Exploring Government Officials’ Data Seeking Behaviors in Open Data Initiatives

The implementation of Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives has become a worldwide phenomenon in government administrations over the last decade. Attracted by the belief of enhancing governmental transparency and the potential of value-adding data to spur economic growth, more and more government agencies are releasing government-possessed raw data online in non-proprietary formats for free access and reuse by the public. This trend also grabs the attention of scholars from various disciplines, and results in manifold OGD studies. However, few studies have looked into the details of the data opening processes. Particularly, there has been limited research exploring the data collecting phase, which is the preliminary phase that government agencies seek and prepare datasets for OGD purposes. This phase is critical because its outcomes can influence the subsequent data opening processes and the datasets that open data users could access and reuse. Therefore, the data collecting phase is worth a more profound investigation. To bridge the research gap, this study sheds light on the data collecting phase at the micro level by exploring government officials’ data seeking behaviors with the following research questions: (1) Why do government officials undertake data seeking tasks? (2) How do government officials discover datasets to open? (3) How do government officials select datasets to open? (4) How do government officials obtain datasets to open? (5) How do government officials seek information to facilitate their data seeking activities? In order to answer these research questions, qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with a protocol developed based on a research framework, deriving from several information seeking models of the literatures. Fifteen government officials were recruited as interviewees from eleven central and local government agencies by purposive and snowball sampling. After the qualitative data analysis, important findings were revealed, discussed, compared with former studies, and organized to form a model of data seeking process. As shown in the model, government officials’ engagements in data seeking tasks were due to individual self-imposition, the requirement of higher-level authorities, and the advocacy of external parties. In addition, the formation of data seeking tasks was found to trigger the subsequent data seeking phases including data discovering, data selecting, and data obtaining. First, potential datasets and data sources were identified through external-directed, internal-directed, or hybrid method during the data discovering phase. Then, during the data selecting phase, influenced by organizational inertia, instrumental rationality, data provider characteristics, data user characteristics, and datasets characteristics, government officials of the OGD departments and the data-generating departments, and their higher-level executives reviewed the discovered datasets to determine which datasets to be opened to the public with respective priorities. Finally, in the data obtaining phase, the selected datasets were either first obtained by the OGD departments for opening or directly released by the data-generating departments. It was found that during the various phases of data seeking process, government officials also looked for information regarding data needs, data sources, and data seeking methods to facilitate the accomplishment of data seeking tasks. Government officials’ choices of information seeking approaches varied and were affected by their respective awareness of the residing environments and information sources that they intended to retrieve information from. In terms of the various adopted information seeking approaches, chaining and browsing were the two features of information seeking behaviors performed by all the interviewees of the study. Nevertheless, the other four features, including monitoring, differentiating, extracting, and verifying, were only found to be performed by government officials who had been behaving actively and positively toward OGD initiatives. In addition, it was found that government officials’ information seeking behaviors were influenced by instrumental rationality, information sources characteristics, and respective information needs. Lastly, the loops of the information seeking process continued until one’s information needs became gradually discernible and were eventually deemed satisfied. With the aforementioned findings, this study contributes to both OGD practices and research. Several suggestions are offered as follows. For OGD practices, it is suggested that government agencies establish federated data repositories within their own agencies to enhance internal data exchange and management. Agencies may also consider applying external-directed, internal-directed, and hybrid data discovering methods simultaneously during the process of data seeking to achieve better effectiveness and efficiency. It is also recommended that platforms be established for encouraging the sharing and exchange of data seeking experiences among government agencies. In terms of future OGD research, further studies should investigate additional types of data selecting procedures and the causes of their differences. The weights and the causal relationships among the influential factors are also worth further explorations. It will also be interesting to investigate the differences of data seeking processes between early and late adopters of OGD initiatives. Lastly, future comparative research can also be conducted to understand the differences of data seeking processes from a cross-country perspective.