“Having Skin In The Game”: A Value Tension Study Of An Inter- Agency IT Project

© 2017 Proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Information Systems, ECIS 2017. All rights reserved. This study seeks to better understand the challenges involved in early stage development of citizen-facing Joined-Up Government and the mitigating strategies used to address these issues. In-depth interviews were carried out with 11 members of a unique, cross-agency case, the SmartStart life event project, the first of a planned suite of life event services in New Zealand’s public sector. Three key underlying value tensions were identified as contributing to agency challenges: New Public Management versus Joined-Up Government, Immediate Needs versus Long Term Benefits, and Waterfall versus Agile development approaches. Participants successfully addressed these value tensions through three concurrent mitigating strategies: active stewardship, citizen centricity, and creation of reusable artefacts. A framework is proposed, based on the concept of a base isolator, to illustrate the dynamics between the underlying value tensions and mitigating strategies, which enable effective practice of Joined-Up Government. Understanding these value tensions and their relationship to the mitigating strategies has implications for both practitioners and researchers.