LegalTech DSS

PROJECT SUMMARY

Public services are meant to support citizens, but translating legislation into effective service delivery is often complex. As laws pass through policy teams, IT systems, operational procedures, and frontline staff, different interpretations can emerge, leading to inconsistencies, delays, and reduced public trust.

Using Amsterdam’s social benefits process as a case study, we investigated why these gaps occur and how organisations can create greater transparency across the service delivery chain.

Our research revealed that the challenge is not primarily technical. Instead, no single stakeholder has visibility of the entire process, making it difficult to identify where misinterpretations and inefficiencies arise.

To address this, we developed UN-FOLDED, a workshop-based tool that brings together legal, policy, IT, communications, and frontline professionals to map the complete journey from legislation to service delivery. Through five design sprints and continuous stakeholder feedback, we created a practical framework that helps teams build a shared understanding of how public services operate in practice.

The tool was tested with municipal staff, who recognised it as a reflection of their daily realities. We also showcased UN-FOLDED at the Digital Society School Final Showcase, engaging visitors in discussions on improving transparency and collaboration in public services. UN-FOLDED was handed over to our project partner to support the development of a more transparent and traceable approach to public service delivery.

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THE CHALLENGE

For many citizens, dealing with a public service is confusing, inconsistent, and hard to trust. One part of an institution says one thing, another says something else. A rule on a website does not match what happens at the desk. A decision arrives with no visible reasoning behind it. These are services meant to help people through important moments in life, yet they often leave people more lost than before. The fault lies with no single person or department. A law does not reach a citizen directly. It travels through policies, digital systems, work instructions, and the people applying them, and at each step it is interpreted again. Over time, what the law says, what staff are told to do, and what citizens experience drift apart. The reason is simple but stubborn: no one sees the whole journey. Each team sees its own part and assumes the rest fits together.
The cost is more than administrative. When public systems become hard to follow, trust erodes, citizens feel unheard, and the staff inside those systems are left to navigate processes that were never built to fit together.
This is not a new problem. In 2015, the United Nations named transparent, accountable institutions a global priority through Sustainable Development Goal 16. Yet in Amsterdam, as in many cities, fragmentation in public service delivery remains largely unsolved.
We began from one belief: public services should be understandable, transparent, and consistent for everyone involved, both the citizens who rely on them and the staff who deliver them. Taking Amsterdam’s social benefit process as our case, we set out to make the journey from law to service more transparent, traceable, and coherent across the departments and systems it passes through. What follows is how we did it, sprint by sprint.