The Untapped Potential: The Inclusive, Personal and Co-created Public Service Experience in Europe

Abstract

For a representative public sector serving society, personal and proactive service delivery remains a largely uptapped potential in Europe. Personalized service delivery has the potential of increasing the perceived quality and personal value of existing public services. If delivered proactively, it can increase the inclusiveness of service delivery as end-users no longer have to identify and request service entitlements. From an efficiency perspective, personalized and proactive services utilize the data and insights government entities already have, can help them reduce administrative burdens and increase productive by automate service production to a greater extend. To date, governments and the public sector have not yet changed the service delivery model facilitating a new personalized and proactive service model. While the enabling concepts of both service personalization, user-engagement and co-creation (both direct and indirect) have long been known and the technology exist, the required regulatory and procedural changes have not materialized. It is therefore up to the end-users to demand more responsive, personalized and proactive service delivery inorder to create more value for their taxes and more personal value. While legal barriers, privacy and security issues are often used as an excuse for the lack of personalized and proactive service delivery to citizens, this article highlights the key challenges in light of the current state of affairs and proposes a number of potential solutions to these—including for user-engagement in the re-design of existing services and the co-creation of new ones. On the basis of European data and experiences in countries as diverse as Denmark, Portugal and the UK, this paper illustrates how the objective of increased online self-service can be underpinned by a changed approach to the reuse of existing government data, increasing efficiency and value creation through user-centric segmentation and the merger of relevant content, personal data and transactions.