The Long and Winding Road of Digital Public Services—One Next Step: Proactivity

Scholta Hendrik, Lindgren Ida

Zusammenfassung

Public sector organizations have been digitalizing their services for many years. As one potential next step of digitalization, public organizations have started to transform their services from reactive to proactive delivery; i.e., delivering service to a recipient without the recipient having to request for the service. Although the academic literature provides conceptualizations of digitally enabled public service delivery, the effects of proactivity on these conceptualizations are unclear. This paper presents ongoing research aiming to address how proactivity changes digitally enabled public service delivery. Based on a qualitative literature review and conceptual discussion, we combine theoretical works in both areas—digital public service delivery and proactivity—to obtain a preliminary conceptual framework for understanding digitally enabled proactive public service delivery. The results include that proactive delivery enables equal treatment of recipients, requires no interaction with the recipient, but is applicable only to compulsory services with clear-cut assessment criteria for service eligibility.

Schlüsselwörter
Digital Government, Digital Service, Proactive Government, Public Administration, Public Service, No-Stop Government, No-Stop Shop