Multi-channel provisioning of public services - Department of ...

Abstract
CITIZEN CENTRIC PUBLIC SERVICE PROVISIONING – A
CONCEPTUAL APPROACH FOR NEXT GENERATION
INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURES
Gustav Aagesen and John Krogstie
The provisioning of holistic public services requires the coordination of various government agencies,
a responsibility often taken on by the service receiver. To compensate for a fragmented and complex
range of government service providers, one-stop shops, online portals, and compound services are
established for the most frequent patterns of interaction. National information infrastructures are
being developed to act as a unified front-end towards the public, and as a point of integration between
collaborating agencies. This paper describes a conceptual approach for organizing delivery of citizencentric
and demand driven public services in a multi-agency setting. It is evaluated through the
presentation and discussion of the case of the Norwegian Individual Plan (I-Plan), a law-given
opportunity for receivers of long-term complex health and social services, aiming to provide
coordinated and individually fitted services. We find that our approach support current requirements
of virtual service organizations, and we see a potential use also within other government domains.
Keywords: information infrastructure, socio-technical system, citizen-centric, e- government, design
science
1 INTRODUCTION
E-government has the potential to improve the delivery of demand driven and citizen-centric services.
Demand driven implies that the need for new services is satisfied upon request, and citizen centric
implies that the needs of the service receivers affect the contents and reach of the services provided.
User centricity also involves facilitating for the needs of the individual user in terms of customising
the services offered to that particular user, and taking action to improve the service delivery to all
users (FAD, 2009). To support this, flexibility is required both within public agencies and in how
services are provided, and necessary tools must be made available for public agencies in order to
effectively provide holistic services with a unified front-end.
Infrastructure frameworks supporting the requirements given by the electronic collaboration of
government agencies are referred to as Next Generation of Digital Government Infrastructures (NGI)
(Janssen et al., 2009), as the further evolvement of the current Government Information Infrastructures
(GII) (Hornnes et al., 2010), providing global functionality. Current technical challenges involve,
among other, establishing global standards while supporting local solutions and practices (Ciborra,
2002); establishing gateway devices between new systems and the currently installed base, and within
(and between) policy networks (Bekkers, 2006); and supporting the required organizational flexibility
for providing citizen-centric, demand-driven, adaptive and evolving services (Aagesen and Krogstie,
2010).
A study on the practice of Individual Plan (I-Plan) (Vold Hansen, 2007) distinguish levels of user
involvement in service delivery scenarios as user centric, user influence, user participation, and user
control. In a user centric (citizen-centric) scenario there is no actual user influence, services can be
customized to the individual while the appropriate services are selected based on logic of
appropriateness (March and Olsen, 2004). In the user influence scenario, provided services are the
result of a negotiation between the provider and the receiver based on a catalogue of services and
measures. In the user participation scenario, the services are provided and selected based on rules and
standards, there is a low degree of customization and the service receiver and provider collaborate in
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