Organizational Readiness and Street-Level Practice in Jakarta's Digital Public Policy Implementation

Background: Digital public policy is often assessed by the availability of platforms, yet the organizational mechanism that connects a standardized digital system with variation in frontline implementation remains under-specified. Objective: This study examines how organizational conditions shape adaptive capacity and street-level practice in the implementation of a standardized digital complaint system, and how the same system becomes embedded in different organizational configurations. Methods: A qualitative comparative case study was conducted over five months in two urban villages in Jakarta, Pondok Pinang and Karet Kuningan, both of which use the JAKI/CRM system. Data from semi-structured interviews with eight informants and from documents were analyzed through data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing. Results: Organizational readiness was examined through four context-specific conditions: human resources, institutional arrangements, digital infrastructure, and organizational culture. The two organizations share the channel, the workforce category, and the system's constraints, but Pondok Pinang allocates reports territorially through zones and team leaders, whereas Karet Kuningan allocates them by duty shift and group competency. In both, digital records are combined with messaging, direct communication, and field verification, and officials still interpret, verify, assess, determine authority, coordinate, and act. The findings suggest that standardizing a digital instrument does not standardize frontline implementation. Conclusion: Across these two cases, adaptive organizational capacity is best treated as an analytically grounded proposition linking organizational readiness to street-level practice, rather than as an independently validated construct. Digitalization relocates rather than removes frontline judgment, and the proposition requires testing across broader settings.