When Public Information System Procurement Meets Open Ecosystems : Experiences from Finland

Abstract

Public sector organisations serve citizens and firms through networked services. Developing these services is a complex task, as all actors want to keep their data to themselves and not to share it with the others. In this paper, we present a case study on Finnish electronic health and social services, particularly its open data ecosystem called Kanta. We study how the characteristics of open data ecosystems: data, its sharing, cooperation, and their value, influence the public procurement of annexed information systems (IS). As the new system specifications are defined by the open data ecosystem and not by the procurement unit, the procurement is not completely managed by the procuring organisation. Our results suggest that utilising the open data ecosysystem definitions has no direct impacts on the IS procurement project per se, but they solve some procurement challenges: the lack of expertise, understanding the target system, and complexity.