Design Science aplicada à governança de GTs: construção de um framework SEED para a gestão do TRE-GO

Abstract

The Judiciary faces the challenge of responding to society’s growing demands for integrity, efficiency, transparency, and accountability, understood as institutional responsibility for reporting on and justifying public decisions. Within the scope of the Regional Electoral Courts (TREs), Working Groups (GTs) play a strategic role in carrying out actions aimed at meeting the targets established by the National Council of Justice (CNJ). However, deficiencies in operationalization, standardization, monitoring, and consolidation of institutional learning may compromise productivity, generate waste, increase dependence on individual efforts, and reduce the predictability of results. In this context, the general objective of this study is to develop and validate, within the context of the Regional Electoral Court of Goiás (TRE-GO), a conceptual framework to improve the management of GTs, with potential transferability to other bodies of the Electoral Justice system. The specific objectives are: to map activity flows and analyze the organizational and normative context of the GTs; to design an artifact that articulates governance, process management, and innovation methodologies; and to assess its applicability and potential contribution. To this end, a methodological strategy grounded in Design Science Research (DSR) was adopted, understood as an epistemological paradigm aimed at constructing artifacts to solve practical problems, with the application of the Systemic Engineering of Epistemic Designs (SEED) method, intended for the systemic structuring of conceptual artifacts. The research is inductive, applied, qualitative, descriptive, case-study based, and participatory, with an empirical field restricted to the GTs of the TRE-GO and an analysis of institutional practices observed since the creation, within the Court, of the Goals Management Office (GGM) in 2023. The study proposes the application of Design Thinking (DT) as a collaborative approach to ideation and prototyping, the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) in the management of work processes, and the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard for mapping process flows. The conceptual framework was built based on the Base for Unified Integrated Layered Design (BUILD) Model, which organizes artifacts into three levels of abstraction: foundational, structural, and operational, articulating four theoretical constructs, four structuring axes, and twelve methodological components distributed across the input, throughput, and output phases. The structure was submitted to validation by an expert panel, in accordance with the methodological requirements of DSR. The results indicated the conceptual maturity of the artifact, especially in its foundational elements, but revealed limitations in the initially proposed graphic representation, which supported its visual redesign. It is expected that the systematization of the organizational learning curve, through triangulation among theory, empirical evidence, and normative guidelines, will result in an artifact capable of guiding the structuring, management, and control of GTs, promoting efficiency, traceability, transparency, and the consolidation of a culture of compliance. As a limitation, it is noted that the final version of the conceptual framework was neither implemented nor submitted to a new round of formal validation, thereby constituting an agenda for future studies.