Exploitation and Exploration Strategies to Create Data Transparency in the Public Sector

Government's resources are often committed to delivery existing services providing little room for innovation. Ambidexterity is the capacity of an organization being able to develop new products and innovate while also continue providing and updating their existing services. Ambidexterity is a concept originating from organizational studies, and hardly used in the public sector. Ambidexterity is the ability to exploit and explore at the same time. As scant attention is given in e-government we opted for investigating a case study to better understand how exploitation and exploration were combined when opening data for creating transparency. Exploration was enabled by introducing incentives to ensure that the open data was used to identify and fight corruption, whereas exploitation was focused on improving data collection, storage and treating, creating efficiency on the monitoring and accountancy procedures of expenditures on the government. Other factors found to influence ambidexterity are the availability of resources, knowledge management, data quality management, external partnership and legislation.