A Local-State Government Spatial Data Sharing Partnership

A Local-State Spatial Data Sharing Partnership Model to Facilitate SDI Development
scarce resources (Oliver 1990). The benefits of reducing the duplication and effort
required to maintain large amounts of spatial data can be a powerful motivator for
state and local governments to collaborate.
Although collaboration may be facilitated by an individual motivating factor or
determinant, the decision for organisations to interact will more commonly be based on
multiple influences (Oliver 1990). It follows that different organisational settings may
extend or reduce these factors, including the way the factors interact.
3.2.3 Consequences of Collaborating
As identified in the preceding section, organisations are motivated to collaborate for a
variety reasons. The results of collaboration lead to a range of consequences or outcomes
which may be in the form of tangible or intangible benefits, costs which may be both
positive and negative, or changed risk environments.
Risks and Costs
Kumar and van Dissel (1996) examined the risks associated with collaboration of
information resources as viewed from strategies of pooled, sequential or reciprocal
interdependency. The pooled interdependency is metaphorically similar to the concept of
the “village commons” where land was set aside for the common use by everyone in the
village. Continuing this analogy, the authors identified that shared information resources
could lead to risks of overgrazing, contamination, poaching, and stealing (Kumar & van
Dissel 1996). In an information systems context, this would translate to the degradation of
information services through overuse of a resource by a single organisation, contamination
of the data base through lack of quality data by some users, misuse of pooled resources by
individual organisations and stealing of organisation specific information.
In sequential interdependencies or supply-chain approaches to information resources, the
risks are more closely aligned to the concept of “transaction costs” which relate to the cost
of managing the transaction or collaboration (Kumar & van Dissel 1996). Three major
sources of transaction risk include transaction-specific capital risk, information
asymmetrics and loss of resource control. The transaction-specific capital risk refers to the
risk of specific or individual activities such as isolated software development which can
consume resources at the expense of wider organisational goals. Information asymmetrics
is characterised by unequal participation or contribution by different organisations which
can then result in conflict. Loss of resource control often occurs as resources are
transferred to another organisation which may then result in loss of power and information
capital.
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