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Data are currently perceived as a strategic asset and a fundamental fuel for organizations both in the private and public sectors (Marr, 2017; Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2013). In the bureaucratic world of today, data have helped to digitize governments and have empowered governments to concentrate on the most pressing problems and needs in order to improve policy decision-making, to improve transparency, and to embrace citizen-centric services (Bertot, Butler, & Travis, 2014; Höchtl, Parycek, & Schöllhammer, 2016; Parycek, Höchtl, & Ginner, 2014; Zuiderwijk & Janssen, 2014).
Governments play essential roles as data providers and vice versa for OGD. Previous research has investigated two main areas of OGD. The first body of work honed in on the supply side, focusing on the search for quality OGD (i.e. Solar, Concha, & Meijueiro, 2012; Ubaldi, 2013) and data security as the factors influencing OGD development (i.e. Blauer (2017), Spavin & Fegan (2017)). However, data experts are still proposing other factors, such as ICT infrastructure challenges (Lane, 2018; Marr, 2017) and trust in the government (Chawda, 2017; Gravestock, 2017). These factors should be further tested. The second body of work focused on the demand side, mainly investigating the impacts of OGD, such as the value and usefulness of OGD (Gravestock, 2017; Marr, 2017; Parkes, Karger-Lerchl, Wells, Hardinges, & Vasileva, 2018; Young & Verhulst, 2016). However, despite the growing amount of OGD released by governments, the adoption of OGD in the government sector has not been extensively studied. According to Young and Verhulst (2016), human capacity and technical capacity among government officials are the first barriers to maximizing OGD impact. The lack of readiness at both the supply and demand side of OGD prevents it from being as impactful as it could be. Importantly, the global OGD movement has slowed down (World Wide Web Foundation, 2017) because of the lack of data usage to create real benefits or transform the data to maximize its impacts (Safarov, Meijer, & Grimmelikhuijsen, 2017; Zuiderwijk & Janssen, 2013). A recent study found that OGD objectives did not significantly impact their benefits (Zuiderwijk, Shinde, & Janssen, 2019). In other words, there is a mismatch between OGD objectives and how they are achieved, which, in turn, leads to a mismatch between OGD supply and demand, which may limit and inhibit the impacts of data on socio-economic development.
Collecting, publishing, and investing in OGD are not the ultimate objectives; rather, how to unleash the power of OGD so that it impacts socioeconomic development is more important (Höchtl, Parycek, & Schöllhammer, 2016; Marr, 2017; Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2013; Young & Verhulst, 2016). Organizations still have mainly focused on technology and faced overwhelming and unusable data (Marr, 2017; Wang & Shepherd, 2020). Based on previous research, little is known about how to unleash the power of data, and very little is known about how data supply is linked to data demand. This knowledge gap is the result of a lack of systematic study (Young & Verhulst, 2016). As long as the question remains unanswered, governments will continue to face risks and inconsistencies between data supply and data demand. This study, therefore, attempts to explore the essential prerequisites that would drive OGD development and to determine the necessary GC in order to transform OGD and to maximize its impacts. This article is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the related work and develops the research hypotheses. Section 3 explains the research methodology. Section 4 describes the research findings, followed by the discussion in section 5. Finally, section 6 presents the conclusion.