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HELSEVEL-Gode og effektive helse-, omsorgs- og velferdstjenester

What public services should be digitalised? Citizens’ and public organisations’ perspectives on digital welfare services in Scandinavia

Alternative title: Hvilke offentlige tjenester bør digitaliseres? Innbygger- og offentlig sektors perspektiv på digitale velferdstjenester i Skandinavia

Awarded: NOK 8.9 mill.

More and more public services such as tax return or changing your residential address are offered online. Although doing everything online saves time and travel cost, many citizens still prefer to call or come to the government office in person in order to apply for certain services. It seems that not all public services are equally suited for digital solutions. In our project, we therefore question if it makes sense to digitalise all services and ask: What public services should actually be digitalised? In the past, public services have often been treated as if they were all the same. However, it makes a huge difference for citizens if you register a new car, enrol your children at school, or apply for unemployment benefits. These services might, for example, differ, in how important they are for a citizen. While registering a car is of course important, receiving unemployment benefits is often essential because it might be your single source of income. Also, the more information you need to provide, and the more checks are required by the public organisations, the more complex and difficult to understand a service can be for citizens. In addition, citizens, independent of the services they apply for, have different needs. It can be very demanding for citizens who struggle with the language or who have less bureaucratic skills to use digital self-services. In our project, we analyse how we can differentiate public services from the citizens' perspective, and how these differences help us to evaluate if a public service is suited for digitalisation from the citizens' perspective. We will also analyse how public organisations characterise the same public services. Is a service, for example, very expensive if citizens call, are there legal rules that require a personal meeting with the citizens, or do the employees in public organisations need to exercise discretion that cannot be automated? We will combine the perspectives of citizens and public organisations to identify what public services should be offered online and what services should rather contain a personal contact between citizens and public organisation employees. In our project, we focus on public welfare services. We collect data from Norway, Denmark and Sweden to compare the different experiences and to develop a Scandinavian perspective on what public welfare services should be digitalised.

The benefits of digitalising public services can only be met if citizens adopt digital services while at the same time stop using expensive traditional channels. Still, many keep using traditional channels. Studies on channel choice and IT adoption have created knowledge on what factors influence citizens’ channel behaviour. However, they have not ‘un-black-boxed’ the digital services themselves nor the interplay between citizens’ perceptions of public services and their channel choices as well as the fit with public organisations' multi-channel management strategies. In addition, the technological optimism of digital government may have caused us to overlook the important question whether all public services are suitable for digitalisation. The project objective is therefore to critically analyse – from the perspectives of citizens and public sector organisations – what public services are suitable for digital communication channels. Our project will take place in collaboration with public welfare organisations Norway, Denmark and Sweden. First, we identify the public services that citizens use the most and the least on digital and traditional communication channels and the services that generate the most and the least effort for public organisations. This sample of services will be the basis for the further analyses. In collaboration with citizens and policy makers, we identify characteristics that are important for (a) citizens’ and (b) public organisations’ perceptions of a public service. Subsequently, we use this set of characteristics to analyse how different citizens perceive the selected sample of public services, and how their perception of these services relates to their channel choices as well as to public organisations’ multi-channel management strategies. Based on these insights, we identify what services as perceived by citizens and public organisations are suitable for digital communication channels.

Funding scheme:

HELSEVEL-Gode og effektive helse-, omsorgs- og velferdstjenester