The “Missing Link” in Data-informed Governance: An Exploratory Study of Data-related Capabilities

Academics and practitioners recognize the importance of data to achieve critical public value outcomes: more effective services, more efficient use of resources, more equitably distributed benefits, and increased transparency and accountability of government action. Scholars are increasingly trying to understand the conditions that influence public organizations’ ability to use data to meet these goals, but existing research largely follows two separate approaches to studying this phenomenon. Some researchers take organizations as their main unit of analysis to understand how organizational configurations and resource endowments explain differences across governments. Other scholars study how individuals’ competencies and behaviors affect effective interpretation of data and its use to make decisions. Between these two poles lies a missing link: the collective and coordinated capabilities of groups of individuals responsible for collecting, processing, sharing, and using data in the service of tackling public problems.

Using a comparative case-study design, we study teams leveraging data to tackle property distress and abandonment in three US cities. This exploratory empirical research allows us to derive insights into the main constitutive components of data-related capabilities, their enabling factors, and their effects. This understanding can advance future scholarship by providing researchers with a more operationalizable construct to study data capabilities, bridging an important gap between the main existing approaches to studying data-informed governance.