Information Governance Modularity in Open Data

Abstract: The growing global interest in enabling more accountable government through the use of the internet is reflected in international initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership (Noveck, 2009; Robinson et al., 2008; Yu and Robinson, 2012). The primary vehicle for the open government agenda has been the online publication of public sectorinformation – or open data. It has been suggested that open data can improve government transparency, enhance citizen engagement in democratic processes and support increased efficiency and effective in public services. It is also proposed that open data can also enable the creation of value in the private sector by providing entrepreneurial opportunities, ensuring better investor information and accelerating product and service innovation (Guerin, 2013). In both industry and in government there is an on‐going debate about how the principles of openness should be applied and how conflicting needs can be reconciled. In a survey of policy‐makers and experts to identify drivers and barriers to implementing open data policy, six of the top seven issues were related to what might be termed “information governance”, including: privacy, quality, usability, standardisation, security and charging models (Huijboom and Van den Broek, 2011). One possible approach to addressing this problem is through the concept of IP Modularity (Henkel et al., 2012), which applies a modular systems perspective to show how intellectual property can be partitioned so that external innovation is supported while value appropriation is simultaneously protected. We examine how a similar approach can be applied to open data bygeneralising the model to include a wider range of rights and obligations. Information governance (IG) modularity is developed as a theoretical framework, drawing on concepts from configuration design and Fixson’s process perspective (Fixson, 2003).