The Preference On Partner Selection In Delivering Digital Projects Of Local Governments

Digital projects are the carriers of digital government.Currently,the construction of digital government is advancing in depth,and the government has initiated a large number of digital projects including city brain,government service platform,etc.The government often lacks the digital technology required for project construction and usually needs to cooperate with enterprises,thus selecting partner becomes a key affecting the performance of digital government construction.Previous studies have paid less attention to partner selection in digital project outsourcing.Among the few relevant studies,no research has analyzed the impact of project types and characteristics on partner selection.This paper is dedicated to portraying the connotation and types of current government digital projects,and exploring how these factors influence digital project partner selection,especially the impact on the selection preferences of state-owned enterprises and private enterprises.This study selects City H,a pioneer region in digital government construction,as the research object.Based on the existing literature and resource dependency theory,this paper proposes an analytical framework that includes elements of technical expertise,project complexity and data riskiness.After synthesizing research methods such as rooting theory and questionnaire research,and conducting logistic regressions on 1633 projects in City H from 2000 to 2020,this study reached the following research conclusions: first,private enterprises are the main partners of the government.The government allocated 14.3% of the projects to state-owned enterprises and 73.5%to private enterprises.Second,the higher the riskiness of the data,the more the government tends to start cooperation with state-owned enterprises.Holding other variables constant,when data riskiness increases by 1 unit,the ratio of government choosing state-owned enterprises as partners increases by 0.8.Third,the relationship between data riskiness and partner selection is influenced by project tier,policy,and project type.Holding other variables constant,district-level projects are more likely to choose state-owned enterprises than municipal-level projects under high data risk;underlying projects are more likely to choose state-owned enterprises than application and auxiliary projects;and projects after the 2016 the Internet Plus Government Services initiative reform are more likely to choose state-owned enterprises than projects before 2016.These findings suggest that data risk is the main consideration driving the choice of government partners.This study provides two theoretical contributions.First,it introduces project complexity into digital government construction research and examines the impact of project nature on government partner selection using the project as the unit of analysis.Second,it expands the research on government-enterprise cooperation and outsourcing,and points out that data is the key element that distinguishes digital projects from other government projects outsourced.Following that,this paper puts forward three policy recommendations: first,to improve the standardization of digital project construction and avoid blindly initiating projects;second,the government needs to consider project type classification when realizing the positive interaction between government and enterprises in digital projects;third,to increase investment in data security,improve government data management capability,and reduce data risks.