Research

My research focuses on the adoption of social technologies in the public sector. I am specifically interested in how government agencies decide to adopt new technologies, what adoption pathways they chose, what the organizational, cultural and managerial challenges are and how other government agencies’ actions influence adoption decision processes.

I am currently working on the following projects:

1. Social media adoption in the public sector:
   For this project, I interviewed the social media director in the executive branch of the U.S. Government who received the mandate via the Transparency and Open Government memo to “harness new technologies” to become more transparent, collaborative and participatory. For the 2008 Minnowbrook III conference, I prepared my outlook on how Web 2.0 will change the public sector (published in 2011). In 2011, I wrote a piece together with my colleague Stuart Bretschneider defining Government 2.0 as the fifth wave of e-Government. In 2011, I received the George Frederickson PA Times Best Paper award for my paper on social media strategies in the public sector. I am currently preparing an article on the adoption of social media applications by Members of Congress. Together with my co-authors, I published a piece on how PA scholarship can adopt social media applications to fascinate knowledge sharing in form of Open Public Administration Scholarship in J-Part (2011).
2. Open Innovation in the public sector:
   In this project I am looking at innovative ideation processes and open innovation platforms on all levels of government. Among them is Challenge.gov – an ideation platform launched by GSA to help agencies run their own contests and challenges. I recently published a PA Times paper on the topic and am preparing my research for journal publication.
3. Wikis in the public sector:
   The goal of this project is to understand how agencies are adopting collaborative technologies for intra- and inter-organizational collaboration as well as how they use them to include citizens into content co-creation processes. The research includes 10 cases on the federal, state and local level. A first report was published by IBM – The Center for the Business of Government.
4. Twitter guide for public managers:
   I received a research grant from IBM – The Center for the Business of Government to develop a guide for public managers on how to use the micro-blogging service Twitter effectively to support the mission of their agencies.
5. Distributed citizen services:
   This project focuses on the adoption or rejection of SeeClickFix.com – a platform that helps citizens report non-emergency issues to their local government. I interviewed public administrators who made the decision to officially incorporate the service into their work order system and also included local government officials who decided against SCF, even thought their citizens have already adopted the platform.
6. Attention networks among public managers:
   I am working on a series of papers together with my co-authors to understand how public employees are searching their informal social network to access the knowledge they need to fulfill their jobs on a daily basis. I use social network analysis to trace the relationships and type of content they need to access.  Four papers are already published on this research: one on going the extra mile to help colleagues find the information they need (2008), one on informal sharing mechanism among DNA forensic scientists (2011), one on informal social awareness networks among government IT professionals (2011), and a piece on the gap of current network research in PA and it’s potential for the discipline in J-PART (2011).