Professor Ines Mergel has published a new report on Enhancing Agile Governance

In this report, the author discusses how digital service teams bring “service designers” into government to transform service delivery. These designers use human-centered design approaches to help public sector organizations refine strategies, rethink the nature of services, and reflect the way that citizens want to use a public service.

The report focuses on how human centricity can help to transform digital service delivery in a way that improves government agility, with results that address principles, mindsets, techniques, and practices. The report makes recommendations to help governments to work together and with external partners to build competencies for redesigning public services in a way that benefits the users of those services. Key priority actions include:

• Start with small steps to experience what the increase in inclusion and participation feels like.
• Closely look at the types of problems to solve as part of the digital transformation of public services.
• Include managers both in the educational experience as well as in the actual doing.
• Collect data from users. • Review and check hypotheses based on user data.
• Act in the open if at all possible.
• Test prototypes with users.