A Study Of User-Oriented Open Government Data

With the development of information technology, public service providing is highly connected to it. Government has produced, collected and stored huge amounts of data during its administrative activities, which makes it the biggest data holder in the whole country. These data stored by government is closely related with citizens’ daily life. In the digital era, government takes advantage of information technology to open government data to the public for re-use and innovation, which creates public value.Open government data has been a hot topic all over the world. Some scholars have made some research and found out that while opening government data to the public, government only cares about the opening process, while ignores how users use these data. As a result, the potential and value of open government data has not been fully achieved.This paper then is based on the idea of user-oriented open government data study. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), one of the research methods in the field of information management, is introduced in the field of public administration and is directly applied to open government data. This paper regards the perceived usefulness and the perceived ease of use as the two key factors which influence users’ usage of open government data. And the perceived usefulness and the perceived ease of use are derived from the data usefulness and data ease of use management, which raises the two main factors of government opening process:data usefulness and data ease of use management. This paper regards government and users as the two main stakeholders of open government data, and government opening process and user using process as the two main phases. By system dynamics approach, this paper constructs a user-oriented open government data model. Then this paper focus on the government opening process and pay great attention to data usefulness and data ease of use. New York City open government data initiative and Shanghai open government data initiative are selected to compare the differences of data usefulness and data ease of use management performance. This paper designs 13 observation indicators to conduct this case study. In addition, this paper finds out that five key factors, including political leader promotion, legislation and detailed action plan, professional organization and leader appointment, open government culture and user feedback mechanism, could influence the data usefulness and data ease of use management. This would be used for the reference of Shanghai open government data initiative.