From ownership to relationality: relationalizing government information in digital government platforms
Yunlei Liu, Yunfeng Zeng, Peng LiuPurpose
This study aims to examine how digital government platforms reorganize government information beyond its original departmental and system locations. It asks through what processes ownership-anchored government information becomes relational and under what boundary conditions this reorganization occurs.
Design/methodology/approach
The study analyzes 133 documents collected from the development of a provincial digital government platform ecosystem comprising Shandong Tong, Ai Shandong and the Code Platform. Qualitative content analysis was used to screen and code the documentary corpus, supplemented by a limited discourse-analytic perspective at the interpretive stage. From 685 candidate semantic units, 119 core evidence units were identified and coded through material-near open codes, aggregate themes and higher order analytical dimensions.
Findings
Government information is relationalized through three functionally related processes. Ownership recalibration re-specifies administrative anchoring through standards, identifiers, permissions and responsibility. Relational generation connects information across interfaces, systems, identities and service scenarios. Translation into governance action incorporates these connections into coordination, oversight, decision support and feedback. Boundary governance operates across the three processes by defining the access, security, responsibility and usability conditions under which information relations can be formed and sustained. The findings show that relationalization does not remove administrative anchoring; it reconfigures that anchoring within wider relations of connection and use.
Originality/value
The study shifts the analytical focus from whether government information is shared or systems are connected to how the organizational position of government information itself changes within digital platforms. It conceptualizes relationalization as the joint reconfiguration of administrative anchoring, cross-system connection, governance use and the conditions governing those relations. This explains why platform connectivity alone is insufficient for connected information to become usable and governable in governmental practice.