The complexities of government as a platform, co-production and public value creation: the need of public value orchestration

This thesis aims to contribute to the literature that discusses the impact of e-government systems on the value that is created by public services. Specifically, this work sheds light on how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) mediated co-production of public service offers innovative ways to produce public services and on the value they create. An in-depth analysis of how the Government as a Platform (GaaP) can enable co-production of services across the entire public administration is presented to support the proposed argument. The thesis is based on three published papers that discuss the limitations and the complexities of co-production enabled by ICTs and the specific case of the GaaP. The first paper explains that, although ICTs-mediated co-production helps to improve efficiency, it also reduces control over the public administration’s action and hence it is not suitable to produce public services that need a high level of control to deliver the expected outcome. The second paper adopts the public value perspective and explains that, in order to create value for the public, it is necessary to overcome the siloed view of value creation and thereby to serve not only the need for greater efficiency but also all citizens’ needs and expectations. Hence, when public agencies adopt ICTs-mediated co-production, they should also ensure a suitable level of control over the impact of public interests served by other public agencies. The third paper argues that the GaaP is constituted by multiple platforms and ecosystems which favour co-production of more services for citizens but also decrease control over the impact on other policy domains. The impossibility to control implications for other policy domains threatens public value creation. From the study of the Italian public administration that has recently adopted an e-government architecture based on the GaaP principles, it has emerged that to mitigate negative externalities of co-production, public agencies should adopt a governance mechanism called public value orchestration, which consists of continuous configuration of production in order to meet multiple needs and expectations