Governance Mechanism And Multi-agent Integration Pattern Of E-governance Ecosystem

With the gradual transformation from social management to social governance,it has become a new model of social governance that non-governmental entities,such as citizens and private enterprises,cooperate with public sectors to complete the public services provision and public affairs governance.The innovation of information technology brings new opportunities for the interactions between multiple stakeholders of social governance.E-governance platform provides channels for the interaction between stakeholders.Government,the initiator of the platform,corperate with private enterprises,the complementary actors of the platform following the pattern of public-private partnerships,to encourage citizens to participate in E-governance through the IT governance innovation.These stakeholders finally realize the co-creation of social governance value.We proposed the concept of E-governance ecosystem to systematically describe this phenomenon.According to the triple framework of service ecosystem published in MISQ in 2015,this study determined three essential issues for the service innovation of E-governance ecosystem,including the governance mechanism of multi-agent cooperation,the public-private partnerships(PPP)pattern in building E-governance platform,and the citizen participation pattern in co-creating social governance value.The methods of design science,multi-case study,and structural equation model are applied to study three issues.First,this paper focuses on designing and evaluating the governance mechanism of the E-governance ecosystem.As the E-governance ecosystem is an emerging IT artifact,this study followed the design science research paradigm.At design stage,we identified three kinds of key actors of ecosystem,namely government,citizen and E-governance platform contractor,defined the roles of actors and analyzed the forms of social exchange between them.Then,we designed the cooperative co-governance mechanism between actors,including five components of motivations of participatory governance,contextualized governance policies and strategies,offline or online citizen-to-government contributions,online or offline government-to-citizen rewards,and retention and recommendation.Finally we built a prototype of E-governance ecosystem governance mechanism.At evaluation stage,a case on green commuting E-governance was taken to instantiate the governance mechanism and evaluate its effectiveness.The mechanism prototype was continuously improved based on the evaluation results.A multi-level governance mechanism was proposed to meet the demand of contextualized social governance.This study proposed the concept of E-governance ecosystem that systematically describes the IT governance innovation carried out by multiple actors of social governance.It theoretically designed the multi-agent interaction process,which facilitates the transformation of research on multi-agent collaborative governance from conceptual analysis to theoretical design and scientific validation.Meanwhile,it provided general and operable design scheme for building E-governance ecosystem governance mechanisms in different contexts.Second,we studied the PPP pattern in the E-governance ecosystem governance mechanism.Smart city as a kind of E-governance platform provides important IT infrastructure for the social governance.This study conducted a multi-case study on three representative smart city projects.First,two key components were identified to measure the success of E-governance platform,including data integration-oriented performance and citizen service-oriented performance.Then,four key governance structure characteristics of the PPP model that enabled the E-governance platform success were identified,including top-level planning of the local government,government-dominant infrastructure construction,hybrid organizational platform as a general contractor,and deep involvement of a large number of private partners.Finally,drawing on the transaction cost theory,the concerns of the communication-related and relation-related cost were proposed as two critical considerations for establishing the PPP pattern.This study founded that the PPP pattern with higher concerns about the communication-related cost is more likely to realize the design of a hybrid organizational platform as the general contractor and the performance of top-level planning that both have a positive impact on the integration-oriented performance of E-governance platform.While the PPP pattern with higher concerns about relation-related cost is more likely to realize the adoption of a government-dominant infrastructure construction and the involvement of numerous private partners that both have a positive impact on the citizen service-oriented performance of E-governance platform.This study innovatively explored the "black box" of the many-to-many PPP pattern.The proposed factors and hypothesis offer theoretical references for the subsequent empirical validation of the pattern.This study provides suggestions for the successful establishment of E-governance platform from the perspective PPP in practice.Finally,this paper explored the different roles of public and private value in citizen participation.This study was conducted in the setting of green commuting E-governance.The empirical analysis of survey data by using the method of structural equation model revealed that different degrees of significant positive effects from participation antecedents(e.g.,time abundance,mobilization,collective incentive,health incentive,and online image incentive)to two values and from two values to continuous participation.It also found the significant mediating effects of two values on the relationships between participation antecedents and continuous participation.This study distinguishes the values generated by citizen participation in governacne and empirically demonstrates the important role of private value.The result regarding to the significant mediating effects of the two values further explains the mechanism of the internal mechanism of citizen participation at the level of psychological value perception.In practice,some references are provided to set up appropriate governance means on E-governance platform to encourage citizen participation.Overall,through designing and evaluating the ecosystem governance mechanism,building an effective PPP pattern and validating the effects of public and private value on citizen E-participation,this paper has conducted a systematic study on the multi-agent cooperation mechanism and pattern of the E-governance system,which creates far-reaching influence and significance as the breakthrough exploration for theoretical system construction and practical guidance of E-governance ecosystem.