TITLE:
Inter-Organizational Data Sharing during COVID-19 Health Emergency: Lesson Learnt from Veneto and Lombardy Regions
AUTHORS:
Valeria M. Urbano, Giovanni Azzone, Marika Arena
KEYWORDS:
Data Sharing, COVID-19, Public Health, Inter-Organizational Data Sharing, Bio-Surveillance
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Service Science and Management,
Vol.15 No.6,
December
27,
2022
ABSTRACT: The importance of data driven decision making in evidence based public health has significantly risen with the
aim of answering today’s challenges and of providing new sustainable solutions.
However, the advent of big data and data sciences techniques poses new
challenges in terms of data sharing as multiple sources of data imply multiple stakeholders involved. Although the
potential impact of data sharing among public organizations is widespread,
several initiatives of cross-organizations information sharing fail. While
revealing the necessity of cooperation between organizations to cope with the
health emergency, the current pandemic COVID-19 has shed light on the
complexity of inter-organizational data practices. In the last few years,
several attempts have been made by the authors to identify factors affecting
information sharing in the public sector. The framework developed by Yang and Maxwell (2011) summarizes the main insights from existing literature, providing a
comprehensive overview of factors impacting data sharing initiatives and classifying them into
technological, organizational and political factors. The aim of this research
study is to investigate factors that hinder data sharing initiatives put in
place to deal with the health emergency. To this end, we rely on multiple case studies.
The Lombardy and Veneto regions were selected because the epidemic was
initially concentrated in these two regions. The first hotspots of COVID-19
cases were identified in two geographical areas located in the Lombardy and
Veneto regions, and stringent measures were introduced to contain the epidemic.
The analysis of the case study is used to gain concrete, in-depth knowledge
about inter-organizational data sharing in the context of epidemics. The
findings of this research study confirm some of the relationships between technological and organizational factors
and the success of the data sharing initiatives in the context of an emergency, as well as extend the proposed framework
exploring further sources of complexity.