Designing IT-Support For Citizen Advisory Services: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective

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 article, we aim to close this gap by assessing the design requirements needed to develop value-added IT-systems supporting citizen advisory services. We argue that previous developments of design requirements for correspondent IT-systems neglect the users’ motives and focus merely on their actions. We thus refer to self-determination theory as a theoretical lens to analyze current literature on how to design adequate IT-systems fostering users’ basic needs. In doing so, we introduce design goals and demonstrate to what extent they are fulfilled when these design requirements are implemented in a real-world IT-system that supports citizen advisory services. We follow a design science approach, in which the previously elaborated requirements are implemented in a software prototype, and are then evaluated qualitatively in two user studies with real-world advisors and citizens to assess their suitability relative to the design goals. Our 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 theory.