Maintaining data-integrity in the back office registries of cities; a survey on organizational barriers and ways to address those

Cities and regional authorities require consistent data on items like persons, addresses, locations and buildings as the fundament for service delivery, fraud-prevention and -detection, permit enforcement, and the effective execution of day to day operations. The concept of basic registries in the Netherlands is introduced to improve data integrity and the single entry for the citizen. Evidence shows that the change that comes with the implementation of basic registries could be more demanding for government organizations than earlier adaptations to the new ICT, like World Wide Web or email. Change triggered by basic registries seems to follow the same path as EDI did for business. Political forces do not realize the impact of this change on daily operations sufficiently. This results in a narrow focus on implementation issues, in which real basic e-government design issues are often neglected. Zenc implemented an action research (participative research method) oriented survey on the implementation of data integrity operations for basic registries in Belgium and the Netherlands. The research unveils a range of methods that government agencies apply to deal with organizational, legal and technical barriers. Early results show a number of patterns in organizational barriers towards the change that accompanies the implementation of basic registries. The research question is if those patterns related to the resistance to introduce basic registries are an indication of core changes in the organization of the public domain rather than 'simple' adoptions of new technologies. The paper describes the findings and seeks to identify key-areas for improvement and in depth research on road maps for data integrity in the back office of government.