Purpose The study aims to identify and validate the key readiness factors for Business Process Integration (BPI) and interoperability in Tanzania’s public sector and to develop a context-relevant readiness perspective grounded in the Technology–Organization–Environment framework. Design/methodology/approach The study used a two-phase quantitative design. Phase I applied the Fuzzy Delphi Method to evaluate and prioritize readiness indicators across the technological, organizational and environmental dimensions. Phase II used a targeted financial sustainability validation module to examine the weakest organizational readiness factor identified in Phase I, focusing on budget structure, adequacy, release reliability, recurrent financing and implementation support. Findings The most important readiness factors are government policy support, top management leadership and alignment with national Information and Communication Technology and e-government strategy. Technological factors, such as infrastructure and information security, also ranked highly. However, financial resources emerged as the weakest readiness condition. The Phase II financial sustainability results showed that institutions report moderate capacity to sustain existing systems but weaker capacity to finance training, change management, integration platforms, middleware and Application Program Interface management tools. Research limitations/implications The study relies on expert judgment rather than direct performance measurement of integrated systems and its contextual focus on Tanzania’s public sector may limit generalizability to other settings. Practical implications The study provides an evidence-based foundation for designing readiness assessment tools, guiding interoperability reforms and strengthening policy, leadership and financing arrangements for BPI implementation. Social implications Improved BPI readiness can support more coordinated, transparent and citizen-centered public service delivery. Originality/value The study contributes primarily empirical, contextual and methodological value by providing an expert-validated empirical baseline for assessing BPI readiness in Tanzania’s public sector. Rather than proposing a new TOE framework, the study shows how the Fuzzy Delphi Method can contextually prioritize technology-organization-environment-based indicators to reveal the institutional conditions required for sustained cross-organizational integration.
Purpose This study aims to examine when universities with an explicit public-service mission can contribute to artificial intelligence (AI) governance capacity in public organisations. Design/methodology/approach A problem-driven conceptual synthesis integrates public management reform, policy and dynamic capabilities, institutional logics, higher education, boundary work and training transfer. A targeted supplementary literature search supports comparison with the closest explanations. Findings The Intelligent Public Service University (IPSU) framework links mission framing, internal coordination arrangements and four established transfer functions: formation, circulation, translation and embedding. It specifies conditional relationships, not a universal sequence. Agency uptake depends on workplace authority, administrative context, information sensitivity and institutional independence. Proximal capacity is distinguished from public value and from legitimacy, which may also arise symbolically. Research limitations/implications The propositions require comparative and longitudinal testing. The synthesis establishes neither causal effects nor the superiority of any university type or transfer portfolio. Practical implications Universities and agencies can use the framework to diagnose disconnections between education, institutional governance and workplace use, selecting proportionate arrangements for their resources, mandates and risk context. Originality/value IPSU integrates existing mechanisms to explain a bounded problem: why similar university AI initiatives may yield different agency capacities when educational preparation, coordination and opportunities for use differ.
Purpose 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.
Purpose This study aims to examine how institutional modalities produce and sustain the response–resolution decoupling on a Chinese online governance platform, addressing the gap between quantitative findings on what correlates with responsiveness and qualitative understanding of how it operates. Design/methodology/approach This paper involves a qualitative single case study combining document analysis with semi-structured interviews with practitioners involved in platform-based responsiveness, analyzed through structuration theory’s three modalities (signification, domination and legitimation) and their recursive interplay. Findings Three modalities jointly produce response–resolution decoupling (RQ1). Interpretive schemes construct demands through power-laden priority logics. Through power relations, scarce resources are channeled toward response production. Normative justifications, meanwhile, reward procedural compliance over resolution. Their recursive interaction reproduces the decoupling (RQ2), an unintentional structural emergence where actors recognize the gap yet cannot escape it (“conscious entrapment”). Case-grounded conjectures derived from the analysis are offered for further testing. Practical implications Partial reform risks are absorbed by the unreformed dimensions of the system. Breaking the recursive cycle requires action across all three modalities simultaneously. Social implications By showing that rapid, visible replies can coexist with unresolved problems, the study helps citizens and oversight institutions read platform performance more critically: what platforms count as responsiveness is not what citizens experience as resolution. Originality/value This study specifies “conscious entrapment” as a subtype of institutional decoupling, identifies tri-modal closure as the mechanism producing response–resolution decoupling and demonstrates that the decoupling is sustained by recursive interaction among the three modalities rather than by one-time policy failures.
Purpose This study aims to develop and empirically validate a citizen-centric macro-model for smart city development (SCD) in the Indian context. A climate-responsive conceptual overlay, derived from literature synthesis, is presented alongside the tested model but is not itself empirically tested. The study addresses the technology-centric construction of existing smart city frameworks and the limited integration of citizen-defined, cross-cutting property of urban systems, asking citizens how smart city dimensions relate to SCD and quality of life (QOL), and how citizen participation (CP) and support orientation (SO) moderate these relationships. Design/methodology/approach A sequential mixed-methods design is used. Phase 1 applies thematic analysis to 41 citizen interviews across 22 Indian smart cities, yielding 19 factors organised into eight aggregate dimensions; a ninth dimension (smart living) is added from the literature, and climate-responsive factors are integrated through literature synthesis. Phase 2 tests the macro-model through PLS-SEM on primary survey data from 491 respondents, with CP and SO as moderators. Findings The structural model establishes a strong pathway from SCD to QOL, with smart people as the strongest direct predictor of SCD. Smart environment and smart sustainable design, the two dimensions most closely linked to climate responsiveness in the conceptual integration, are non-significant as direct predictors. Smart environment is significant only at high levels of both CP and SO, while smart sustainable design is significant only at high levels of SO. CP moderates the majority of dimensional effects, and combined CP + SO moderation produces the largest explanatory gain, repositioning smart city dimensional effects as conditional rather than linear-additive. Research limitations/implications The cross-sectional Indian design limits causal inference and cross-national generalisability. The findings reposition smart cities as citizen-conditioned sociotechnical systems and establish moderation analysis as a substantive theoretical commitment. Practical implications Technical smart city investments must be coupled with CP mechanisms. The dimensions most closely associated with climate responsiveness require both participatory engagement and institutional support to deliver citizen-perceived value. The evaluation frameworks should shift from aggregate output metrics to citizen-reported outcomes. Originality/value This study offers the first citizen-derived smart city macro-model for the Indian context, validated through PLS-SEM with participation and institution-based moderators; this tested model constitutes the study’s empirical contribution. The accompanying climate-responsive integration is a conceptual overlay derived from literature synthesis, offered as a framework for future testing rather than as a validated result.
