This course will examine critical issues, current debates and key concepts related to digital transformation of society, with a focus the development, deployment and regulation of disruptive technologies in the public sector. Topics will explore contemporary issues and challenges faced by public managers and civil servants in digital environments, particularly related to the areas of leadership culture, employee behaviour, internal efficiency, job displacement, and the future of work. The course will be divided into project teams working on different topics around a real-world case study. Each team will meet regularly with the supervisor to design and execute the project, to discuss progress, results and final output.

(i) Digital Leadership (contact: shefali.virkar@wu.ac.at): Digital technologies are rapidly transforming the way in which public sector organisations conduct their day-to-day business: processes are being digitized, tasks are being automated, and operating costs are being reduced. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this process, impacting public employees’ everyday working lives and ushering in a new era of remote work or work-from-home. This change in working style has resulted in several challenges for public managers, and has brought into focus how senior public managers are negotiating the shift to more remote and agile ways of working within traditionally conservative and hierarchical organizational cultures.

(ii) Public Sector Artificial Intelligence (contact: shefali.virkar@wu.ac.at): The nascent use of Artificial Intelliegence technologies in the public sector has brought into focus huge potential opportunities, and equally daunting potential challenges and risks. Human-to-human public encounters are gradually being replaced by machine-to-human interactions. Government-citizen relationships are being transformed, and external actors are being included in decision-making processes. Projects in this area will investigate innovative technology-driven approaches to designing, delivering and monitoring the performance of public services, and the approaches taken to ensure public-sector algorithm accountability.

(iii) Improving Government Transparency through Using Digital Technology (contact: jurgen.willems@wu.ac.at). A Practice project with the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance. The Federal Ministry of Finance has implemented a transparency portal  (https://transparenzportal.gv.at/tdb/tp/startpage). The project has two overall objectives: (1) To provide an overview of international examples of transparency portals; (2) To assess how the Austrian transparency portal can provide better information and be made more user-friendly.

(iv) The Equivalence Assumption in Robotization and Automation (contact: jurgen.willems@wu.ac.at): Do we really assume that automated decision-making should resemble human decision-making? The research goal of this project is to document and test whether the equivalence assumption holds when the unique capabilities of automated versus human decision-making are more explicitly explained. The research question of this project is thus: Does more explanation about the unique differences of automated decision-making, compared to human decision-making, lead to more distinct evaluation standards (e.g. on decision performance, ethicalness) for both types of decision-making.

Upon completion of the course, students are able to

- Critically evaluate a research question in the broad topic of Digital Economy from the view of (micro)economics and information systems
- Plan a research project to answer such a research question
- Perform a structured literature search on a given topic
- Design an experiment or empirical study for a specific research question
- Identify appropriate analysis methods
- Conduct appropriate statistical analyses for said data
- Interpret the results of said analyses and evaluate them critically
- Write a research paper according to current academic standards from the relevant disciplines describing the research project and its outcomes

Attendance is mandatory.

Students conduct an interdisciplinary research project spanning all stages: from defining a research question, doing a literature research, to stating hypotheses, implementing an experimental or empirical study, analysing the experimental or empirical data and interpreting and critically reflecting the findings. Besides acquiring methodological knowledge, students gain practical experience in planning and carrying out a research project and also take the perspective of a project manager. Students work in groups and are coached regularly by the two lecturers.

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