Collecting Feedback on Design Patterns for Platform Engineering in the Public Sector

Government as a Platform (GaaP) is a promising approach to the digital transformation of the public sector [1]. Currently, most of the infrastructures are silo-based, but organisations can address this issue through platformisation [2]. Even though platform-oriented infrastructure is aimed to bring several benefits, e.g. reuse of modular components or standardisation, there are still no clear guidelines or methods for the transformation process towards platform-oriented infrastructure [1, 3, 4]. Some countries, however, still managed to implement the GaaP concept relatively successfully. Ergo common patterns may be recognised, extracted and reused upon their experience. The thesis aims to collect feedback of successful GaaP countries on their own and each other's employed design patterns.

Research Questions

1. What are the dimensions of design decisions in applying GaaP in practice?

2. What are the design decisions of countries that successfully apply GaaP?

3. Which design patterns can be derived from these decisions?

Interviews with representatives from the UK, Estonia, Italy and Germany will be conducted to reevaluate and extend already existing patterns.

References

1. Kuhn, Peter, et al. "Barriers of applying Government as a Platform in Practice: Evidence from Germany." Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 2022.

2. Kuhn, Peter; Dallner, Simon; Buchinger, Matthias; and Balta, Dian, "Towards “Government as a Platform”: An analysis framework for public sector infrastructure" (2022). Wirtschaftsinformatik 2022 Proceedings. 4.

3. A. Hein, M. Schreieck, T. Riasanow, D. S. Setzke, M. Wiesche, M. Böhm, and H. Krcmar. "Digital platform ecosystems". In: Electronic Markets 30.1 (2020), pp. 87-98.

4. B. Bygstad and O. Hanseth. “Transforming digital infrastructures through platformization”. In: (2019).