Designing a Digital Environment to Support the Co-production of Public Services: Balancing Multiple Requirements and Governance Concepts

Abstract

This paper investigates the challenges of designing a computer supported collaborative environment aimed at facilitating co-production processes, i.e., those collaborative processes between Public Administrations, private stakeholders and citizens that aim at the design of public services, their implementation, and their shared delivery to the community. We argue that, for such a digital platform, different types of socio-technical requirements should be considered, i.e., those related to governance models and associated collaboration dynamics; requirements that may emerge from the specific type of public service to design; as well as user and technical requirements common to all e-government platforms. This research informed the development and testing of a digital collaboration platform that offers guidance on how to organize a co-production initiative and a network of stakeholders, functionalities to support collaborative work, and enablers (in the form of reusable knowledge and digital resources) to perform the sequence of steps to produce a public service. The lessons learned from the iterative platform development process and a preliminary evaluation study conducted with three Public Administrations in different European countries pointed at specific functionalities that are perceived as most crucial and at different appropriation practices that depend on the organizational structure of the involved Public Administrations and related multi-stakeholder networks. The innovation that is brought about with respect to general-purpose platforms for computer supported cooperative work is represented by the operationalization of co-production processes, with step-by-step guidance and potential reuse (with adaptation) of ready to use resources and processes. Based on the results of our research, general guidelines are also proposed for the design of future digital platforms supporting co-production.