Towards “Government as a Platform”: An analysis framework for public sector infrastructure

abstract

“Government as a Platform” (GaaP) is a promising approach to the digital transformation of the public sector. The approach sees Government as an open platform on which people inside and outside the government can innovate and co-create better public services. On a technical level, this is enabled by public sector infrastructure that also follows the approach. However, it remains unclear how exactly GaaP can be applied to public sector infrastructure in practice. In order to tackle this challenge, we develop a framework for the analysis of public infrastructure regarding its platform character. We apply the framework to a current public infrastructure project in Germany to demonstrate its applicability and infer possible future improvements. We contribute to literature by integrating GaaP literature with ideas and concepts from general IS platform literature and contribute to practice by providing a tool that supports the application of GaaP.