Evaluating Public Service Delivery Smartness and Impact on Citizens’ Well-Being

Public sectors are increasingly adopting emerging technologies to innovate and deliver smart services to enhance citizens’ overall well-being. Although the idea of smartness in public sector service innovations has been explored from the perspective of service providers, limited study has been done from the perspective of end users. Furthermore, the impact of smart service delivery on citizens’ quality of life has been widely studied quantitatively, but qualitative evidence has been sparse. This paper aims to address those research gaps using a mobile-based innovation in the motor vehicle annual registration services (SAMBARA) recently introduced by the West Java Province in Indonesia as a case study. We use a qualitative smartness measurement framework based on efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, and collaboration metrics to assess the smartness of the service. We also evaluate the service’s influence on enhancing citizens’ overall quality of life using the well-being framework, which is based on aspects of usefulness, safety, and convenience experiences. We verified the significance of our findings across various participants’ background using statistical analysis ANOVA. The outcome of the study shows that mobile-based innovation services not only create smartness in public service delivery but also improve citizens’ well-being regardless of their various backgrounds. This research contributes to the public service innovation knowledge base and offers a baseline study for researchers and practitioners to carry out similar study in other emergent nations like Indonesia.