. Such technology has the potential to transform the public sector by providing innovative ways to secure data and detect tampering. However, few studies have theorized the exper...

Contemporary societies face complex problems that challenge the sustainability of their social and economic systems. Such problems may require joint efforts from the public and private sectors as well as from the society at large in order to find innovative solutions. In addition, the open government movement constitutes a revitalized wave of acces...

The use data and data analytics (DA) has been attracting the attention of academics and practitioners in the public sector and is sometimes seen as a potential strategy for process and service innovation. While research on the many possible uses of data have clearly increased - open data, big data, data analytics- empirical research on the socio-te...

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) from a government and public policy perspective. Since 2011, federal spending on IoT has been growing at a compound annual rate of ten percent. New technologies, such as sensors, and new kinds of data, such as big data, are creating new ways to...

Resumen: Se estudia por qué algunos países tienen políticas más estrictas para el control del tabaco que otros. Se analizaron tres casos que confirman dos hipótesis del marco de las coa-liciones promotoras (acf por sus siglas en inglés). En todos los casos, las políticas se inten-sificaron, en gran medida, debido a las perturbaciones externas de ti...

Governments have vast data resources related to a wide-variety of policies and programs. Integrating and sharing data across agencies and departments can add value to these data resources and bring about significant changes in public services as well as better government decisions. However, in addition to the lack of standards and an adequate infor...

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...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue about generation of public value through smart technologies and strategies. The key argument is that smart technologies have the potential to foster co-creation of public services and the generation of public value in management processes, based on the collaborative, social and hor...

It has been advocated that sharing business data can generate public value. Still this information sharing often needs to be done on voluntary basis and that often poses major challenges. The main research question addressed in this paper is: How is voluntary information sharing to create public value achieved and what are the drivers and mechanism...

The use of information technologies for the delivery of government services is core in the mission of government around the world. Although the promise of public value creation through digitizing government services is a recurrent theme in the literature, we still know little about the actual mechanisms of value creation from the citizen’s perspect...

In rural areas, emergency preparedness and response (ERP) could be greatly affected by the lack of access to technology and the Internet and, therefore, to timely and accurate information about a natural or human-made disaster. This paper proposes a socio-technical framework that integrates a potential technology solution, with optimization methods...

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...

What is the path to smarter cities that can make data-driven decisions? In a context where data have been vastly advertised as a solution to many problems, the application of big data analytics (BDA) in government is a trending topic. As a topic and potential strategy, data is on the agenda of researchers and policy-makers worldwide, based on the h...

Local governments around the world are exploring different strategies to become smarter: more efficient, sustainable, and highly interconnected. However, many actors outside government need to be involved too. For instance, public libraries have the potential to play a very important role in the development of smart and connected communities, due t...

Este artigo apresenta um modelo para identificar variáveis com grau de relevância para odesenvolvimento do e-government na esfera regional. Tem como propósitos contribuir para oentendimento do contexto local a partir de informações analíticas e auxiliar o planejamentodo e-government por gestores municipais. Também estimula o desenvolvimento regiona...

Previous studies have infrequently addressed the dynamic interactions among social, technical, and organizational variables in open government data initiatives. In addition, organization level models have neglected to explain the role of management in decision-making processes about technology and data. This article contributes to addressing this g...

In the study of public administration, e-government has been the focus of significant studies, and this number has been growing in recent years. This introduction to the virtual special issue of JPART on e-government highlights key contributions of selected JPART articles to the knowledge about information and technologies in government. In that se...

Importantes declaraciones se han realizado acerca del valor del gobierno abierto, que van desde su potencial para hacer más democráticos a los países, hasta la posible mejora en la prestación de servicios públicos y la interacción con los ciudadanos. Con el gobierno abierto se busca crear confianza en las instituciones a través de la transparencia...

This case study proposes to rethink context as a determinant of digital government success and elaborate on the variables that affect these initiatives in specific contexts. When talking about contextual variables, researchers often categorize them as social, political, and economic. Regarding social conditions, the digital divide is probably the m...

A good understanding of local government data, particularly the contexts in which the data are collected and created, is essential in order for data guardians and users to effectively manage that data and to draw accurate and rich information from them. However, our knowledge of both local government data and data contexts is very limited, which po...

Smart community is a term that has been recently used to characterize efforts to transform communities and make them more sustainable, efficient, transparent, and where citizen participation is the norm. Information technologies are many times seen as enablers of these potential changes. In smart communities, the role of public libraries is key. Th...

This poster describes an ongoing research project that builds an IoT data management experimental environment based on Ethereum Blockchain and smart contracts. The goal of the project is to simulate the application of IoT devices in smart city initiatives, and explore how IoT data management could benefit from Blockchain technology. In this project...

Open government is definitely not a new concept. For almost a decade, countries around the world have been implementing open government initiatives as a way to increase transparency, improved accountability, fight corruption, or foster economic development. However, there is still no consensus about the constitutive dimensions of open government an...

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...

This article identifies variables that are specific to the development of local e-government to facilitate better planning among municipal managers in developing countries, drawing on the UN's maturity model for the EGDI. We identify variables that have the highest correlation, in the local context, with the level of use of e-government. The quanti...

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...

Historically, e-government approaches have focused on citizens as the most important audience for government information and services. This focus is appropriate for most traditional public services. However, a large number of service users are noncitizens, including, for example, people applying for immigration services. Theoretically and practical...

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...