Government cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS) requires multiple agencies to agree on who does what. A 2016 US national survey identified three determinants of clarity of roles and responsibilities (CRR) — boundary object use, collaboration/communication skills, and organizational diversity — and a 2019 eight-case US study characterized how they operate. In its concluding limitations, that study left open two future-research directions: which additional determinants of CRR exist in government CBIS beyond the three identified in the literature, and whether the account extends beyond US criminal justice and public health to additional policy domains and to different organizational and cultural contexts beyond the United States. No study to date answers either direction for CRR, so the problem remains open.

Background

Cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS) is the exchange of information and knowledge across the boundaries of government organizations — for example, between public-health agencies, police departments, and research institutions — which is increasingly necessary to address complex public problems that no single agency can solve. A recurring obstacle in such initiatives is ambiguity about who is responsible for what. Clarity of roles and responsibilities (CRR) denotes the extent to which participants in a collaboration have a shared, mutually understood assignment of tasks, duties, and accountability; prior research links higher CRR to better performance of both individual organizations and inter-organizational efforts, and in CBIS specifically CRR enables other success factors such as trust among participants and willingness to share.

A first quantitative anchor was provided by Sayogo, Gil-Garcia and Cronemberger (2016), who analyzed a US national survey and identified three statistically significant determinants of CRR in interagency information integration and sharing: (1) the extent to which participants use boundary objects; (2) participant skills in collaboration, coordination, and communication; and (3) the diversity of the participating organizations and their goals. A boundary object is a concrete artifact or institutionalized practice — such as a written statewide response plan, a process diagram, a formal interagency agreement, or a regular cross-agency meeting — that is concrete enough to serve as a shared reference point for all parties yet adaptable enough to be used within each party's local context. Gil-Garcia, Guler, Pardo and Burke (2019) followed up this survey with qualitative case research: eight US state and local CBIS cases, four in public health (West Nile Virus surveillance and response) and four in criminal justice (systemic capacity building). They showed how the three determinants operate mechanistically — for example, off-season planning cycles made statewide written response plans salient boundary objects in the public-health cases, while embedded project managers and daily morning meetings were decisive for role alignment in the criminal justice cases — and they disaggregated organizational diversity into two dimensions requiring different managerial responses: heterogeneity in information needs (e.g., real-time, safety-critical data versus publishable research data) and heterogeneity in organizational goals (operational versus research missions).

The 2019 study is, however, a qualitative characterization resting on eight cases from two US policy domains in several states. In its concluding limitations the authors framed an explicit empirical agenda for future research, which constitutes the open problem: only three factors had been identified in the literature as significant to CRR, and the study's cases were confined to criminal justice and public health in the US, so the field still lacks an account of what produces CRR in government CBIS that goes beyond the three established determinants and generalizes across contexts.

Problem Statement

The open problem is the empirical research agenda on clarity of roles and responsibilities (CRR) in government cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS) left in the concluding limitations of Gil-Garcia, Guler, Pardo and Burke (2019), which built on the survey-identified determinants of Sayogo, Gil-Garcia and Cronemberger (2016). Because only three factors had been identified in the literature as significant to CRR, and because the 2019 study examined cases from only two policy domains — criminal justice and public health — in several US states, the study stated two future-research directions:

  1. Additional determinants. Identify and specify how to empirically test additional determinants of CRR in government CBIS beyond the three established determinants (boundary object use; participant collaboration, coordination, and communication skills; organizational diversity, disaggregated by the 2019 study into heterogeneity in information needs and heterogeneity in organizational goals) — for example power asymmetry, legal mandates, agency culture, resource endowment, or prior collaboration history, which the 2019 study did not examine.
  2. Generalization across contexts. Extend this effort by expanding beyond US criminal justice and public health to additional policy domains and to different organizational and cultural contexts beyond the United States, examining whether the determinants and the ways they operate that were identified in the US cases hold in those contexts.

The two directions are complementary and independent. Direction 1 concerns identifying at least one additional determinant of CRR beyond the three established determinants and how it can be empirically tested; Direction 2 concerns whether the established determinants and the ways they operate do or do not hold in at least one additional policy domain and, beyond the United States, in a different organizational or cultural context.

References

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