Private technology use by citizens far accelerates digital service offerings of public administrations. Citizens are used to fast paces of online interactions using social media platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, and highly efficient private sector online services, such as Amazon’s online platform or free apps, such as Google maps. However, public administrations’ online services – to the extent that they exist – are designed following government’s internal logic and rarely have the needs of their clients in mind. Most of the tasks are outsourced to external contractors. The results are that online services are archaic in nature (a mere translation from analog to digital), use rates are low, and citizens still trust face-to-face analog interactions with civil servants more than digital services (Bright and Margetts 2016).
As an alternative to the creation of digital services with the help of external contractors, several countries have started to implement so-called digital service teams to overcome the institutional, procedural, and managerial problems that are persistent in many large bureaucracies (Mergel 2016). These teams are using design thinking approaches and qualitative user research in order to understand what their internal or external clients’ needs are in order to co-produce digital services that transform the user experience, are simple, and effective. However, little is known so far how these teams operate, how they recruit IT competencies, how they pair up with product owners on the agency level, how they co-produce and co-design digital services, how they help to change the bureaucracy to adopt a digital mindset, and what the outcomes are that are leading government toward digital transformation.
Qualitative elite interviews with a shared interview guide (Aberbach & Rockman 2002) with government officials in six countries were used to extract strategic intent, policy changes, managerial as well as cultural implementation challenges, co-production approaches, agile methodologies, and outcomes of digital transformation efforts. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and hand-coded line-by-line following an initial set of core concepts in a grounded-theory like approach and then within concept coding was conducted to trace patterns. Additional codes emerged that were not covered in the literature (Corbin & Strauss 1990).
Aberbach, J. D., Rockman, B. A. (2002): Conducting and coding elite interviews." Political Science & Politics, 35(4), pp. 673-676.
Bright, J., Margetts, M. 2016): Big Data and Public Policy: Can It Succeed Where E‐Participation Has Failed?, in: Policy & Internet, 8 (3), pp. 218-224
Corbin, J. M., Strauss, A. (1990): Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria, in: Qualitative sociology, 13(1), pp. 3-21.
Mergel, I. (2016): Agile Innovation Management: A Research Agenda, in press in: Government Information Quarterly, 33(3), pp. 516-523.
Digitalization and its implications in the creation of value within a co-production framew
