Designing for Empowerment in Citizen Advisory Services

Abstract

Today’s government front offices mainly provide transaction-oriented processing services. However, in recent years citizens’ expectations have raised and are demanding more citizen-centric and individually tailored services including advisory services. Yet, front office employees, with having barely any additional training, have difficulty meeting these expanded expectations. In consequence, they frequently lack subject matter expertise as well as the necessary skills to meet the service demands. In addition, the organizational work environment, lacking necessary supportive resources, contributes strongly to the identified qualification deficiencies. This dissertation addresses the shortcomings of previous approaches from research and practice for qualifying advisory service personnel. In response, a novel approach for IS-based on-the-job qualification is introduced in order to answer the main research question, how government front office employees can be empowered to provide superior advisory service with the help of IS artifacts. In four consecutive research essays, the dissertation provides comprehensive answer to the main research question. It introduces the concept of an advisory information artifact that, when deployed in front office employees’ work environment, can effectively promote experiential learning on-the-job and ultimately empower service personnel comprehensively to act as skilled advisors. While essay I reviews previous design-oriented IS research and stresses current research approaches’ shortcomings, essay II and III introduces two essential components of an advisory information artifact, making it an effective on-the-job qualification measure: counseling affordances and service encounter thinkLets. Our research shows that providing counseling affordances can effectively promote experiential learning on-the-job and ultimately support front office employees in providing superior advisory service. Furthermore service encounter thinkLets revealed most effective to complement counseling affordances’ on-the-job support and together provide service personnel with a scaffold that enables less-trained front office employees almost immediately to act as skilled advisors and to make the advisory service an individualized co-creation experiences. Finally, our research in essay IV revealed that deploying an advisory information artifact in citizen advisory service encounters allowed, first, for comprehensively empower public employees to act as skilled advisor. Second, our research showed how IS artifacts could be designed and deployed to effectively promote transformational changes in governmental service provision, bringing front offices from providing transaction-oriented processing services to offer true citizen-centric advisory services.