A Self-Determination Perspective on IT-Based Citizen Advisory Support

Abstract

In public advisory services, the individual's satisfaction depends less on extrinsic factors (e.g., monetary rewards) than on their inner needs fulfillment. Currently used IT-systems supporting citizen advisory services neglect these intrinsic needs of their users, hence insufficiently fostering their satisfaction. In this paper, we aim to close this gap by assessing the design requirements needed to develop value-added IT-systems for citizen advisory services. We thus refer to self-determination theory to analyze current literature perspectives on how to design adequate IT-systems fostering users' basic needs. We follow a design science approach and implement these requirements in a software prototype, and evaluate them qualitatively in a user study with real-world advisors and citizens. Our preliminary results show that this approach promises to reveal the design requirements that matter in citizen counseling, signifying an important step toward developing a conceptual IT systems design model.