Using digital platforms to promote a service-oriented logic in public sector organizations: A case study

Abstract

A growing number of scholars and practitioners have recognized that value is defined and co-created by citizens, and that citizens must be involved in the service delivery process to improve the quality and efficacy of public services. Central to such a service-dominant logic, is that public sector organizations cannot manufacture value for citizens, they can only make a value proposition which the citizen might choose to use. Hence, value must be co-created. However, this entails accommodating co-creation practices with millions of users. Currently, co-creation is often limited to involving a carefully selected set of users in crafting requirements early, and/or measuring user satisfaction upon service launch. There is an empirical blind spot in the current literature in terms of how to shape service delivery in a way that is capable of effectively capturing emergent and process-oriented value co-creation across large user groups. Through a longitudinal case study of the IT department at the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), providing services to millions of users, this paper explores how digital platforms are used to transform value co-creation into a process of continuous improvement. We find that adopting a process-oriented approach for co-creation within public sector organizations requires structural changes, including sourcing strategy and governance structure. We also show the importance of digital platforms in increasing the efficiency of co-creation. We discuss how these structural changes were done, and the role of digital platforms in achieving these changes.