Public administrations are increasingly relying on collaboration within inter-organizational networks to coordinate the development and provisioning of integrated digital public services. Collaboration strategies are necessary to focus collaborative efforts, align and prioritize goals, and leverage concrete results that advance integrated service delivery (ISD). However, literature on inter-organizational collaboration strategies for integrated service delivery is scarce. This research identifies collaboration strategies in three qualitative case studies in Belgium. The cases present 33 collaboration strategies categorized into engagement, motivation, and joint action strategies. Collaboration strategies should complement each other. Together these strategies can help to overcome the adoption paradox, one of the key issues to advance ISD, which refers to service providers not being inclined to adopt an ISD unless it has many users, but users might not be willing to use and ISD before many service providers have adopted it. Policy-makers can use the identified collaboration strategies to advance integrated service delivery.

Different actor roles in inter-organizational digital public services are often neither understood nor acknowledged. This can result in challenges regarding the proper design and result in a lack of adoption of these services. In the literature, there exist various taxonomies outlining roles such as users, consumers or co-creators, although their value is limited. We define roles as the expectations regarding the actors and their responsibilities in the governance of a digital public service. The aim of this research is to better understand the various roles in inter-organizational digital service provisioning. This objective is achieved by examining existing classifications and using them to analyze the roles in three inter-organizational cases in Belgium. The multiple-case study reveals natural persons and legal entities often combine several roles. Public administrations have to collaborate to establish inter-organizational digital public services, but might be confronted with different perspectives regarding the end-user or other roles. This might lead to tensions and could have consequences regarding adoption. The results show that intermediary roles performed by non-public sector parties, such as mandate holders or private service providers, are lacking in existing classifications. A novel classification is proposed together with suggestions for the concept of roles, taking a comprehensive view on actor roles in the entire service delivery chain.

Governments aim to digitalize public services. Whereas initially they worked in isolation, nowadays they increasingly link different building blocks together to realize integrated public services. This evolution poses challenges concerning the governance of public services. The purpose of this paper is to identify governance challenges in inter-organizational digital public service delivery. To do this, we investigated a case study that deals with the creation of digital invoicing services in Belgium. The findings show seven groups of governance challenges that incorporate technical, organizational and inter-organizational factors. Governance challenges can be external, related to the environment and the users, as well as internal, related to the digitalization objectives and governance dynamics. Moreover, as public services evolve over time, so do governance challenges, suggesting that governance regimes may have to evolve accordingly to maintain coordinated service delivery.