Introduction to Digital Government Research in Public Policy and Management

Digital government research aims not only to generate new knowledge but also to make useful connections between research and practice. To achieve both ends, digital government research ideally derives research problems from practical challenges, and translates research findings into both new knowledge and usable results. Ubiquitous problems related to data availability, quality, and usability; information value; technology choices; and organizational and cross-boundary information-enabled processes are all of interest to both scholars and managers. These challenges take specific forms in different organizational and policy settings, but they also have common characteristics that can be usefully approached using analytical lenses that focus on some combination of strategy, policy, data, skills, costs, and technology. This chapter uses a public management perspective, represented by a set of real-life case studies, to explore how these considerations interact to produce both desirable and undesirable results. These interdependencies present researchers and managers with special challenges to overcome as well as unique opportunities to collaborate.