Potential for Improving Public Services by Exploring Citizens’ Communication to Public Organizations

Abstract

While the purpose of public organizations is to serve citizens, the citizens themselves are not always consulted in order to develop better public services. We argue that the direct communication from citizens to public organizations contains a wealth of information on how the organizations could improve their services, and this information is worth exploring. In order to prove our argument, we have interviewed 19 public organizations in Rwanda and Sri Lanka, identified 26 issues raised by the citizens, and mapped these issues into four solution domains: availability and timeliness of information, policy development, business process development, availability and design of eservices.