Interkommunal IT-samverkan. Faktorer och effekter av ett framgångsrikt samarbete
Today more and more municipalities interact across a wide range of sectors. The reasons tostart interacting are varying and for those who succeed with this form of work, there arebenefits in terms of efficiency and knowledge exchanges. But are the reasons that interactalways obvious? Sweden currently has 290 municipalities of varying size and allmunicipalities have basically the same mission, to deliver services to its residents.Information technology allows municipalities to digitize much of the workload, but theintroduction of the technique is not without problems. For small municipalities, there are greatdemands to deliver reliability and support for their internal and external services. For largermunicipalities the interactions is about taking responsibility for their smaller neighbors andhighlight their regional identity. What are the real profits of the actors, and are there anycosts? We did this study to find out what values that were important to the success of ICT(Information Communication Technology) collaboration between municipalities are, and whatany other costs are there? This resulted in our following question:"What factors are important to the success of IT cooperation between municipalities?"We conducted a qualitative, comparative study where we examined two municipal clustersthat work together on the IT-field. A central point in the study was that we examined therelationship between small and larger municipality that collaborated in the IT field, in twoisolated clusters. The result of the study shows us that there are resource and knowledgebenefits to be gained through collaboration on ICT. Technique, confidence and trust, identityand organizational culture are important values to consider for interoperability. Technicalaspects have been of less important in this study, while we focus on the parts that makecollaboration possible has been of greater importance. Confidence and trust for each other is avital part of the collaboration, and we can see that the question about identity is important forthe organizations. Organizational culture is important to take into account when a decisionwill be taken when the size of the organization are relevant to organizational culture.Keywords: Collaboration, IT, organization, municipality, identity, organizational culture, trust and confidence