A conceptual framework for the government big data ecosystem (‘datagov.eco’)

The public sector, private firms, and civil society constantly create data of high volume, velocity, and veracity from diverse sources. This kind of data is known as big data. As in other industries, public administrations consider big data as the “new oil" and employ data-centric policies to transform data into knowledge, stimulate good governance, innovative digital services, transparency, and citizens' engagement in public policy. More and more public organizations understand the value created by exploiting internal and external data sources, delivering new capabilities, and fostering collaboration inside and outside of public administrations. Despite the broad interest in this ecosystem, we still lack a detailed and systematic view of it. In this paper, we attempt to describe the emerging Government Big Data Ecosystem as a socio-technical network of people, organizations, processes, technology, infrastructure, standards & policies, procedures, and resources. This ecosystem supports data functions such as data collection, integration, analysis, storage, sharing, use, protection, and archiving. Through these functions, value is created by promoting evidence-based policymaking, modern public services delivery, data-driven administration and open government, and boosting the data economy. Through a Design Science Research methodology, we propose a conceptual framework, which we call ‘datagov.eco’. We believe our ‘datagov.eco’ framework will provide insights and support to different stakeholders’ profiles, including administrators, consultants, data engineers, and data scientists.