Governo Electrónico - Universidade do Minho

Advisor
Prof. Luis Amaral
Information Systems Interoperability
in Public Administration
Abstract
Author
Delfina de Sá-Soares
The pursuit of a Public Administration that is more efficient, more effective, more transparent and
more able to provide integrated high quality public services to the citizen constitutes one of the great goals
and, simultaneously, one of the great challenges facing Public Administration professionals.
To achieve this goal, it is required greater collaboration capability between multiple agencies, which
necessarily implies the existence of interoperability capability between their information systems.
The creation of interoperability between technologically different information systems (that were
developed in an independent and autonomous way, and without envisage the possibility of future
interoperation), operating in different organizational contexts (each agency has its own culture, its way to
operate, its goals, its priorities, its autonomy and its semantics), is recognized as a high complexity task, that
is affected and subjected to a myriad of aspects, not yet satisfactorily known and characterized, that turn
interoperability into a huge challenge and that have been compromising and disturbing its achievement.
In this context, this study identified as its research problem the lack of an explicit and systematized
understanding of the complex of forces acting in the process of interoperability implementation between
Public Administration information systems.
The understanding of the complex of forces affecting the process of interoperability implementation
between information systems in Public Administration may assist the professionals in the management and
accomplishment of this phenomenon, thus concurring to the success of these initiatives and concomitantly to
the establishment of a Public Administration with more adequate, sustained and sustainable levels of
interoperability. Additionally, this work, by placing its focus on the understanding of the complex of acting
forces as a whole, and not only in the identification of those forces, as it has occurred in the literature,
formulated a set of research questions that have been neglected till the present, namely the determination of