Creating public value through service design: Facilitation of human-centred service transformation in the city-state of Hamburg

Abstract

Citizens expect their governments to be as digital and easy to use as other service providers in their lives. However, many public service organisations still have a low level of digitalisation and try to catch up with people’s expectations set by private companies. Digital public services are particularly immature in Germany. While Germany is an economic and political world leader, the country is a laggard in the digital transformation of its services to the public. This thesis studies a digital transformation project in the city-state of Hamburg, set up to create citizen-friendly services and modernise administration.

Public organisations try to create public value as they spend taxpayers’ money. The thesis reviews different concepts of value creation, co-creation and co-production in public management and service management discourse. It evaluates the role of human-centred design approaches and service design and their contribution to value creation. Building on existing theories, it describes the input and effect of service design on public value creation.

Through a range of qualitative methods, the thesis studies how ‘citizen-friendliness’ is achieved in Hamburg’s digitalisation projects and how citizens and their needs are considered in the design and development processes of new digital public services. The empirical research is conducted on two different levels – organisation and service. The research on the organisational level examines prevailing principles, mindsets, practices, and methods through contextual inquiries and interviews with administrative staff and consultants. Further research on a specific public service undergoing digitalisation is used as an instrumental case to gain additional insight into the ways of working and to investigate the benefit of a service design approach to an organisation and its role in public value creation. Several established frameworks are utilised to describe the set-up and maturity of design in the city-state.

The research shows how human-centred design is partially used in Hamburg’s service transformation projects. At the same time, it uncovers how reliant the administration is on external capacity and which barriers hinder the creation of genuine citizen-friendly service offerings. Multiple intervention designs are created, and activities carried out to first further investigate and then facilitate a human-centred design approach to public service transformation. New approaches to organisational design and service design are proposed to improve how public services are developed and the public organisations designing them are set up.

The thesis has both theoretical and practical value. It proposes a new model to describe the contribution service design can make to the creation of public value. For the city-state of Hamburg, it identifies how a specific service offering can be improved and what organisational evolution can enable the development of more citizen-oriented offerings in the future.