Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund Rydén

I am holding a PhD-position in a Scandinavian project focusing on “What public services should be digitalized?”. The project is a collaboration between researchers from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden in the context of digital public sector and what services is suitable for digitalization.

My research interest within the project is on the digital citizenship and how the interaction between citizens and public sector changes alongside the digital transformation within public sector. I will focus on the perspectives of citizens to understand the needs, values and logics present in the interaction mediated through different channels. Understanding the perception of citizens considering digital, non-digital and hybrid interactions will provide a foundation to further look towards what public sector is suitable for digital channels from a citizen perspective.

Public sector has the last decades developed towards more open and horizontal governance structure. The digital transformation can be seen as a further development in this direction as it provides new ways of interacting with public sector independent of time and space. The question is what implication this development will have on institutions, professions, and citizens and how it changes roles, responsibilities in the service conduction?  

I have worked within the public sector in Sweden with service administration, consulting as well as with organizational development in building bridges between departments and design new procedures at a horizontal dimension within the organization. I have later been working within private sector to expand and develop the service provided to public sector organizations. As an extension of public sector services the business provided housing and support to homeless families in the municipality of Malmö. Later on I did my internship at Ernst & Young within the audit of public sector as well as a consultant regarding developing internal procedures.