Regenerating the Human Capital Ecosystem of the Public Service Ecosystem in African Countries through Digital Transformation: An Experiential Perspective

The human capital ecosystem in public service in most of the African countries have been drowned in inefficiency due to bureaucracy and political interferences (Rogger, 2018). The service that is assigned to this sector of the government comes in the form of public good for the interest of the general public. However, what we see is that the services are not rendered efficiently due to the bureaucratic approaches, on one hand, and the abuses of offices through political interferences, on the other hand (Ifaka & Odigie, 2021). To bring the public service in African countries to the expected level of efficiency, this paper revisits the public service ecosystem to regenerate its human capital ecosystem in line with the concept of the ecosystem as introduced by Adner (2017) with the application of digital technology. We therefore relate the human capital ecosystem to the public service ecosystem (Kinder, et. al., 2021; Rossi & Tuurnas, 2021; Strokosch & Osborne, 2020; McAdam, 2019) through the introduction of technology while adopting the four levels integrative framework (Petrescu, 2019) of institution building, service provision, individual actor and personal beliefs (Osborne et.al. 2021). This framework further integrates service management with marketing theory, public administration, and management theory. With an integration of these theories and their application to the public service ecosystem of a government agency in north central Nigeria, as our case study, the results of our experiential experimentation show that with a realignment of focus on value addition, in the form of public value, as proposed by Vargo & Lursch (2016) to the public service ecosystem, and the use of digital technology, there will be significant improvement in the performance of the human capital ecosystem.