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Using Life Events to design citizens' future services

Sogei undertook a three-month project to build, test and formalise a research framework based on Service Design and Design Futures to design digital public services centred on the citizens' Life Events approach.

Sogei undertook a three-month project to build, test and formalise a research framework based on Service Design and Design Futures to design digital public services centred on the citizens' Life Events approach.

Industry

Public Service & Institutions

Year

2021

Client

Sogei

Services

e-Government and citizens' Life Events

In Italy, less than 40% of online users actively use e-Government services compared to the EU average of 64% (DESI report 2020). A situation exacerbated by the silos logic of digital public services.

As part of the project, we proposed to Sogei a methodology to improve communication, information and service sharing between public administrations by analysing and mapping citizens' Life Events. We used a design approach based on generating possible scenarios for the future PA while structuring replicable methodological practices for building new services.

Outcome

To overcome the fragmentation of the experience Sogei tested through a pilot project a new design methodology based on the citizen's life-moments to design the new generation of digital public services.

Life Events & Service Design

With Sogei, we started from a shared and participatory definition of the future research activity's perimeter to understand the challenges and opportunities that await Italian public administration: which sectors are the most promising and which topics are unexplored. Then we defined four pillars on which to base the project.

Life Events
Using the Life Events lens to analyse, select and map the interconnected services involved in the crucial stages of citizens' lives: marriage, birth, opening a business, moving to another city etc.

Interoperability
Using the service community concept enabled us to overcome internal PA discrepancies and think about how all public administration entities should work and interoperate to provide end-to-end service to citizens.

Future
Using a future-oriented design approach to build scenarios of a possible future PA and add a medium to long-term perspective to inspire tomorrow's services design.


Formalisation
Constructing and formalising through a series of replicable methodologies and building frameworks and shareable tools to address the design of all other services.

Exploring context and mapping actors

By analysing citizens' Life Events, it was possible to find out which entities are involved, identifying possible service communities: actors who share visions, responsibilities, and practices in service delivery, to create collaborative models and eliminate silos, supporting the delivery of services across the citizen experience.

A vision of future PA

The activity of participatory future scenario generation allows stakeholders to empathise with the citizen and think about a distant horizon free from feasible constraints. In this way, creating a vision of a shared and truly innovative service experience is possible beyond mere functional improvement.

Future scenarios are also vital to understanding possible new ways of interaction between citizens and the public administration. The goal is to expand the study of possible futures to each Life Event and have an ongoing observatory on the citizen-PA future relationship in which people and entities can collaboratively participate.

A playbook to facilitate collaborative design

To return the generated value, we collected and created a set of practices, tools, and supports to design services around citizens' Life Events collaboratively among the PAs involved. The result is a guide, a unique tool that is a playbook for design.

A pilot service to start the revolution

Sogei engaged different stakeholders in the Life Event service ecosystem to start a business, redesigning the path to opening a VAT number, to propose a new experience through a single point of interaction for the citizen.

We approached the project thinking about an experience that would involve full interoperability between entity systems based on APIs. For several reasons, maximum integration is only sometimes feasible from the start. So that this condition would not compromise the implementation of a service, we identified several levels of integration that could enable an otherwise seamless experience for citizens.

Project numbers

Using a methodology based on Life Events to design public services means encouraging a citizen-facing PA's proactive approach, thus defining the ambition to be of concrete support in its most important moments.

Weekly Iterations, from discovery to design
12
Stakeholders involved in the project
15+
Two Life Events services mapped
100+
Project Streams
2
Collaborating PAs
2
Articles and reports for project communication
10

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