Commentary: 311 Services: A Real‐World Perspective

• Author: P. K. Agarwal
• Published date: 01 September 2013
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12115
• Date: 01 September 2013

Commentary

P. K. Agarwal is chief executive off‌i cer

of TiE Global, a nonprof‌i t that fosters

entrepreneurship in 61 cities in 17 coun-

tries. Previously, he was Governor Arnold

Schwarzenegger’s appointed chief technol-

ogy off‌i cer for the State of California. He

holds a bachelor’s degree from IIT Delhi

and master’s degrees from California State

University, Sacramento, and the University

of California, Berkeley.

E-mail: pk.agarwal@tie.org

702 Public Administration Review • September | October 2013

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 73, Iss. 5, pp. 702–703. © 2013 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12115.

P. K. Agarwal

TiE Global

The article “Coproduction of Government

Services and the New Information

Technology: Investigating the Distributional

Biases,” by Benjamin Y. Clark, Jef‌f rey L. Brudney,

and Sung-Gheel Jang, examines “whether the 311

system for requesting government services results in

use throughout a jurisdiction or facilitates the ‘haves’

gaining greater access and limiting opportunities

for historically disadvantaged groups.”  e authors

obtained service request data from the City of Boston’s

citizen relations management database.

While I am in general agreement with the conclusion

of the study, this opens up the opportunity to examine

the use of the term “coproduction” in public ser vice,

as well as to look at the technological aspects of the

telephone-based 311 services.

 e authors start by using the term “requesting

government services” and then ease into calling it

coproduction.  ere ought to be some standard by

which activities in a value chain can be evaluated

and participants classif‌i ed as coproducers. In the

private sector, these boundaries are much clearer.  e

def‌i nition of coproduction on BusinessDictionary.

com is fairly unambiguous: “Distributed-production

arrangement in which dif‌f erent f‌i rms (often located

in dif‌f erent countries) produce dif‌f erent parts of the

same end product. Engines, fuselage, tail-section, and

wings of the Airbus, for example, are coproduced in

dif‌f erent countries of the European Union.”

Similarly, coproduction is a well-established practice

in the moviemaking business, with established norms

of how work could be divided and managed. While

the availability of the Internet has created a seamless

integration of the customer in the process, custom-

ers are still customers and should not easily become

producers. Would my printing a boarding pass at an

airline kiosk or using the Internet to buy an airline

ticket make me a coproducer in the transportation

business? I hardly think so. However, in public ser vice,

beginning in public safety in the 1970s, we have taken

a rather expansive view of the term. It is worthwhile to

note that, by and large, the use of this term does not

exist in the public sector at the practitioner level.  e

folks requesting services are clients, and government is

the one delivering or producing services.

It is likely that someday in the future, clients will not

only request services but also provide pictures, videos,

sound recordings, and GPS coordinates, as appropri-

ate. Subsequently, crowdsourcing by the community

would determine the relative priority of the request.

 e community would get involved in the schedul-

ing of the service and monitoring the progress. In

that scenario, it may be worthwhile to reexamine

whether a “request for service” could be labeled as

coproduction.

 e other semantic issue is that of calling the 311

service, termed the Mayor’s Hotline in this case, a new

technology. It is largely a good old telephone-based

call center with an information technology back end.

 e 311 service was borne out of the misuse of 911

systems, intended for life-threatening situations. Too

many people were calling 911 for nonemergency serv-

ices. It was the City of Baltimore that launched the

311 service in 1996. With the advent of the Internet,

the 311 service has also been made available online

as well as through a smartphone app. In the context

of this study, it may be more appropriate to call this a

relatively new service instead of a new technology.  e

data presented indicate that 32 percent of the service

requests came via the Internet or the smartphone app.

Over time, more transactions will shift online, but the

telephone option is here to stay for a while. So the real

question is whether the use of 311 systems has any

usage biases in it.

 e study indicates that race, income, and education

do not signif‌i cantly bias the use of 311 services, but

Hispanics may not be as connected with the service.

 ere are some data to conjecture that the increased

use of smartphones may help bridge this digital

divide. I do not think it is an issue of access. Some 96

311 Services: A Real-World Perspective