You need to involve citizens in your decisions and work together to make sure you understand the nature of problems that you’re trying to solve through a process of ‘co-design’. After jointly developing a solution, you should also work together to assess whether the service is performing as expected by yourselves and by your citizens. This kind of thinking requires a fundamentally different way of thinking from policy makers.

Discussions about service quality are not only about the actual performance of your organisation, but also need to reflect the expectations of your citizens and how you are meeting them - their perceptions of service quality may be markedly different from those of municipalities.

No big government reform can be made possible without the essential contribution from public sector officials - a valuable resource that is too often neglected or taken as a constraint rather than an opportunity for sustainable change. If professional knowledge becomes obsolete almost as quickly as it is acquired, why public sector officials should be an exception? These must be freed from a number of binding constraints, which make up a working environment that is often reluctant to innovation, dependent from past behaviour, rule compliant rather than focused on the effectiveness of public action. But we also know that there are islands of good practice everywhere, and we only need to spread awareness of what is feasible and what is not. This is not the panacea of course, but in parallel with empowering citizens, we need to empower the civil servants too.

Citizens are the reason why local government services exist. Governments need to put the needs of citizens and customers first, even when developing ‘back office’ IT services.

Successful e-government requires local government to identify the best and most appropriate ways to deliver services to particular groups and then to use a range of channels to deliver good services. You cannot develop different delivery channels for participation and services (face to face, email, web, telephone etc.) without first understanding your customers and communities and their channel preferences and behaviour.

All government actors should have better tools to find out more about their customers - where they live, their age and gender profiles, the services they tend to use etc.. National governments can help local authorities by developing tools and methodologies that allow local governments to work with their customers and communities through a process of ‘co-design’ to develop and deliver better services.

The examples of the esd community (UK) and the national government driven KING- and Answer-teams (NL) show how this can be done: networks, consultants and regular meetings are combined with local projects in a process that is actively supported by national government.