Guest editorial: Public value creation through information technologies in government

Abstract

Public value, a concept centering on meeting the citizens' collective expectations with government and public services (Moore, 1995), has gained a growing interest in in public management theory and practice (Bozeman, 2019; Bryson et al., 2014; Smith, 2004; Stoker, 2006). This growing interest responds in part to the increasing complexity of both the problems faced by public managers (Bryson et al., 2014) and the networked environment in which they need to operate (Pardo et al., 2011). Moreover, a public value perspective seems useful given that it enables linking insights from different analytical and conceptual perspectives (Smith, 2004). Because of the increasingly recognition of the importance of public value scholarship and the wide applicability of the public value framework, there is a variety of perspectives and areas of study where public value has proven to be valuable as a conceptual framework (Hartley et al., 2019). Wallmeier et al. (2019), for example, identify three different interpretive schemes of public value in the public management literature: Public value creation through information technologies has been adopted by scholars in Digital Government. The incorporation of public value in the digital government research is especially relevant because the adoption of technology, and technology enabled organizational innovations and policy development are frequently tied to the more comprehensive value creation, such as enhancing public service delivery, improving program effectiveness, and advancing democratic values. In a sense, technologies provide additional resources and capabilities to engage the public, inform the deliberation process, enable broad participation and collective decision making, monitor progress and performance, and ensure accountability, transparency and equity.The dominant view of public value in this domain is more similar to the view of public value as a management strategy (Bryson et al., 2014; Moore, 1995). From the perspective of digital government scholars, information technologies are understood as operational capabilities to facilitate organizational transformation and thus produce value to the citizens (Neumann et al., 2019; Panagiotopoulos et al., 2019; Twizeyimana and Andersson, 2019). The common conceptualization entails transformation and value creation as the result of complex interactions between information technologies and organizational actors and practices, enabled (or not) by a specific set of institutional rules (Panagiotopoulos et al., 2019; Picazo-Vela et al., 2018).Although less common, public value as a lens has also been applied in the research of the evaluation of impacts of technology investments in the digital government literature. In this stream of research, the focus is often centered on unpacking what constitutes public value and what is valuable in the context of technology-driven transformation. Bannister and Connolly (2014), for example, identified a taxonomy of values by classifying values in three major categories: duty-oriented values such as accountability or economy, service-oriented values such as responsiveness or transparency, and socially-oriented values such as inclusiveness or fairness. In another work with a focus on discussing what is public value, Cook et al. (2015) identified several types of intrinsic value of government as a societal asset and substantive value of government actions and policies that benefit particular individuals, groups, or organizations. They further propose a method not only for evaluating their digital government initiatives, but also for public managers to incorporate the consideration of public values in the selection or design of information technologies.Finally, the topic of using public value as a theoretical instrument in the co-production literature has emerged in digital government literature. Co-production refers to the phenomenon of including stakeholders of different kinds in the design and development of