Work in progress…

In February, I am attending the CBS PhD-course on Write publishable research. The course is targeted at improving the capability to describe the research question and the research process and results in a format that can be published in either journals or conferences. I have just submitted the following abstract:
Abstract: Interoperability and integration between different levels of government is one of the largest challenges governments around the world are facing today. While most e-government literature has focused on the simple online transactions between citizens and government, little research has investigated the theoretical and practical interoperability challenges that vertical and horizontal integration are confronting governments with when public institutions must work across the traditional “stove pipes” to provide integrated services for business and civilians. This paper investigates the various dimensions of e-government interoperability and integration that an individual institution is faced with when trying to coordinate IT-infrastructures across different levels of government. Based on literature about enterprise architecture and service-oriented architectures, interorganizational systems and institutional theory from the political science discipline the case study investigates the information systems coordination challenge between the national health sector in Denmark, the Copenhagen hospital region and Denmark’s largest hospital from different perspectives. Our findings illustrate that creating interoperability across different levels of government requires that we rethink the way we think about e-government systems development. Power is unevenly distributed between different public institutions and it is difficult to dictate/coordinate the organizational, semantic and technical interoperability. The interoperability problems arise because there is no overall coordination of different e-government initiatives in “stove pipes” and because different institutions, in sectors or on their own, often have no dimidiate incentives or opportunities to share data and functionality with other institutions.
Key words: Enterprise Architecture, e-Government, Service-oriented architecture, Interoperability, Health Care, IS management
As you can see, my research question for the article is still a bit fuzzy. Please feel free to comment on the abstract