Challenges in the innovation system of cloud services by governments: A literature review

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Abstract
Governments aim to embrace private-sector cloud services to benefit from scalability, economies of scale, and ease of use. At the same time, governments are reluctant to innovate, as a focus on sovereignty can make cloud services undesirable, and innovative use of cloud services is needed. Although research on challenges to cloud services for governments exists, public values and current developments towards sovereignty requires deeper analysis of the underlying forces driving. This paper investigates challenges addressed in previous research and analyses them using the Technological Innovation Systems (TIS) framework, as this provides in-depth analysis in internal and external functions that incorporate interactions and conflicts. TIS draws attention to the need to innovate the government cloud provider relationship. We found that incorporating public values such as transparency, sustainability, and privacy is pertinent to public services, but there are no approaches for incorporating them when moving to cloud services. In the current geopolitical environment, sovereignty and digital autonomy are increasingly considered in terms of varying degrees of independence. Furthermore, functions as the Guidance of the Search show conflicting forces that enhance complexity but provide a source of identified challenges in the literature. Sovereign clouds are under development as solutions for overcoming these problems. Cloud innovation systems should take public values and other specific public-sector aspects into account to enable the use of cloud services. Governmental adoption of cloud services and their challenges have their source in conflicting forces.

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