TU Dresden presents Research on Open Government Data at ECIS 2026

How can municipalities harness the long-term potential of open government data and sustainably promote data-driven innovation? The team from the ISIH and WIBE Business Informatics Chairs addressed these questions at the 34th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2026), which took place in Milan from June 15 to 17, 2026, under the theme “Reimagining Digital Technology for Business, Management, and Society.”

As part of the open data initiative of the Smart City Dresden (MPSC) pilot project, the team is researching how open government data can create greater added value for public administration, the economy, and urban society. At ECIS, the team presented two recent research papers on this topic.
Eric Börner presented the paper “Explaining the Sustainability of OGD-Based Applications: A Generativity Perspective.” The paper examines the conditions that must be met for applications based on Open Government Data (OGD) to be successfully operated and further developed over the long term. The results highlight the technical and social factors that contribute to ensuring digital applications based on open government data remain usable over the long term, thereby creating sustainable added value for municipalities and their citizens.

In the second paper, “A Typology of City-level Chief Data Officers in the Public Sector,” Isabell Lippert presented a typology of Chief Data Officers (CDOs) in municipal administrations. The research identifies different role profiles for the strategic anchoring of data responsibility and provides municipalities with guidance on the organizational structuring of data-related tasks. In doing so, it establishes important prerequisites for the successful use of open government data and the development of data-driven municipal innovations.

With these two research papers, the team contributed current findings from the Dresden Smart City pilot project to the international academic discourse. The results support municipalities in making open government data usable in the long term and in creating organizational frameworks for a sustainable digital transformation.