Mitigating Administrative Burdens: Understanding the Role of Intermediaries in Co-producing Digital Self-services

Abstract

Public sector organizations are increasingly adopting digital self-service solutions. With digital self-services, citizens are given a more active role in co-producing their services, as they serve themselves and perform tasks that were previously performed by public professionals. However, many citizens struggle with their expanding role as co-producers and experience burdens in their interaction with digital self-services. To mitigate these burdens, citizens often turn to so-called intermediaries for help. Intermediaries are third parties such as family members, friends as well as professionals that assist citizens during digital self-services or completely take over the responsibility from them. Although they are important co-producers, intermediaries have seldom been the focus of attention as their role during co-production is often invisible from the outside. We present two qualitative empirical studies from Norwegian and Brazilian welfare services. Our findings show the burdens citizens experience with digital self-services and illuminate how important personal intermediaries are to reduce citizens’ experience of burdens, resulting in triangulated or hybrid “co-production”.