Managing Factors that Affect Utilizations of Open Government Data: A Case Study of a Municipality

Abstract: Governments and municipalities are now starting to open up their large amount of collected data and provide it as open government data. The opening of data is often simplified, and the complexity of the phenomena is generally not understood by municipalities. In line with this, the purpose of the thesis is to discuss how the factors that affect utilizations of open government data are being managed by municipalities. By studying existing literature, we identified factors that affect utilizations of open government data and consequently these factors created our theoretical framework. This framework was then used for our empirical data collection through a case study of a municipality, consisting of five interviews. Our findings show that factors affect utilizations of open government data in a varying degree and thus, some factors are managed by municipalities more than others. Since open government data was found to still be a new phenomenon within our empirical setting, a lot of factors affecting the utilizations were only partly managed. We found several major decisions that municipalities need to consider when managing factors that affect open government data utilizations in terms of data quality, formats and standards, and what audience to target with their data portal.