The collaborative realization of public values and business goals: Governance and infrastructure of public-private information platforms

The scale of society's evolving challenges gradually surpasses the capacity of the public sector to address them. Coping with these challenges requires budget-short governments to look for innovative ways to transform and improve their operations and service provisioning models. While in many cases transformation starts from the inside-out (based on policy goals) and focuses on reorganization through ICTs, we notice a different class of ini- tiatives in which external ICT developments are capitalized by governments to transform from the outside-in. One category of ICT innovations that is especially promising for such a transformation is that of information plat- forms (henceforth platforms), which can be used to connect different stakeholders; public and private. Platforms are not new. Yet, there is not much research on using public–private platforms as part of a transformation effort, the (policy) instruments that are involved, nor about dealing with the cascading multi-level challenges that transformation through platforms offers. This paper addresses these knowledge gaps by drawing on empirical re- search embedded in two long-term endeavors: (1) standard business reporting between businesses and govern- ment agencies and (2) international trade information platforms. In both cases, platforms are being collaboratively developed and used by a collective of public and private organizations. These initiatives reveal that government agencies can steer and shape the development of public–private platforms in a way that enables businesses to pursue their own interest whilst transforming business–government interactions and more gener- ally serving collective interests and public value. Our findings indicate that once a public–private governance structure is accepted by stakeholders and adapted to fit with the technical dimensions of the information infra- structure, even platforms that are driven by the private sector can start to evolve in a way that enables extensive transformation of the operations of government.