How to move towards digital era governance: The case of VDAB

Abstract

This paper takes our research work with VDAB (Vlaamse Dienst voor Arbeidsbemiddeling en Beroepsopleiding), the public employment service for the Flemish region in Belgium, as a starting point to study the transformation of government from New Public Management (NPM) to Digital Era Governance (DEG). This study focuses on how to work towards disruptive DEG innovation in a turbulent strategic context by employing a strategy of simple rules. Together with VDAB we apply an Action Design Research (ADR) approach to develop a set of “boundary breaking rules”. Coining these simple rules represents a first significant step in VDAB’s journey towards achieving a radical business innovation. In addition to the main artifact designed using our ADR approach in the VDAB context, i.e. the “boundary breaking rules”, we derive lessons from this approach concerning the nature of this artifact specific for the VDAB case. Although this paper represents an early stage of the research and has not yet reached the final ADR stage of formalization of learning, we aim for it to lay the foundations for a more broadly applicable design theory of simple rules, useful in contexts generalizable from the specific VDAB context.