Unique Uniform: A Taxonomy for Locally Contextualized Public Service Models
Abstract
Public organizations are confronted with a contradictory challenge: On the one hand, they want to increase their service quality by considering their individual local contexts. On the other hand, public services are mostly based on standardized legal regulations, which leads to uniformity in the conceptual models representing those services. Therefore, local contexts are not yet reflected in such conceptual models. Conceptual models should originate from standardized legal regulations but also provide systematic contextualization mechanisms. To support this endeavor, we suggest a preliminary taxonomy for the classification of adaptations in conceptual models of public services to local contexts. We intend to develop the taxonomy following the approach by Nickerson et al. As a result of the first iteration of taxonomy development, the proposed taxonomy consists of five dimensions with 21 characteristics. We also outline the steps of a method for applying the taxonomy to public services. In future work, we also intend to develop a tool that uses the taxonomy to assist public organizations in individualizing their public services to local context.
Keywords
adaptation; conceptual model; configurable process model; public organization; reference modeling; local context; public service; taxonomy.