A Conceptual Model of Open Government Data Adoption for Local Authorities in Malaysia

Abstract

One of the key initiatives in Eleventh Malaysia Plan (RMK-11) in enhancing public service delivery is to leverage
data to enhance outcomes and lowering the costs. In line with this vision, implementation of digital government is
planned to offer more innovative services, that is accessible to the citizen and provide efficient and integrated
service delivery by 2020. Thus, Malaysia has launched its Public Sector Open Data (PSOD) portal for agencies
to share data with each other and to facilitate Open Government Data (OGD) philosophy and policies. Data from
official sources are stored in a centrally-accessible repository. However, the rate of adoption by the government
agencies specifically local authorities in sharing their dataset at PSOD portal shows a very slow progress. This
scenario is in contrast to the needs of smart city implementation that require a combination of open data and
Internet-of-Things technology at the local authorities’ level. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify and
analyze the influencing factors of OGD adoption by conducting expert review with five (5) experts from a central
agency, local authorities and public university. Fifteen (15) identified factors from the literature review and eleven
(11) factors have been validated and individually ranked by the selected experts. A conceptual model of OGD
adoption for local authorities in Malaysia which is based on Technology-Organisation-Environment, Diffusion of
Innovation and Institutional Theory was proposed as the outcome of the study.