Master's Thesis Efstratios Pahis

Evaluating the adoption of the Government as a Platform Analysis Method by practitioners

Government as a Platform (GaaP) is a recent approach aiming toward the digitalization of the public sector. The core idea of GaaP is to organize the government in terms of an open platform where different public, as well as private entities, contribute collaboratively to the creation of new public services. Harnessing upon the principles of an open platform, governments expect to achieve higher efficiency in the delivery of public services by providing citizens and private companies access to the government’s digital infrastructures and, thus, fostering co-innovation. The Government as a Platform Infrastructure Analysis Method (GaaPIAM) is designed to support the transformation towards GaaP by decomposing the existing infrastructure and recomposing it into a platform-oriented one. However, the GaaPIAM has not been extensively tested in practice yet. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to evaluate the GaaPIAM regarding its effectiveness, supportability, and adoption by practitioners in practice. To achieve this, we follow the Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm and develop an evaluation concept for the evaluation of the GaaPIAM in three steps. First, we distill the requirements for the concept. Second, we develop the evaluation concept itself. Finally, we apply the concept in two different workshops with practitioners in order to perform the actual evaluation of the GaaPIAM. This thesis shows that GaaPIAM supports effectively the practitioners to better understand the GaaP approach and, further, identify gaps in their infrastructure and develop actionable proposals for improvements based on the identified gaps. The utilized evaluation concept allowed for a granular and precise evaluation due to the nine developed criteria aligned with the artifact's goals. Furthermore, its configuration with multiple suitable evaluation methodologies from literature combined with the plethora of evaluation events and modes endorsed the rigorous and precise evaluation of the GaaPIAM. However, although the introduction of "adoption by practitioners" as an evaluation criterion might be useful, utilizing the recommendation-willingness to measure the adoption by practitioners bears drawbacks. From a practical perspective, this master thesis contributes towards the adoption of the GaaPIAM in practice and, therefore, supports governments in their effort to implement GaaP.