Managing Socio-Technical Debt: Causes and Design-Science Solutions for Citizen-Centred Digital Public Services

Abstract

Technical debt (TD), the accumulation of long-term costs and inefficiencies caused by earlier technological and organisational decisions, has become a sweeping challenge in public-sector digitalisation. Social and technical factors together drive the proliferation and persistence of TD: fragmented governance, legacy systems, siloed development practices, and procurement dependencies constrain innovation and reinforce outdated infrastructures. This doctoral research, conducted within the Swedish municipal context, explores how these intertwined causes can be mitigated to enable more coherent, citizen-oriented digital public services, such as streamlined licensing, permit-handling, and feedback processes for residents and local businesses. The thesis applies an echeloned design science research (eDSR) approach that integrates analytical investigation with the practical design and evaluation of digital-government artefacts. The overarching aim is to develop design principles and architectural strategies that help municipalities build sustainable, interoperable, and citizen-responsive digital ecosystems. The research comprises five studies forming the foundation for a synthesised framework addressing socio-technical debt (STeD), a construct that captures the mutual reinforcement of social and technical liabilities in digital transformation. The first study reveals how siloed municipal IT landscapes and legacy systems perpetuate TD, while the second develops a microservice-based encapsulation strategy that technically mitigates such debt by isolating legacy dependencies and supporting incremental modernisation. The third and fourth studies examine, respectively, governance of open-source software and the design of a generative artificial intelligence platform, showing how procurement practices, ownership models, and architectural openness shape the accumulation, or prevention, of new debt. Finally, the fifth study investigates national information-infrastructure projects, demonstrating how fragmented inter-organisational governance and weak interoperability standards create systemic STeD across the public-sector ecosystem. Drawing together insights from these studies and 25 complementary expert interviews, the resulting framework links debt-generating problems to targeted design principles focused on citizen-centredness, transferability, and governance. These principles are operationalised through an IT-architecture blueprint emphasising modularity, transparency, and open programming interfaces. Empirical evidence shows that TD in municipalities is largely social rather than technical in nature: governance fragmentation, procurement dependencies, and organisational inertia sustain it more than codelevel flaws do. The thesis contributes theoretically by reframing TD as a socio-technical phenomenon, conceptualised as STeD, and practically by offering actionable design principles and governance strategies for building open, scalable, and citizen-centred digital public services.