Public organizations are joining-up and collaborating with each other and with the public. All these efforts require vertical and horizontal interoperability and need to be supported by the next generation of digital government infrastructures. By overcoming the fragmentation, public organizations can exchange information and benefit from each other facilities. The creation of an interoperable government faces challenges at the technical, organizational, managerial and strategic level.

Interoperability is the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together and covers a mixture of technical and organizational aspects. Infrastructures are generic facilities facilitating organizational collaborating, service provisioning and business processes. Cloud services are a new way of providing and using ICT based on virtualized resources meeting security, privacy and scalability requirements. Clouds provide the opportunity to share resources and provide shared services over the Internet, so that administrations, enterprises and citizens can benefit from open data and shared services.

This minitrack is aimed at discussing theories, methodologies, experience reports, literature and case studies in the field of cloud services and interoperability. We solicit for papers covering technical and organizational aspects and combining theory and practice. Papers in the field of government cloud, integration, agile development, information exchange, enterprise architecture, cloud computing, ICT-(shared) services and Software as a Service (SaaS) are strongly encouraged. We promote a diversity of research methods to study the challenges of this multifaceted discipline focusing on various aspects of interoperability and also theoretical papers and papers from developing countries.

Topics and research areas include, but are not limited to:

1. -System development, implementation and agility for digital public services
   

2. -System, user data- and process-based integration
   

3. -Information infrastructures, cloud infrastructures, reuse and quality in digital public services
   

4. -Semantic ontologies, web services and modeling for governmental infrastructures
   

5. -Cloud computing, ICT-services, scalability, reliability, flexibility
   

6. -Software as service (SaaS), utility computing, shared services, cloud providers
   

7. -Cross-organizational modeling and visualization ranging from the organizational to technical level
   

8. -Infrastructure, interoperability and enterprise architecture planning, alignment, strategies and governance
   

9. -Interoperability and architecture standards, principles and frameworks
   

10. -Technical, semantic, organizational, managerial and legal/policy aspects of interoperability
    

11. -Organizational and/or policy perspectives on the dynamics of the infrastructure and interoperability process and barriers to interoperability
    

12. -Service-oriented architectures, web services, semantic web services, orchestration and composition
    

13. -Linked data, meta-data and semantic technologies leading to enhanced digital public services
    

14. -Best practices and case studies and longitudinal studies
    

15. -Theoretical contributions and contributions from developing countries
    

More co-chair information

Marijn Janssen, PhD, is Director of the interdisciplinary Systems Engineering, Policy Analyses and Management Master program, manages the Toptech executive program “IT and Business Architectures” and is an Associate Professor within the Information and Communication Technology section of the Technology, Policy and Management Faculty of Delft University of Technology. He conducted and managed a large number of research projects and published over 200 refereed publications and serves on several editorial boards and conferences in the area of e-government and service engineering. For more information, visit www.tbm.tudelft.nl/marijnj.

Yannis Charalabidis, PhD, is an assistant professor in the University of Aegean, in the area of eGovernment Information Systems, while also heading eGovernment & eBusiness Research in the Decision Support Systems Laboratory of National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), coordinating policy making, research and pilot application projects for governments and enterprises worldwide. A computer engineer with a PhD in complex information systems, he has been employed for 8 years as an executive director in Singular IT Group, leading software development and company expansion in Eastern Europe. He writes and teaches on eGovernment Information Systems, Interoperability and Standardization, eParticipation and Government Transformation in NTUA and the University of Aegean. He has published more the 100 papers in international journal and conferences. He is the Best Paper Award winner of the EGOV 2008 Conference, Best e-government Paper Nominee in the 42nd HICSS Conference and 1st Prize Nominee in the 2009 European eGovernment Awards.

Helmut Krcmar, PhD, holds the Chair for Information Systems, Faculty of Informatics, Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany and serves as Dean of the Faculty of Informatics. He is also a member of the faculty of the TUM Business School. He received a Ph.D. in business administration (University of Saarbrücken) and has worked as Post Doctoral Fellow at the IBM Los Angeles Scientific Center and as Assistant Professor of Information Systems (Leonard Stern Graduate School of Business, New York University and Baruch College, City University of New York). 1987 to 2002 he held the Chair for Information Systems, Hohenheim University, Stuttgart, Germany, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences from 2000 to 2002. His research interests include Information and Knowledge Management, IT-enabled Value webs, Service Management, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Information Systems in Health Care and eGovernment.