Throughout the last twenty years, the public sector has significantly committed – with resources and policies – to using digital technologies for better public service provision. Although the back-end processes, in many cases infrastructure and even the offer of digital services have positively benefited from this investment, the still ‘siloed’ approach holds up the digital transformation of public administrations.

In inGov project we advocate that integrated public services (IPS), underlined by the enabling role of interoperability, hold a great promise to bring a smooth and closer to citizens’ needs experience while interacting with the public administration. IPS, however, are challenging because they entail a ‘solution’ that works across different technologies, information models, sectoral or organisational logics and even legal structures for cross-border projects. Stakeholder collaboration, legal harmonisation and technical compatibility, therefore, are some of the issues to consider when deploying IPS. As a first iteration in inGov’s Work Package 2, “IPS holistic framework”, we have focused on these aspects with the final aim to provide a holistic framework that takes into account, in addition to technology, stakeholder involvement and governance in the creation and delivery of IPS. This holistic, wide-ranging approach derives from the need to implement a 360-degree coverage of the numerous aspects of the IPS lifecycle to ensure their purposeful and satisfactory analysis and/or implementation.

In this first released version, we distinguish IPS governance, formal agreements, stakeholders’ involvement and implementation as five interrelated operationalisable constructs of the framework. Developing upon the IPS-Co conceptual model, particular attention is given to co-creation activities in the different phases of the development of an IPS. The first part of the work mixes a theoretical analysis with a practical examination of five existent IPS-Co projects around Europe. On top of this, twenty-three recommendations are provided to practitioners, and contextualised in an IPS agile roadmap. Based on the theoretical and practical analysis, the recommendations cover governance, political, legal and technical aspects and concern all the phases of a project lifecycle. The recommendations highlight the fundamental importance of stakeholders and the means to engage them, confirming the imperative necessity to involve citizens, businesses and public administrations in any IPS-Co initiative

The next stages of development of the framework will consist in refining current findings and broaden our analysis by including other relevant constructs. Particular attention will be given to the experience of pilots in using the recommendations for their IPS co-creation activities.