Understanding the determinants of success in inter-organizational information sharing initiatives: results from a national survey

Inter-organizational collaboration and information sharing have the potential of generating great benefits to government agencies and other social actors dealing with complex public problems. However, these initiatives have proved to be difficult to implement and important challenges have been identified in previous studies. Existing literature deals with challenges and enablers as important success factors for inter-organizational information sharing initiatives. Most of this research is based on cases and there are few quantitative empirical studies about this topic. Based on a national survey of government managers in two policy domains, this study starts filling this gap by systematically identifying some important determinants of the success of inter-organizational information sharing initiatives through quantitative empirical analysis. Our analysis suggests four factors as the key determinants of inter-organizational information sharing success. We found that the following variables are statistically significant and clearly influence the success of inter-organizational information sharing initiatives: (1) availability of financial resources, (2) formally appointed project managers, (3) technical compatibility and (4) standards. As mentioned before, this is one of the first quantitative explorations and testing of success factors of inter-organizational information sharing in government settings and additional research is clearly needed.

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