Barriers of applying Government as a Platform in Practice: Evidence from Germany

Abstract

Government as a Platform (GaaP) is a promising approach to the digital transformation of the public sector. GaaP aims at the development of efficient and user-friendly services by exploiting platform principles such as openness, modularization and co-creation. Hence, GaaP claims to deliver a new level of stakeholder participation in the production of public services. However, the success of GaaP is arguably bound to the context of a country. To address the potential impact of a country’s context, the goal of this paper is to identify barriers and measures to overcome them in the application of GaaP in the federal context of Germany. We conduct a literature review and investigate a use case of a German digital government agency by means of documents, expert interviews and workshops. The agency applies GaaP to its architecture management of the federal IT infrastructure. We find five barriers and three measures to overcome. We conclude by discussing implications for theory and practice.