Virtual Desk and the creation of public value at Superior Tribunal de Justiça
Public Value, Virtual Desk, Superior Tribunal de Justiça,
information systems success model, means-end model, videoconferencing.
Public value creation is the reason for the existence of public services.
Governments that fail to deliver adequate returns to society in exchange for the taxes paid find
it difficult to remain in power. In the Brazilian Judiciary system, it's no different—there is
significant pressure to maintain productivity, which is one of the highest in the world, and to
justify the expenditure of 1.6% of GDP allocated to the Judiciary. In this context, the customer
service records data from the Superior Tribunal de Justiça (STJ)’s Virtual Desk (Balcão Virtual
in Portuguese – a video conferencing service for the court’s Clerk’s Office) are analyzed to find
evidence of public value creation for the Court, and, in this process, to derive information to
guide evidence-based decision-making, aiming to improve value generation for the STJ. A
quantitative approach is used in this explanatory research to analyze customer service’s records
and related information from Virtual Desk. Then the data is applied to the model by LI and
SHANG, 2020 (derived from DELONE and MCLEAN's continuous use approaches, 1992, and
GUTMAN's means-end chain, 1982, and ZEITHAML, 1988) to assert if public value is created
or not. Evidence was found that the Virtual Desk generates value for the STJ through the
intention of continued use, evidenced by the increasing demand for the service, along with
positive user evaluations. The results of this research suggest that expanding the Virtual Desk
service to other sectors of the court that are not yet covered by this type of access will increase
the public value of the Court.