Smart advisors in the front office: Designing employee-empowering and citizen-centric services

Civil servants in government front offices frequently lack subject matter expertise as well as necessary skills to meet modern citizen-centric service demands. Using design research, we discuss how front offices can change the service paradigm from administering government-centric and transaction-oriented services to providing truly citizen-centric services. We demonstrate that by means of “advisory information artifacts” civil servants can become expert advisors and eventually provide citizens with superior advisory services. Advisory information artifacts consist of a knowledge base, “counseling affordances” offering advisors moderation material and “service encounter thinkLets” covering the corresponding work practices. Such advisory information artifacts have the capacity to effectively support civil servants in acquiring the necessary advice-related skills while concurrently providing superior citizen-oriented services.