Increasing the real-world impact of digital government research – Contextualize, internationalize, strategize

More than 25 years since digital government emerged as a multi-disciplinary domain of research and practice, the key questions today are about the impact of digital government on public service delivery, internal management, and policy processes and outcomes, whether digital government delivers on its promises, and the role of research in translating promises into outcomes. However, most progress in this area is due to a combination of public expectations, digital innovations, and international competition, not research.

While researchers traditionally compete for the attention of each other and measure success through citations, publicly-funded research and institutions are increasingly required to demonstrate real-world impact. This is particularly so for digital government given the close interaction between research and practice, and the sensitive nature of digital government as a critical capability of the state. However, metricizing real-word impact is often difficult – the impact is subtle, slow and variable; counterproductive – it promotes short-term thinking, and risky – “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Goodhart’s Law).

The keynote will explore how digital government research can increase its real-world impact. To this end, it will examine methodological, institutional and disciplinary challenges to digital government researchers focusing on the real-world impact; explore and theorize three approaches to overcoming such challenges – contextualize, internationalize and strategize; empirically analyze the entire body of articles published in Government Information Quarterly to discover evidence, gaps and trends of digital government research community pursuing those approaches; and offer some recommendations for digital government researchers and institutions pursuing real-world impact.

Finally, the keynote will frame a panel discussion on the fourth approach - collaborate. Collaboration between digital government research and policy institutions, community organizations, research teams and individual researchers aimed at generating real-world impact.