Our guest professor Ines Mergel’s new article, ”Co-Production Phases in the Development and Implementation of Digital Public Services,” co-authored with Noella Edelmann and Nathalie Haug, is now published online in the journal Perspectives on Public Management and Governance!

For this article, the authors interviewed digital transformation experts who explained how they proceed to implement digital public services. Using the theoretical framework of co-production, the paper identifies the co-production phases that public mangers go through when they start to design digital public services, implement and assess them. In each phase, they highlight who is involved in which phase. Based on the empirical evidence, the existing co-production framework can be advanced by showing that public managers use an additional phase – co-assessment – to continuously use the feedback they receive during the use of a digital public service to improve the service.

The authors apply the conceptual framework of co-production to digital public services – it was previously predominantly applied to analog social service. During the digital transformation of the public sector the advanced framework can serve as a guideline for future research.