Revisit the drivers and barriers to e-governance in the mobile age: A case study on the adoption of city management mobile apps for smart urban governance

ABSTRACT

This article presents an explorative case study to understand the drivers and barriers that influence the adoption of smartphone-based city management apps as e-governance tools in U.S. cities. Using interviews with government officials and citizen focus groups in a southeastern city, we systematically examine the facilitators and barriers from the perspectives of the government and citizens. Our findings suggest that the city management app system was primarily adopted by the government to improve service efficiency through information integration and workflow automation on the backend. It is viewed by both the government and citizens as an innovative two-way communication tool that encourages citizens to report service problems and facilitates service improvement. However, the app’s potential of being an open dialogic and social space to engage citizens in a full range of co-production activities has not yet been sufficiently realized. Strategies for local governments and city management app developers to address e-governance challenges are discussed.

Acknowledgments

Jinghui (Jove) Hou and Daniel L. Fay contributed to this work equally. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article. The authors also thank Yun Chen for her research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Based on incomplete statistics from vendors’ websites, cities that have launched the 311 service platforms in their city management apps are located in more than 40 states across all eight U.S. census divisions. These cities include large cities with a population of greater than 500,000, mid-sized cities that have a population between 100,000 and 500,000, and cities that have a population of less than 100,000.

2. A recent national survey from the Nielsen Company shows that more than 95% of individuals aged 18–44, 89% of individuals aged 45–54, 80% of individuals aged 55–64, and 68% of individuals aged over 65 in the United States own smartphones (The Nielsen Company, 2016). We estimate the percentage of smartphone owners in Tallahassee based on the percentage of total population in each age group and the percentage of smartphone owners in the corresponding age group reported by the Nielson Company survey.

3. All interview and focus group questions are provided in Appendix A.

4. To address our research questions, we only used the adoption-related questions and responses in the content analysis. The rest of the transcripts were used as supplementary information for our case study.

5. See Appendix B for the codebook.

6. Among the U.S. cities that have research universities based on the 2015 statistics, about 180 cities are mid-sized cities that have a population between 100,000 to 500,000. University classification information is available at http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/downloads.php.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) Award #1640587 (PI: Arghandeh) and the Florida State University’s First Year Assistant Professor grant.

Notes on contributors

Tian Tang

Tian Tang is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University. Her research focuses on energy policy, technology policy, technology innovation, and public sector innovation.

Jinghui (Jove) Hou

Jinghui (Jove) Hou is affiliated with the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. Her research focuses on social and psychological effects and uses of information technologies and management systems.

Daniel L. Fay

Daniel L. Fay is an Assistant Professor at the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University. His research interests include public policy process, public management, and education policy.

Catherine Annis

Catherine Annis is a doctoral student at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Her research interests include public sector innovation, collaborative governance, and organizational networks.