INTERORGANIZATIONAL COOPERATION AND COOPERABILITY

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INTERORGANIZATIONAL COOPERATION AND COOPERABILITY

• Walter Castelnovo
• Dipartimento di Scienze della Cultura, Politiche
  e dellInformazione Università dellInsubria
• Italy

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Administrative fragmentation in Local Government

• The system of Local Government in Italy
• 8100 municipalities
• 72 of Italian municipalities have less than 5000
  inhabitants
• about 22 have between 5000 and 20000 inhabitants
  
• only 6 have more than 20000 inhabitants
• 103 provinces
• 20 regions

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Administrative fragmentation in Local Government

• Problems related to administrative fragmentation
• difficulty to ensure the availability of suitable
  financial resources to support innovation
  processes
• difficulty to ensure a widespread presence of
  specialized competencies for the management of
  innovation processes
• difficulty not only to manage innovation projects
  in order to satisfy the citizens need for higher
  quality services, but also to maintain the level
  of the services already delivered

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Administrative fragmentation in Local Government

• Possible solutions
• reduction of the administrative fragmentation
  obtained by means of a forced merger of
  municipalities
• not viable in those countries, such as Italy,
  where the municipalities autonomy is
  constitutionally granted
• policies to support intermunicipal cooperation

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Intermunicipal cooperation

• Definition of the European Council
• intermunicipal cooperation institutionalise
  cooperation between municipalities, and other
  local authorities close to the community,
  allowing them to jointly manage certain important
  services.
• In broad terms, intermunicipal cooperation may
  be defined as an arrangement between two or more
  government organizations for accomplishing common
  goals, providing a service, or solving a mutual
  problem.
• The chief motive for intermunicipal cooperation
  may be a desire for management effectiveness so
  that to ensure that local structures are
  realistic and relevant as far as the exercise of
  competencies is concerned

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Intermunicipal cooperation

• Intermunicipal cooperation and E-Government
• intermunicipal cooperation represents a solution
  SLGOs can resort to in order to handle the
  complexity of E-Government processes by sharing
  resources and specialized competences
• intermunicipal cooperation is related to
  E-Government because the adoption and the
  widespread use of ICT implied by E-Government
  enables more efficient and effective forms of
  cooperation which allow SLGOs to systematically
  share resources in the management of the
  administrative processes, in order to improve
  quality, efficiency, effectiveness, and
  responsiveness

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Interoperability and intermunicipal cooperation
(W3H)

• What, Who, Why, How
• Given the variety of the resources that can be
  shared in a intermunicipl cooperation, there is
  not a unique way to manage the cooperation.
• Both the exchange modality and the conditions
  that must be satisfied in order to integrate the
  shared resources in the processes of the
  cooperating organizations depend on
• what is the type of resource that is
  interchanged/shared (What)
• what subsystems of the involved organizations use
  that resource (Who)
• what is the aim of the cooperation (Why)
• what are the modalities according to which the
  cooperation can be managed in order to guarantee
  the usability of the interchanged/shared
  resources (How)

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Cooperation scenario

• In a SLGO the availability of a human resource
  involved in the process for delivering a service
  temporarily fails.
• In order to maintain service continuity, the
  missing resource must be replaced. However, a
  specialized competence cannot always be replaced
  with other equivalent resources the organization
  already has at its disposal.
• Moreover, it might be a competence hard to find
  on the market or, anyway, a resource which cannot
  be easily found in a short time, because of
  financial or normative constraints.

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Cooperation scenario (W3H)

• What, Who, Why, How
• the resource which is shared is a specialized
  human resource (what).
• The agents directly involved in the interaction
  are the offices that in the involved
  organizations use the required resource (who)
• the purpose of the cooperation is to maintain the
  level of the services delivered (why).
• The condition that would make a resource coming
  from another organization immediately usable
  within a SLGO is some sort of organizational
  homogeneity characterizing the partners of the
  cooperation (how).

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Thecnical and non technical of interoperability

• besides technical interoperability (which
  guarantees compatibility and interchangeability)
  coalition and joint operations require the
  cooperability of the partners
• COOPERABILITY
• the ability of different forces to function
  together essentially as a single force with no
  loss in effectiveness.

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Thecnical and non technical of interoperability

• Cooperability attributes
• Preparedness
• this attribute describes the preparedness of the
  organization to interoperate. It is made up of
  doctrine, experience and training.
• Understanding
• the understanding attribute measures the amount
  of communication and sharing of knowledge and
  information within the organization and how the
  information is used.
• Command Style
• this is the attribute that describes the
  management and command style of the organization
  - how decisions are made and how roles and
  responsibilities are allocated/delegated.
• Ethos
• the ethos attribute concerns the culture and
  value systems of the organization and its goals
  and aspiration.

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Cooperability reference model
integration
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Cooperability and Levels of Information Systems
integration
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Integrated System of Local Government

• An Integrated System of Local Government is an
  aggregation of SLGOs that jointly define
  systematic forms of cooperation based on the
  appropriate cooperation environment.
• Within an ISLG, sharing a cooperative environment
  makes the partner strongly interoperable, not
  only on the technological level, but on the
  organizational level as well, up to the
  achievement of levels of full cooperability among
  the partners.
• The setting up of an ISLG can be considered as
  the result of a process of joint technological
  and organizational innovation.

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Virtual Integration

• ISLG members are not, strictly speaking,
  integrated in the system
• the implementation of an ISLG simply amounts to
  the sharing of the appropriate technological and
  organizational platform, which makes
  interorganizational cooperation easier.
• The integration among the partners within an ISLG
  is only virtual and it is determined by the
  strengthening of the conditions of
  interoperability (up to cooperability) rather
  than by a real organizational integration.

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Virtual Integration

• each member of the ISLG keeps its autonomy,
  though it agrees to coordinate its activity with
  that of its partners and to systematically share
  resources (of various sorts) with them
• as the integration is exclusively determined by
  the adoption of a shared cooperation environment,
  the activation of an ISLG does not necessarily
  require the definition of new levels of
  government (as it happens in the case of
  institutionalized forms of integration, such the
  Unions of Communes)

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Virtual Integration and administrative
fragmentation

• The setting up of an ISLG can represent a
  solution to the need to overcome administrative
  fragmentation, in order to achieve the
  rationalization, the simplification and the
  reduction of the cost of the system of Local
  Government.
• To achieve these results through intermunicipal
  cooperation, the aggregation that set up must
  necessarily be stable in time.
• Sharing a cooperation environment means to adhere
  to the conditions of technical interoperability
  and, above all, to the cooperability constraints
  that define it.
• This can mitigate the opportunistic behaviour of
  the partners (which is one of the main causes of
  aggregation instability) and, therefore, can
  force the stability of an aggregation that turns
  into an ISLG