Abstract: Innovation and changes in public sector organization and information technology (IT) have brought challenges to policy makers, practitioners and professionals. IT applications in public sector organization have unveiled potential advantages in public service. However, creating value from IT in public sector organization yet unyielded. Evidently, there are plethora of failure cases of IT application in public sector organization, especially in the context of developing and transitional countries. Both IT and public sector organization act, interact and intra-act dynamically with wide ranges of actors, contexts, processes and structures. Thus, it is impertinent to build partnership, network, collaboration, co-management, co-creation, co-design, collective efforts, joined up initiatives and joint action among public sector organization, citizens, business organization and non-profit organization to harness benefits of IT in public sector organization. Consistently, this panel aims to propose and illustrate an embedded collaborative governance for co-creation and value creation from IT in public sector.
So far as, scholars and practitioners have attempted to frame governance approaches and lens to generate value from IT applications in public sector organization. They are: ‘joined up governance’ ‘network governance’, ‘IT governance’ ‘interactive governance’ and ‘collaborative governance’. Contrary to this, there have been emerged dynamic features in IT applications, for instance, divergence, versatileness, inclusiveness, interactiveness and online presence. Consequently, existing governance approaches are insufficient to analyze actions, interaction and intra-actions between IT applications and public sector organization as well as public service. Particularly, ‘joined up governance’, ‘network governance’ and ‘collaborative governance models’ are three major approaches of public sector governance. However, they are top down rather than bottom up, process centric rather than action centric, ahistorical rather than contextual, technocratic rather than socially embedded and deterministic rather than mutually dependent. Thus, existing governance models are incapable of tracing intra-actions, entanglements and dynamism between IT application and public sector organization. In order to, enhance problem solving capacity of public sector organization and create public value through IT applications, a broader and dynamic governance framework is inevitable because IT applications, public sector organization, users, services, statutes, routines and practices interact dynamically, intra-act inseparably and embed in socially and contextually. Thus, we argue for an embedded collaborative governance framework to trace intra-actions, entanglements and imbrications in E-service and organization. Along the line, this panel aims to contribute in the public management through building and illustrating a new lens i.e., ‘embedded collaborative governance’. This approach would focus on IT and public sector organization as non-deterministic, bottom up and intra-active point of views to ensure co-creation from IT and organization. Consistently, it would seek value creation from IT application in public sector organization through solving practitioners’ problems. Moreover, this lens hasbeen applied in an empirical study in a public sector organization in Bangladesh. The study finding would be used to illustrate the proposed embedded collaborative governance approach.
Value co-creation, co-design and co-production in public services
