C. William R. Webster

The advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), popularized through ChatGPT and other similar platforms, has in recent years become a focal point for governments’ ambitions to enhance the quality of public services and policy. Whilst governments have been using technological systems and platform for decades, such as big data analytics and automated decision-making, recent developments in generative AI, and its perceived capability of simulating human thought, is accompanied by both opportunity and risk. AI is not only significant for the future delivery public services, it also constitutes a challenge to how we define and prioritize public value. This article uses a ‘value-chain approach’ to explore and summarize the immediate experiences of the use of AI in public service contexts, and highlights some of the hurdles and challenges associated with the adoption of this technology. While value-chain approaches are traditionally associated with identifying sequences in a (commercial) production (manufacturing) process - as an analytical tool to realize desired outcomes - recent literature has successfully applied this approach to public service contexts, including in relation to digital service delivery and public policymaking. This article provides an opportunity to reflect on some of the promises and pitfalls associated with this technology, as well as presenting some elements for better diagnostic tools used for forecasting and evaluating digital platforms and systems utilizing generative AI in a more systematic manner. This includes value issues associated with data quality, intellectual property, surveillance, privacy, and transparency. The article also highlights issues around trade-offs between different values, and in doing so, argues that assessing the interlinked relationship between values and digital services are key to understanding the future nature of public service delivery.

Purpose: This article investigates some ongoing issues faced by higher education institutions (HEIs) having to rapidly move their teaching online during the early stages of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.Design/methodology/approach: The article incorporates a review of academic and policy literature concerning digitalisation and online learning in universities and qualitative interviews with staff involved in online teaching and learning at a university in Scotland.Findings: For most HEIs and organisations across the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the speed at which digitalisation and digital ways of working have been embedded in organisational life and service delivery including new ways of learning and working. This has led to a recognition of the need for practically focused, effective inclusive digital interventions. A range of initiatives that have been developed or accelerated in response to the pandemic are discussed. These should be explicitly designed and implemented to also reach individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, including those with low-skill levels or qualifications and older age groups. Effort is also needed by policymakers and HEIs to better understand the challenges and unintended consequences that digital learning and working poses.Research limitations/implications: More research is needed into the methods and implications of increased online teaching. The range of interviewees is limited to one main organisation. A wider range of staff, students, HEIs and other types of organisation would add additional insights.Practical implications: Insights from interviews highlight a number of institutional responses to digitalisation, which were accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These identify learning and reflection points for HEIs moving to enhanced online teaching provision.Originality/value: This article provides an analysis of the processes, issues and impacts associated with the rapid shift to digitisation in HEIs at a point in time shortly following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It raises issues around inclusivity of online learning, pedagogy, unintended consequences of digitalisation and privacy, when moving to online teaching that are relevant both during the pandemic and in the longer term.

Big Data Analytics promises to help companies and public sector service providers anticipate consumer and service user behaviours so that they can be targeted in greater depth. The attempts made by these organisations to connect analytically with users raise questions about whether surveillance, and its associated ethical and rights-based concerns, are intensified. The articles in this special themed issue explore this question from both organisational and user perspectives. They highlight the hype which firms use to drive consumer, employee and service user engagement with analytics within both private and public spaces. Further, they explore extent to which, through Big Data, there is an attempt to expand surveillance into the emotional registers of domestic, embodied experience. Collectively, the papers reveal a fascinating nexus between the much-vaunted potential of analytics, the data practices themselves and the newly configured intimate spheres which have been drawn into the commercial value chain. Together, they highlight the need for conceptual and regulatory innovation so that analytics in practice may be better understood and critiqued. Whilst there is now a rich variety of scholarship on Big Data Analytics, critical perspectives on the organising practices of Big Data Analytics and its surveillance implications are thin on the ground. Combined, the articles published in this special theme begin to address this shortcoming.

The emergence of Big Data has added a new aspect to conceptualizing the use of digital technologies in the delivery of public services and for realizing digital governance. This article explores, via the ‘value-chain’ approach, the evolution of digital governance research, and aligns it with current developments associated with data analytics, often referred to as ‘Big Data’. In many ways, the current discourse around Big Data reiterates and repeats established commentaries within the eGovernment research community. This body of knowledge provides an opportunity to reflect on the ‘promise’ of Big Data, both in relation to service delivery and policy formulation. This includes, issues associated with the quality and reliability of data, from mixing public and private sector data, issues associated with the ownership of raw and manipulated data, and ethical issues concerning surveillance and privacy. These insights and the issues raised help assess the value of Big Data in government and smart city environments.

Citizens increasingly contribute directly to the evolution of sustainable cities, in particular where new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) promise to transform urban governance into ‘Smart city governance’ and where ICTs are integrat