icegov2012 proceedings

Measuring Organizational Interoperability in Practice: The
case study of Population Welfare Department of
Government of Sindh, Pakistan
ABSTRACT
Devender Maheshwari
Technical University Delft
2628 BX DELFT
The Netherlands
Tel. 0031152783284
D.Maheshwari@tudelft.nl
Government organizations use technology to interoperate with
each other in order to provide effective and efficient services to
the citizens. Interoperation between these organizations is
challenging due to the organizational differences among different
types of public organizations. Measuring organizational
interoperability of government organizations using technological
advancements is difficult and often remains at the technical level
and do not measure the organizational level. Existing
interoperability models and frameworks focus on different aspects
of organizational and technical interoperability independently; but
there is hardly any single measurement instrument addressing
both. Though the interoperability models and frameworks
describe the layers, levels, and stages; they do not identify any
assessment constructs for measuring and benchmarking the
organizational interoperability. This paper investigates
interoperability maturity models to identify assessment layers for
measuring and benchmarking the interoperability, and propose the
measurement instrument that will allows government
organizations to effectively measure organizational
interoperability. We develop a list of measurement constructs for
the sub-layers of organizational interoperability layer to assess the
maturity of organizational interoperability. Finally, we conduct a
case study at Population Welfare Department Government of
Sindh, Pakistan to investigate the applicability and usefulness of
the organizational layer and its measurement constructs in the
proposed interoperability measurement instrument for assessing
the maturity of organizational interoperability.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.12 [Interoperability]: Distributed objects; H.1.1. [Information
Systems]: Models and Principles –Systems and Information
Theory; H.4 [Information Systems Applications]: Miscellaneous;
J.1 [Administrative Data Processing]: Government
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
216
Marijn Janssen
Technical University Delft
2628 BX DELFT
The Netherlands
Tel. 0031152781140
M.F.W.H.A.Janssen@tudelft.nl
General Terms
Measurement, Documentation, Design, and Theory
Keywords
E-government, Interoperability, Measurement, Benchmarking,
Public Service Organizations.
1. INTRODUCTION
Interoperability is described to have significant impact on public
organizations to advance the processes, procedures, operations,
and effective service provision to the citizens [30-31, 37-38].
Maturity of public organizations is often characterized by the
interoperability as a key element for e-government integration,
new connectivity creation among networks, information sharing,
and collaboration [13, 21, 27]. Measuring interoperability is not
only a technological challenge, but a sociotechnical matter since
both technical as well organizational capabilities reflect the
maturity of public organizations [16, 38, 48]. This means that the
aspects of organizational interoperability are equally important for
interoperability measurement. Hjort-Madsen [21] describes that
the complexity of organizational aspects of interoperability may
surpass the technical as the public organizations move toward
inter-organizational governance. Van der Veer and Wiles [50, p-6]
describe the organizational interoperability as “the ability of
organisations to effectively communicate and transfer
(meaningful) data [7] even though they may be using a variety of
different information systems over widely different
infrastructures, possibly across different geographic regions and
cultures”, whereas the European Interoperability Framework (EIF)
IDABC [23, p-16] describes it as "defining business processes and
bringing about the collaboration of administrations that wish to
exchange information and may have different internal structures
as well as aspects related to requirements of the user community”.
Recently, this bias has been criticized by many as the public
organizations interoperate more and more with each other for
information sharing to provide effective and efficient services.
Hence, the need of disparate back-office systems to interoperate
and collaborate with each other requires enhanced interoperability
among different back-offices. Interoperability in literature is
mostly described from technical viewpoint as a capability of
different systems to exchange and share information in useful
manner [2, 24, 33, 41]. Many definitions of interoperability can be
found in literature [10, 24-25, 33, 41].
It is easily ascertained from the literature that several authors and
organizations discuss technical aspects of interoperability
standards e.g. [3, 9, 11, 34, 46, 49]; whereas the organizational