Multilectic Forums in Digital Service Ecosystems

Digital public service development toward human-centric service portfolios requires radical changes and innovative collaboration among multiple actors. Such a collaboration involving public and private service providers and NGOs has turned out to be challenging. On the organizational level, long-term sustainability requires dialectical reasoning and synthesis between innovation and efficiency toward organizational ambidexterity. However, public organizations face the need for mandated efficiency, which hinders innovativeness. In addition, the need for interoperable human-centric services at the ecosystem level introduces additional complexity. To evaluate how to address the emerging tensions in complex public service ecosystems in developing interoperable human-centric digital service portfolios, we conducted a single-case study with multilevel analysis in a large-scale public service ecosystem in Finland. We found that dialectical tensions emerging on various forums, where differing goals, views, and values meet, are intertwined within and across multiple ecosystem levels and that the synthesis of these tensions can be more than the sum of their parts. We introduce the concept of multilectic forums and theorize how they emerge continuously and simultaneously in public service ecosystems between the public and private service providers and NGOs while human-centric digital service portfolios are developed. We propose that governing intertwined tensions on multilectic forums can result in innovative and efficient digital services and collectively ambidextrous ecosystems.