Standardized but flexible information exchange for networked public administrations: A method

Folmer Erwin, Matzner Martin, Räckers Michael, Scholta Hendrik, Becker Jörg

Abstract
Purpose
Governmental institutions must collaborate with other organizations across institutional boundaries to achieve high-quality service offerings. The required cooperation may lead to complex networks, including several of the thousands of public administrations in the many federal layers of a single country. This article addresses the key challenge of the proper management of the information exchange between networked actors, which is generally conducted by means of forms.

Design/methodology/approach
Following the design science research paradigm, this research develops a method that assists in the design and maintenance of forms in public administrations.

Findings
Discussions in the project's focus groups add evidence to the researchers' expectation that the method developed in this study improves the quality of forms while reducing the effort required for their design and maintenance.

Research limitations/implications
This article includes an evaluation of the approach based on qualitative feedback from the project's stakeholders, although the implementation of the workflows and procedures is subject to future work that evaluates the approach in a variety of practical settings.

Practical implications
The method developed in this article allows public administrations and legislative authorities to design and manage forms in a cooperative way. Software developers can assume the existence of information structures. The approach extends the BOMOS standardization framework to the operational level.

Originality/value
The main contribution of this article is the development of a novel method that will change how information exchange is managed in public administrations.

Keywords
Public administration; Government; Form; Document; Information exchange; Standardization; BOMOS