Effective Digital Government Platforms: Advanced Computing Cyberinfrastructure for Scientific Innovations

The existing literature on digital government lacks a rigorous empirical investigation into advanced computing cyberinfrastructure for scientific innovation. Distributed computing cyberinfrastructures are an increasingly salient form of digital platform government enabling service production and delivery. Government cyberinfrastructure programs for scientific innovation advance national competitiveness. This study draws from the literature on digital government, cyberinfrastructure, and socio-materiality to develop hypotheses on the effectiveness of cyberinfrastructure as a platform government. The US NSF cyberinfrastructure program, the largest government-funded digital platform for scientific innovation, is the focus of the empirical investigation in this article. The results from the selected scientific fields in this program support the importance of equity effort, capacity, and socio-material coupling for effectiveness. The variations in the relative impacts of these factors imply the need to have a targeted field-specific strategy rather than a generic one across fields of science. The empirical findings suggest the calibration of the type of equity effort, the level at which capacity resides, and the scale and type of socio-material coupling for effectiveness.