CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The rising income inequality make continuing provision of essential public services to all, i.e. independent of income levels, more important than ever. In 2013, the richest 10% earned 9.6 times the income of the poorest 10%, compared to 7.2 times in the 1980s, changing profile of poverty from pensioners in the 1980s to the youth and families with children today (OECD, 2015a). Further, there is growing evidence of the "powerful and corrosive effects of inequality on economic growth, poverty reduction, social and economic stability and socially-sustainable development" (UNDESA, 2013). Such provision is also considered a moral obligation and cases of "water, food, energy, income security, health services and other essential public goods and services" a human right (UNSTT, 2012). Recently, in addition to ensuring the universality of public service provision, the quality and sustainability of such services are becoming a concern as well (UN, 2015). The provision of public service is increasingly challenged by diverse social needs, ageing societies, digitally-savvy populations, economic pressure, and unequal conditions for public service delivery existing within and across countries. For example, the failure of public service delivery in many developing countries is not just due to the scarcity of resources but also to the problems of incentives, accountability and governance that vary from one context to another (Global Development Network, 2009). Overcoming such challenges requires innovation in public service delivery: creating and maintaining an eco-system of government agencies, businesses, non-profit organizations, universities, citizens and other actors that participate in the provision, consumption and intermediation in public service delivery; bringing services closer to the consumers through, e.g. the provision of multi-service centers and the use of diverse delivery channels; learning about public service provision locally and from around the word and adapting the knowledge to the local contexts; and digitizing public services, tailoring them to individual needs, and delivering them through various digital channels using new social and organizational innovation models (OECD, 2015b). The focus of this chapter is on public service innovation with digital technology. Today, digital public services are routinely produced by the national, state or local governments and delivered to citizens, businesses and other entities under their jurisdiction, and there are as many as 25 models to compare the maturity of such services and track their progress over time (Fath-allah, Cheikhi, Al-qutaish, & Idri, 2014). Among them is the four-stage model that underpins the United Nations Global e-Government Survey, a global measurement instrument that tracks the progress in e-Government, including the provision of digital public services, by all UN member states. Despite the emergence of social media, cloud computing, mobile apps and other disruptive technologies and their gradual adoption by public service delivery systems around the world, the four stages of the model - Emerging, Enhanced, Transactional and Connected - remained unchanged from the first edition in 2001 (UNDESA and ASPA, 2001) until the latest edition in 2014 (UNDESA, 2014). The chapter starts from the premise that despite unequal progress in digital public service delivery by different UN member states, the four-stage UN maturity model measures what is now a standard level for digital public services. However, the capabilities built at this level - for government agencies to disseminate one-way information to citizens (Emerging), to engage citizens in two-way discrete interactions (Enhanced), to engage citizens in linked interactions (Transactional) and to coordinate internally between themselves (Connected) are a foundation for innovation in digital public service delivery. The Digital Public Service Innovation Framework, introduced by the chapter, builds upon this foundation to introduce seven innovations in digital public service delivery: For citizens to know about service decisions made by government (Transparent); For citizens to participate in such government decisions (Participatory); For government to initiate service delivery to citizens (Anticipatory); For citizens to choose how they wish to receive services (Personalized); For government and citizens to engage in collaborative service delivery (Co-Created); For service providers to be aware of the service delivery context (Context-Aware); and For providers to utilize context awareness for better service delivery (Context-Smart). Unlike the four linear stages for delivering digital public services at the "standard" level - the achievement of the earlier stages conditioning the achievement of the later ones, digital public services delivered at the "innovative" level are open-ended - new innovations are expected to be continuously added over time, and generally non-linear - one innovation may or may not depend on another innovation. The chapter also presents some evidence of electronic public services delivered at the standard and innovative levels, the former relying on the submissions to the United Nations Public Service Award, and introduces some implications including policy recommendations for government and benchmark organizations that deliver and measure innovative digital public services. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 provide a background to public sector innovation in general. Section 3 outlines the concept of Digital Government and its evolution over time as conceptual foundation for digital innovation in the public sector. Section 4 presents the original Digital Public Service Innovation Framework and Section 5 provides a set of case studies to provide some evidence for the validity of the framework. The implications are outlined in Section 6 and the conclusions provided in Section 7.

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