EXPLORATORY METHODOLOGY · 2027–2030

The Coordination Index

Developing an exploratory framework for understanding administrative burden where responsibility crosses organisational boundaries.

Exploratory methodology in development

Public administration is divided into organisations; citizens' lives are not. The Coordination Index therefore looks less at whether institutions can demonstrate coordination activity and more at what happens where one organisation meets another.

If we want to understand coordination, we should examine what happens at the join.

Five dimensions

R — Repetition

Information, evidence or procedure repeated across the boundary.

H — Citizen-managed hand-offs

Transfers that depend on the citizen carrying the case from one organisation to another.

A — Responsibility ambiguity

Uncertainty about who is responsible for the next administrative action.

I — Information discontinuity

Relevant information fails to travel with the administrative journey.

M — Citizen mediation

The citizen must explain, translate or reconcile institutional differences.

These dimensions are not yet added together into a single score. Time, effort and consequence matter, and a neat number could conceal more than it reveals.

The purpose of an index is not to produce a number. It is to reveal something useful.

Administrative Orphan Point

IOAS proposes the term Administrative Orphan Point (AOP) for a point in an administrative journey at which responsibility for progressing a matter is not operationally held by any institution during a transition between organisations, leaving the citizen principally responsible for restoring movement.

A case may have a formal owner without having an operational owner. The diagnostic question is deliberately simple: Who owns the next move?

Citizen Coordination Load

Citizen Coordination Load is the additional time, effort and responsibility imposed upon a person principally because they must compensate for boundaries between institutions during an administrative journey.

The Messenger Test

Remove the citizen from the transfer for a moment. Does the administrative message still arrive? Does the process continue? If not, the citizen may be functioning less as a participant and more as the connection between institutions.

The objective of coordination is not to eliminate institutional boundaries. It is to reduce the unnecessary consequences of those boundaries.

Central research question

To what extent does a citizen have to compensate for the fact that the organisations serving them are separate?

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