Citizen-oriented digital transformation in the public sector

Abstract

Digital transformation has emerged as a term that describes the departure from digitization efforts to a full stack revision of the policies, processes and services in order to create simpler user experiences for citizens and frontline workers. While previous waves of digitization focused on the transition from analog to (parallel) digital services to increase efficiency and effectiveness of government services, digital transformation aims to redesign and reengineer government services from the ground up to fulfill changing user needs. At the center of these efforts are users -both internal and external users -of digital services who are included in the digital transformation efforts. This panel therefore brings together four aspects of digital transformation: a) dynamic capabilities as a precondition for digital transformation; b) co-design of digital services with users; c) digital co-production and co-creation to increase legitimacy of digital services; and d) co-creation with open data to improve digital service delivery While there is a venerable research tradition discussing dynamic capabilities in the private sector there is nothing comparable in the case of the public sector (see, e.g., [1][2][3]). At the same time, there are ample of examples of public organisations and sometimes whole countries behaving dynamically, that is creating change that significantly alters what government does (see, e.g., [4][5][6]). Digital transformation offers a good case to study how such capabilities are formed and maintained in the public sector as many countries are attempting to use digital technologies to rethink public organisations and services [7]. This article argues that there are two ideal-typical models of digital transformation -Estonia's country-as-a-service and UK's country-as-a-platform approaches, respectively -that can be studied as different yet parallel cases of not just digital transformation but also of how dynamic capabilities are created and maintained in the public sector. The article is based on interviews with key actors in Estonia and the UK, and traces history and evolution of both concepts (country-as-a-service and country-as-a-platform) and their context specific implementation processes, and successes and failures. This comparison allows to tease out some of the key aspects of dynamic capabilities in the public sector. KEYWORDSKonstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) Erschienen in:

Digital Transformation for Crisis Volunteerism : A study in the aftermath of the Swedish Forest Fires Crisis in 2018

“…In contrast to this, I choose to use the concept of DT that, to a greater degree, has the potential to observe the power associated with holistic understandings of factors beyond the immediate context of the IT artefact. This enables a focus on capabilities such as connectedness, distribution, scaling and intelligence that can help digitally transform CV (Lindgren, 2013;Sørensen, 2016;Mergel et al, 2018).…”

“…Wide-scale digitalisation in society is blurring the lines between concepts such as the individual, the organisation and society, not least through the greater depth and level of entanglements that these developments are creating between the social and the material (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al, 2014). In the past decades, researchers have also related to the impact of digitalisation and DT, not only in organisations but in society as a whole and at all levels in society (Isaksson and Wennberg, 2016;Klievink et al, 2016;Sørensen, 2016;Lindgren and van Veenstra, 2018;Mergel et al, 2018).…”

“…Vial (2019) considers what factors may trigger DT and calls these triggers disruptions. Changes in consumer or citizen behaviour, resource use and expectations, availability of technology and environmental factors can all be understood in terms of disruptive forces that influence needs and actions for DT (Zahra et al, 2006;Mergel et al, 2018;Klievink et al, 2016;Lindgren and van Veenstra, 2018).…”

“…In the context of CV practice, triggers for digital transformation can be related to the relevance of citizen's expectations that sufficient efficiency and capacity be achieved in crisis response (Saaroni, 2015;Albahari and Schultz, 2017;Mergel et al, 2018). Triggers for DT in CV may also emanate from other levels in society, such as local, national or international administrative functions or business's (Hagen et al, 2018), and their needs to meet the scale of demand on public services and increase responsiveness and openness (also in crisis contexts) (Klievink et al, 2016;Lindgren and van Veenstra, 2018).…”

Transforming Government by Leveraging Disruptive Technologies

“…For blockchain, including a basic training for public sector specialists on the technology use in government is required. When using IoT in government applications, training needs refer to introductory topics of digital government such as enterprise architecture, public administration and public sector innovation, as well as the emergent digital transformation domain, which refers to completely redesigning government services to fulfil changing user needs (Mergel, Kattel, Lember, & McBride, 2018).…”