Public Technologies Transforming Work of the Public and the Public Sector
June 2024
Article No.: 20, Pages 1 - 12
Abstract
Technologies adopted by the public sector have transformed the work practices of employees in public agencies by creating different means of communication and decision-making. Although much of the recent research in the future of work domain has concentrated on the effects of technological advancements on public sector employees, the influence on work practices of external stakeholders engaging with this sector remains under-explored. In this paper, we focus on a digital platform called OneStop which is deployed by several building departments across the U.S. and aims to integrate various steps and services into a single point of online contact between public sector employees and the public. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 22 stakeholders, including local business owners, experts involved in the construction process, community representatives, and building department employees, we investigate how this technology transition has impacted the work of these different stakeholders. We observe a multifaceted perspective and experience caused by the adoption of OneStop. OneStop exacerbated inequitable practices for local business owners due to a lack of face-to-face interactions with the department employees. For the public sector employees, OneStop standardized the work practices, representing the building department’s priorities and values. Based on our findings, we discuss tensions around standardization, equality, and equity in technology transition, as well as design implications for equitable practices in the public sector.
References
[1]
Asmaa Abyre, Kaoutar Al Haderi, and Mohamed El Kandili. 2018. Marketing and smart city: a new model of urban development for cities in Morocco. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Smart City Applications. 1–5.
[2]
Ali Alkhatib and Michael Bernstein. 2019. Street-level algorithms: A theory at the gaps between policy and decisions. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–13.
[3]
Asbjørn Ammitzbøll Flügge, Thomas Hildebrandt, and Naja Holten Møller. 2021. Street-level algorithms and AI in bureaucratic decision-making: A caseworker perspective. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW1 (2021), 1–23.
[4]
Christoffer Andersson, Anette Hallin, and Chris Ivory. 2022. Unpacking the digitalisation of public services: Configuring work during automation in local government. Government Information Quarterly 39, 1 (2022), 101662.
[5]
Rhys Andrews and Tom Entwistle. 2010. Does cross-sectoral partnership deliver? An empirical exploration of public service effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. Journal of public administration research and theory 20, 3 (2010), 679–701.
[6]
Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner. 2016. Machine bias. In Ethics of Data and Analytics. Auerbach Publications, 254–264.
[7]
Robin Bartram. 2019. Going easy and going after: Building inspections and the selective allocation of code violations. City & Community 18, 2 (2019), 594–617.
[8]
Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. 1999. Contextual design. interactions 6, 1 (1999), 32–42.
[9]
Mark Bovens and Stavros Zouridis. 2002. From street-level to system-level bureaucracies: how information and communication technology is transforming administrative discretion and constitutional control. Public administration review 62, 2 (2002), 174–184.
[10]
John Boyle and David Jacobs. 1982. The intracity distribution of services: A multivariate analysis. American Political Science Review 76, 2 (1982), 371–379.
[11]
Anna Brown, Alexandra Chouldechova, Emily Putnam-Hornstein, Andrew Tobin, and Rhema Vaithianathan. 2019. Toward algorithmic accountability in public services: A qualitative study of affected community perspectives on algorithmic decision-making in child welfare services. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–12.
[12]
Robert D Bullard. 2003. Addressing urban transportation equity in the United States. Fordham Urb. LJ 31 (2003), 1183.
[13]
Karim Chandrasekar. 2011. Workplace environment and its impact on organisational performance in public sector organisations. International journal of enterprise computing and business systems 1, 1 (2011), 1–19.
[14]
Alexandra Chouldechova, Diana Benavides-Prado, Oleksandr Fialko, and Rhema Vaithianathan. 2018. A case study of algorithm-assisted decision making in child maltreatment hotline screening decisions. In Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. PMLR, 134–148.
[15]
Eric Corbett and Christopher A Le Dantec. 2018. The problem of community engagement: Disentangling the practices of municipal government. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 1–13.
[16]
Sasha Costanza-Chock. 2020. Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.
[17]
John L Crompton and Charles W Lamb Jr. 1983. The importance of the equity concept in the allocation of public services. Journal of Macromarketing 3, 1 (1983), 28–39.
[18]
Noortje De Boer and Nadine Raaphorst. 2023. Automation and discretion: explaining the effect of automation on how street-level bureaucrats enforce. Public Management Review 25, 1 (2023), 42–62.
[19]
Fernando Delgado, Stephen Yang, Michael Madaio, and Qian Yang. 2021. Stakeholder Participation in AI: Beyond" Add Diverse Stakeholders and Stir". arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.01122 (2021).
[20]
Carl DiSalvo. 2022. Design as democratic inquiry: putting experimental civics into practice. MIT Press.
[21]
Noella Edelmann, Judith Schossboeck, and Valerie Albrecht. 2021. Remote work in public sector organisations: Employees’ experiences in a pandemic context. In DG. O2021: The 22nd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. 408–415.
[22]
Magdalini Eirinaki, Subhankar Dhar, Shishir Mathur, Adwait Kaley, Arpit Patel, Akshar Joshi, and Dhvani Shah. 2018. A building permit system for smart cities: A cloud-based framework. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 70 (2018), 175–188.
[23]
Virginia Eubanks. 2018. Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin’s Press.
[24]
An Official Website for Commonwealth of Kentucky. [n. d.]. Kentucky Busienss OneStop. https://onestop.ky.gov/Pages/default.aspx Accessed: April, 2024.
[25]
Marcus Foth, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, and Christine Satchell. 2011. Urban informatics. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 1–8.
[26]
Sarah E Fox, Kiley Sobel, and Daniela K Rosner. 2019. Managerial Visions: stories of upgrading and maintaining the public restroom with IoT. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–15.
[27]
Guo Freeman, Jeffrey Bardzell, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2017. Aspirational design and messy democracy: Partisanship, policy, and hope in an Asian city. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. 404–416.
[28]
Guo Freeman, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Szu-Yu Liu, Xi Lu, and Diandian Cao. 2019. Smart and fermented cities: An approach to placemaking in urban informatics. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–13.
[29]
Batya Friedman. 1996. Value-sensitive design. interactions 3, 6 (1996), 16–23.
[30]
Amy K Glasmeier and Molly Nebiolo. 2016. Thinking about smart cities: The travels of a policy idea that promises a great deal, but so far has delivered modest results. Sustainability 8, 11 (2016), 1122.
[31]
Min Hee Go. 2014. The power of participation: Explaining the issuance of building permits in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Urban Affairs Review 50, 1 (2014), 34–62.
[32]
Daanika Gordon. 2020. The police as place-consolidators: The organizational amplification of urban inequality. Law & Social Inquiry 45, 1 (2020), 1–27.
[33]
Equitable Data Working Group. 2022. A Vision for Equitable Data Recommendations from the Equitable Data Working Group. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/eo13985-vision-for-equitable-data.pdf Accessed: April, 2024.
[34]
Naja Holten Møller, Irina Shklovski, and Thomas T Hildebrandt. 2020. Shifting concepts of value: Designing algorithmic decision-support systems for public services. In Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society. 1–12.
[35]
Naja L Holten Møller, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and Christopher A Le Dantec. 2019. Assembling the Case: Citizens’ Strategies for Exercising Authority and Personal Autonomy in Social Welfare. Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 3, GROUP (2019), 1–21.
[36]
Tony Hope, Lars Peter Østerdal, and Andreas Hasman. 2010. An inquiry into the principles of needs-based allocation of health care. Bioethics 24, 9 (2010), 470–480.
[37]
Artificial Intelligence. 2016. Automation, and the Economy. Executive office of the President (2016), 18–19.
[38]
Harry Jones. 2009. Equity in Development: Why it is Important and how to Achieve. Overseas Development Institute.
[39]
Tejaswini Joshi, Jeffrey Bardzell, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2021. The Flaky Accretions of Infrastructure: Sociotechnical Systems, Citizenship, and the Water Supply. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW2 (2021), 1–27.
[40]
Naveena Karusala, Jennifer Wilson, Phebe Vayanos, and Eric Rice. 2019. Street-level realities of data practices in homeless services provision. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW (2019), 1–23.
[41]
Michael Katell, Meg Young, Dharma Dailey, Bernease Herman, Vivian Guetler, Aaron Tam, Corinne Bintz, Daniella Raz, and P. M. Krafft. 2020. Toward situated interventions for algorithmic equity: lessons from the field. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. ACM, Barcelona Spain, 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372874
[42]
Anna Kawakami, Venkatesh Sivaraman, Hao-Fei Cheng, Logan Stapleton, Yanghuidi Cheng, Diana Qing, Adam Perer, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Haiyi Zhu, and Kenneth Holstein. 2022. Improving human-AI partnerships in child welfare: understanding worker practices, challenges, and desires for algorithmic decision support. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–18.
[43]
Constantine E Kontokosta and Boyeong Hong. 2021. Bias in smart city governance: How socio-spatial disparities in 311 complaint behavior impact the fairness of data-driven decisions. Sustainable Cities and Society 64 (2021), 102503.
[44]
Tzu-Sheng Kuo, Hong Shen, Jisoo Geum, Nev Jones, Jason I Hong, Haiyi Zhu, and Kenneth Holstein. 2023. Understanding Frontline Workers’ and Unhoused Individuals’ Perspectives on AI Used in Homeless Services. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–17.
[45]
Elitsa Lazarova and Nadezhda Veselinova. 2023. The digital transformation of Bulgarian municipal administration in the era of artificial intelligence. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies. 54–58.
[46]
Jungwoo Lee, Helle Henriksen, and Kim Normann Andersen. 2019. Impact of IT in the public sector workplace. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. 370–377.
[47]
Silvia Lindtner and Seyram Avle. 2017. Tinkering with governance: Technopolitics and the economization of citizenship. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW (2017), 1–18.
[48]
Michael Lipsky. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy: The Dilemmas of Individuals in Public Service.,[city: New York]:: Russell Sage Foundation. (1980).
[49]
Michael Madaio, Lisa Egede, Hariharan Subramonyam, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, and Hanna Wallach. 2022. Assessing the Fairness of AI Systems: AI Practitioners’ Processes, Challenges, and Needs for Support. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6, CSCW1 (2022), 1–26.
[50]
Lucia Maribel Bautista Zuniga, Gianella Palacios Moreno, Alfredo Benites Yarasca, and Maria Quinto Rojas. 2022. Smart Cities: Impact on the development of Urban Logistics. In 2022 5th International Conference on Computers in Management and Business (ICCMB). 151–155.
[51]
Ninareh Mehrabi, Fred Morstatter, Nripsuta Saxena, Kristina Lerman, and Aram Galstyan. 2021. A survey on bias and fairness in machine learning. ACM computing surveys (CSUR) 54, 6 (2021), 1–35.
[52]
Kenneth J Meier, Joseph Stewart Jr, and Robert E England. 1991. The politics of bureaucratic discretion: Educational access as an urban service. American Journal of Political Science (1991), 155–177.
[53]
Gianluca Misuraca and Gianluigi Viscusi. 2014. Digital governance in the public sector: challenging the policy-maker’s innovation dilemma. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance. 146–154.
[54]
Heather Moody, Linda Elaine Easley, and Melissa Sissen. 2021. Water shutoffs during COVID-19 and Black lives: Case study Detroit. Environmental Justice (2021).
[55]
Chris Muellerleile and Susan L Robertson. 2018. Digital Weberianism: bureaucracy, information, and the techno-rationality of neoliberal capitalism. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 25, 1 (2018), 187–216.
[56]
Viginia Murphy-Berman, John J Berman, Purnima Singh, Anju Pachauri, and Pramod Kumar. 1984. Factors affecting allocation to needy and meritorious recipients: A cross-cultural comparison.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46, 6 (1984), 1267.
[57]
Rosanna Nagtegaal. 2021. The impact of using algorithms for managerial decisions on public employees’ procedural justice. Government Information Quarterly 38, 1 (2021), 101536.
[58]
Department of Administration. [n. d.]. Wisconsin OneStop Business Portal. https://onestop.wi.gov/ Accessed: April, 2024.
[59]
Department of Labor & Industry. [n. d.]. Plan Review and Inspection Requirements. https://www.dli.pa.gov/ucc/Pages/Plan-Review-and-Inspection-Requirements.aspx Accessed: April, 2024.
[60]
Official Website of the State of West Virginia. [n. d.]. West Virginia OneStop Business Portal. https://business4.wv.gov/Pages/default.aspx Accessed: April, 2024.
[61]
Luis G Ortegón, J Javier Samper Zapater, Francisco García, Olmer García, and Luis Felipe Herrera-Quintero. 2020. Smart urbanism: a use case using construction regulation in Colombia. In Proceedings of the 10th Euro-American Conference on Telematics and Information Systems. 1–7.
[62]
Juho Pääkkönen, Matti Nelimarkka, Jesse Haapoja, and Airi Lampinen. 2020. Bureaucracy as a lens for analyzing and designing algorithmic systems. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–14.
[63]
Rocco Palumbo, Mohammad Fakhar Manesh, and Damiano Petrolo. 2022. What makes work smart in the public sector? Insights from a bibliometric analysis and interpretive literature review. Public Management Review (2022), 1–26.
[64]
Caroline Criado Perez. 2019. Invisible women: Data bias in a world designed for men. Abrams.
[65]
Dimitra Petrakaki and Andreas Kornelakis. 2016. ‘We can only request what’s in our protocol’: technology and work autonomy in healthcare. New technology, work and employment 31, 3 (2016), 223–237.
[66]
Ursula Plesner, Lise Justesen, and Cecilie Glerup. 2018. The transformation of work in digitized public sector organizations. Journal of Organizational Change Management 31, 5 (2018), 1176–1190.
[67]
Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason. 2013. Service design: From insight to implementation. Rosenfeld media.
[68]
Maryland OneStop Portal. [n. d.]. Maryland OneStop. https://onestop.md.gov/ Accessed: April, 2024.
[69]
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Jan 23, 2021. Couple return to the hilltop to help perk up a ‘forgotten neighborhood’. (Jan 23, 2021). https://www.post-gazette.com/life/goodness/2021/01/24/Hilltop-Coffee-city-Pittsburgh-Arlington-Avenue-neighborhood-goodness/stories/202101240001 Accessed: April, 2024.
[70]
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Margaret Mitchell, Timnit Gebru, and Iason Gabriel. 2022. A Human Rights-Based Approach to Responsible AI. (2022). arxiv:2210.02667 [cs.AI]
[71]
Joanna Redden and Jessica Brand. 2017. Data harm record. (2017).
[72]
Samantha Robertson, Tonya Nguyen, and Niloufar Salehi. 2021. Modeling assumptions clash with the real world: Transparency, equity, and community challenges for student assignment algorithms. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–14.
[73]
Devansh Saxena. 2023. Designing Human-Centered Algorithms for the Public Sector A Case Study of the U.S. Child-Welfare System. In Companion Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work(GROUP ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, 66–68.
[74]
Devansh Saxena, Karla Badillo-Urquiola, Pamela J Wisniewski, and Shion Guha. 2021. A Framework of High-Stakes Algorithmic Decision-Making for the Public Sector Developed through a Case Study of Child-Welfare. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW2 (2021), 1–41.
[75]
Devansh Saxena and Shion Guha. 2024. Algorithmic Harms in Child Welfare: Uncertainties in Practice, Organization, and Street-level Decision-making. ACM J. Responsib. Comput. 1, 1 (2024), 1–32.
[76]
Cathrine Seidelin, Therese Moreau, Irina Shklovski, and Naja Holten Møller. 2022. Auditing risk prediction of long-term unemployment. Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 6, GROUP (2022), 1–12.
[77]
Billie F Spencer Jr, Vedhus Hoskere, and Yasutaka Narazaki. 2019. Advances in computer vision-based civil infrastructure inspection and monitoring. Engineering 5, 2 (2019), 199–222.
[78]
Clay Spinuzzi. 2005. The methodology of participatory design. Technical communication 52, 2 (2005), 163–174.
[79]
Janaki Srinivasan, Savita Bailur, Emrys Schoemaker, and Sarita Seshagiri. 2018. Privacy at the margins| The poverty of privacy: Understanding privacy trade-offs from identity infrastructure users in India. International Journal of Communication 12 (2018), 20.
[80]
Logan Stapleton, Min Hun Lee, Diana Qing, Marya Wright, Alexandra Chouldechova, Ken Holstein, Zhiwei Steven Wu, and Haiyi Zhu. 2022. Imagining new futures beyond predictive systems in child welfare: A qualitative study with impacted stakeholders. In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 1162–1177.
[81]
Michael Veale and Irina Brass. 2019. Administration by Algorithm? Public Management Meets Public Sector Machine Learning. (2019).
[82]
Cedric Deslandes Whitney, Teresa Naval, Elizabeth Quepons, Simrandeep Singh, Steven R Rick, and Lilly Irani. 2021. HCI Tactics for Politics from Below: Meeting the Challenges of Smart Cities. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–15.
[83]
Meredith Whittaker, Kate Crawford, Roel Dobbe, Genevieve Fried, Elizabeth Kaziunas, Varoon Mathur, Sarah Mysers West, Rashida Richardson, Jason Schultz, Oscar Schwartz, 2018. AI now report 2018. AI Now Institute at New York University New York.
[84]
Amanda Williams, Erica Robles, and Paul Dourish. 2009. Urbane-ing the city: Examining and refining the assumptions behind urban informatics. In Handbook of research on urban informatics: The practice and promise of the real-time city. IGI Global, 1–20.
[85]
John Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi. 2017. Speed dating: providing a menu of possible futures. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 3, 1 (2017), 30–50.
Index Terms
- Public Technologies Transforming Work of the Public and the Public Sector
Recommendations
Governing the Public Sector E-Performance: The Accounting Practices in the Digital Age
Over the past several decades the demand for accountability in the field of public administration has been growing exponentially in Europe. The particular emphasis for this theme was the stimulus for the significant adoption and use of information ...
eGovernance implementation model for public sector innovation
ICEGOV '12: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic GovernanceThis study examines the process of innovation in the Federal Government Agencies of Pakistan to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of public services. Research objective of this study is to provide an eGovernance Implementation Model of how ...
Technology adoption in the public sector: an exploratory study of e-government in Malaysia
ICEGOV '07: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governanceAll around the world, the quest to improve government service delivery is becoming an important agenda for most governments. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and the Internet in particular have opened new possibilities for the government ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
June 2024
297 pages
ISBN:9798400710179
DOI:10.1145/3663384
Copyright © 2024 Owner/Author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 25 June 2024
Check for updates
Badges
Best Paper
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Funding Sources
- Carnegie Mellon University Block Center for Technology and Society
- NSF (National Science Foundation)
Conference
CHIWORK 2024
CHIWORK 2024: Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work
June 25 - 27, 2024
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 0Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)0
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML FormatGet Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in