Understanding the evolution of the service logic in digital government era: Evidence from the digital transformation of the Scottish government

Defined as the delivery of government information and services through ICT application (Moon, 2002), digital government or e-government is one of the most important innovative practices happened in the public management area over last two decades. It fundamentally reshuffled the structure and operational process of government, and expected to enhance social communication, reduce the administrative cost and produce greater efficiency (Tolbert et al., 2008).
The rapid development of e-government reform worldwide has garnered fruitful studies. They discussed its technical renovations, driving factors, and general barriers in various contexts. The extant literature, however, has been aligned primarily with the narratives of either the conventional Public Administration paradigm-highlights the fulfilment of a series of democratic values such as transparency and responsiveness- or the New Public Management paradigm-underlines the administrative efficiency and customer satisfaction from the perspective of managerialism. They may not fully capture the essence of digitalisation reform as a revolution in both the public service content and delivery approach. That is, from the face-to-face service delivery to the indirect interaction between users, internet-based media and backstage supporters (Osborne et al. 2016). Also, they have not yet adequately clarified how different recognitions of public service, as the underlying logics and values, support the e-government development.
This article anticipates contributing to this knowledge deficit. It examines the digital transformation of the Scottish government over the last 20 years. To begin, we systematically introduce the theory of service-dominant logic as our research perspective (Grönroos, 2011, Vargo and Lusch, 2014). This theory re-conceptualises the nature of service delivery from an exchange procedure of ‘goods’ to a continuous customer-provider interaction and value co-creation ‘process’. It, to a large extent, has led the service management and marketing study in the past decade and generated growing influences on public management research (Osborne et al., 2013). According to the core propositions of the service-dominant logic, we build up an analytical framework which specifies the service logic of government into five dimensions: the identification of targeted customers, the recognition of value propositions, the design of service interaction, the conception of value generation, and the formulation of public value creation.
The empirical section of this article is conducted as a longitudinal qualitative study. The research data is collected from policy archives and semi-structured interviews. Qualitative coding is applied as the data analysing method, with the support of temporal bracketing strategy to decompose the chronological data into successive time periods. As an emerging finding, we defined four stages of the Scottish government’s digitalisation reform including the information openness stage, the service on-line stage, the open innovation stage, and the user-centred integrative service stage. Within each stage, the service logic in five dimensions according to our research framework is manifested further.
This article aims to reflect on the process theory through an in-depth single case study on e-government reform. It has two main contributions: first, it attempts to transform the service-dominant logic theory into an applicable analytical framework of service innovation; second, it reveals how the changes in the recognition of public service underpin the development of e-government. Based on this article, we call for future studies continually exploring the dynamics between service improvement and digital transformation.



References
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