Research colloquium: Agile and Digital Governance

In the summer semester 2024, Prof. Mergel will offer an online research colloquium together with other international researchers: Agile and Digital Governance. The colloquium will take place every Monday at 12:30 - 2:00 pm via Zoom. Registration for the colloquium is not required.

Zusammenfassung Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced as one of the most prominent technological innovations to push the conversation about the digital transformation of the public sector forward. This special issue focuses on actual implementation approaches or challenges that public managers are facing while they fulfil new policy that asks for the implementation of AI in public administrations. In addition to assessing the contributions of papers in this issue, we also provide a research agenda on how future research can fill some of the methodological, theoretical, and application gaps in the public management literature.

New Publication: Implementing AI in the public sector.

New publication from  Mergel, I., Dickinson, H., Stenvall, J., & Gasco, M. (2023). Implementing AI in the public sector. Public Management Review, in press, 1-13.

The publication can be found here.

Zusammenfassung Digital transformation has become a buzzword that is permeating multiple fields, including public administration and management. However, it is unclear what is transformational and how incremental and transformational change processes are linked. Using the PRISMA method, we conduct a systematic literature review to structure this growing body of evidence. We identified 164 studies on digitally-induced change and provide evidence for their drivers, implementation processes, and outcomes. We derive a theoretical framework that shows which incremental changes happen in public administrations that are implementing digital technologies and what their cumulative, transformative effects are on society as a whole.

New publication: Digitally-induced change in the public sector: a systematic review and research agenda

New publication from Haug, Nathalie, Dan, Sorin, & Mergel, Ines (2023): Digitally-induced change in the public sector: a systematic review and research agenda, Public Management Review, 1-25. The publication can be found here.

New publication: Implementing successful innovation fellowships in the administration

The new publication by Prof. Dr. Ines Mergel, Nathalie Haug, Valerie Albrecht,
Almire Brahimi, Dr. Noella Edelmann, Dr. Nassrin Hajinejad, Ines Hölscher, Jana Plomindes: "Erfolgreiche Innovationsfellowships in der Verwaltung umsetzen" by Kompetenzzentrums Öffentliche IT (ÖFIT) is available online.

Welcome to the pages of
Digital Governance Labs at the University of Konstanz

Prof. Dr. Ines Mergel is Professor of Public Administration - Digital Governance at the University of Konstanz. Prof. Mergel's research focuses in particular on management and technology processes in innovative public management practices. Current projects include digital transformation, open innovation, big data and the use of in-house social networking technologies in the public sector.

Innovative Verwaltung. Change Leadership macht den Unterschied.

New publication: Agile competencies for the
Digitalization of public administration

What skills do civil servants need for the digitalization of public administration? Prof. Dr. Ines Mergel, Almire Brahimi & Stefanie Hecht have identified the necessary skills and ideas for implementation in the new issue of the specialist publication Innovative Verwaltung.

To the article.

Open Public Administration
Scholarship

Research-based teaching content from the Mergel working group is published on OPAS.

Agile: A New Way of Governing

A new article by Prof. Dr. Mergel, Prof. Dr. Ganapati and Prof. Dr. Andrew B. Whitford has been published in the Public Administration Review. This paper presents potential applications of modern agility in public administration and discusses possible challenges that may arise when implementing agility in public administration.

A new international project to teach digital skills in public administration has been launched:

Digital specialist Professor Ines Mergel from the University of Konstanz is a founding member. Experts from ten institutions - including the universities of Cambridge and Harvard - are developing an open access curriculum to support current and future administrators and managers

New seminar aims to bridge teaching, research and practice to understand digital transformation in the public sector

With the support of an internal grant from the "Transfer Lehre" project, Professor Mergel is offering a BA seminar that helps to bridge research, practice and teaching experiences. The students will conduct interviews with experts and present their findings to the mayor's office at the end of the seminar.

This semester I am teaching a new seminar that focuses on a relatively new topic: The challenges that public administrations are facing when they are aiming to digitize their analog services. Under the catchy term “digital transformation”, many are looking to not only move from analog to digital, also redesigning, automating, or abandoning outdated administrative acts and the corresponding services.

The term was adopted from the private sector, where digital transformation of products and business models started to occur with the use of the Internet as a distribution and communication channel. The tricky situation for public administrations however is that they can’t reinvent their business models, look for new customer segments, or abandon offline products/services. Unfortunately, public administrations are compared to those whose core business model was digital transformation of their own sectors, such as Apple’s iTunes platform, Skype replacing landline phones, Amazon transforming book/retail sector, Twitter as a newsfeed replacing traditional print newspapers, etc.

We have very limited literature on the topic, therefore the goal of this seminar is that students are deriving research questions from expert interviews and are adding necessary insights by conducting additional interviews. I will give a short introduction to the topic, plus train them in qualitative data collection and analysis – with the hope that they will be equipped to design an interview guideline, select interview subjects, analyze, and present the data.

I was able to cooperate with four external partners for this project: the City of Konstanz, the Initiative D21 (responsible for Germany’s annual e-Government monitor), the City of Ulm’s Verschwoerhaus (an innovation lab), and the Deutschen Städte- und Gemeindebund. They will join us in person or via Skype, present a short introduction of their main problems and findings and then we will open up the conversation for the student-led Q&A.

Finally, the students will design posters with their main findings – an alternative way of communicating research insights to an audience – and will discuss their findings in the Mayor’s office with civil servants who are interested in digitization.

The project is supported with an internal grant to increase the transfer between research, teaching, and practice. This is an initiative that was requested by the student body and in my opinion an applied topic like digitization fits extremely with this mission. I am also hoping that the students are gaining valuable methodological and communication skills, will be able to ‘translate’ their academic insights in plain language to a larger audience, and will be generally best prepared for their BA theses and the job market.

I have made good experiences including practitioners into my classes before, but never transferred the findings of the students from academia into practice – except for using a class blog to encourage the students to write for digital media outlets. It created a bit of press attention and was listed by FedTech magazine as one of the “50 must-read federal IT blogs” in the US. You can read about my experiences and download the syllabi here:

  1. Mergel, I. (2016): Big Data in Public Affairs Education, in: Journal of Public Affairs Education, 22(2), pp. 231-248.
  2. Mergel, I. (2012): The Public Manager 2.0: Preparing the Social Media Generation for the Networked Workplace, in: Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE), 18:3, pp. 467-492.

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