To Örebro University

Integration in health care is a normative goal, but the legal regulation of government operations across sectors is complex. Many values must be safeguarded and they are therefore legally protected. Interoperability can, however, create value conflicts and there is little empirical research into the constructive attempts to resolve such deep-rooted conflicts. This paper addresses this gap by an in-depth study of how values are institutionalized in laws and government organizations. Data was collected by means of participant observation and narrative interviews. The study showed that value conflicts constitute barriers to integration that were difficult to resolve. One major problem was that the necessary discussion about how the conflicts should be handled could not be held because there was no such arena. Different authorities were governed by different values that were deeply institutionalized; while services were to be integrated, the legal regulating bodies were not.

Interoperability is a top priority today as governments try to integrate services across departments so as to improve effectiveness as well as efficiency. Integration in government is complicated, as evidenced by a discouraging project failure rate. An often quoted reason is that the complex relationships among government, society, and technology which come into play when integrating multiple organizations are not fully understood. This paper addresses this gap by scrutinizing a large national integration project asking, what is the nature and causes of the conflicts that surface during implementation? Data was collected by means of participant observations and narrative interviews. Seven major conflicts were found, all general because they involve basic values which were in conflict with each other. The values were specified by legislation and strictly operationalized in various government institutions which, consequently, were in disagreement about what was legal and desirable. The findings show that in order to achieve interoperability a "re-operationalization" of these values is necessary. These changes cannot be clearly defined upfront but must be "negotiated" by means of practical achievements that are considered important enough to motivate gradual changes in the way we implement our values in legislation and practices. This means that ambitious integration projects must serve as spearheads in such value change, which is a root cause for delays and even failure.

The aim of this paper was to analyze an implementation of the public data agenda to address the lack of empirical research on the subject. The focus of the paper is on the interplay between policy, process and people. The approach was qualitative, interpretive research and data was gathered through interaction, interviews and observations over a period of 20 months. Findings showed that the policies are a bit opportunistic and that it is not clear what data that should be made available to attract citizens to take part in the agenda, raw data or processed data? Furthermore, the incentives for citizens to engage in the public data agenda were not obvious. I therefore wonder, do we believe too much in information? Are we being information determinists?