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Adaptability and accountability of information architectures in interorganizational networks

Published: 10 December 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Governmental service provisioning is increasingly organized around networks of agencies. These agencies have various objectives and a variety of heterogeneous types of information systems. Each agency can independently design (a set of) subsystems that should function together to provide a service. Often the collaborating organizations have various degrees of technology-readiness and different objectives and interests. The service executing depends on the weakest subsystem and total network performance need to be accounted for. Furthermore, network arrangements are likely to change and evolve over time and need to adapt to changing circumstances, whereas, the entire network's performance is dependent on the performance of the individual departments.
In this paper we investigate adaptability and accountability aspects of information systems in networks of organizations. Adaptability is the ability to deal with new environmental conditions. Accountability is the answerability for one's actions or inactions and to be responsible for their consequences. Adaptability requires a loosely coupled structure, which can seriously hamper accountability. Accountability requires tight integration and clear processes. We analyzed the adaptability and accountability aspects in two case studies. The case studies demonstrate that both requirements are not necessarily conflicting and can be complimentary. More research is necessary on designing architectures which are able to meet the adaptability and accountability requirements at the same time.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEGOV '07: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governance
December 2007
471 pages
ISBN:9781595938220
DOI:10.1145/1328057
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 10 December 2007

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Author Tags

  1. accountability
  2. adaptability
  3. coordination
  4. flexibility
  5. information architecture
  6. interorganizational networks
  7. orchestration
  8. public service networks
  9. service-oriented architecture

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ICEGOV '07

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ICEGOV '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 130 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

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  • (2012)Architectures for Enabling Flexible Business ProcessesIntelligent and Knowledge-Based Computing for Business and Organizational Advancements10.4018/978-1-4666-1577-9.ch011(187-205)Online publication date: 2012
  • (2012)Understanding Resistance in IT Outsourcing: A Service Provider PerspectiveThe Dynamics of Global Sourcing. Perspectives and Practices10.1007/978-3-642-33920-2_8(126-141)Online publication date: 2012
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