Swedish municipalities strive to digitalize their citizen facing services to the extent possible, directing citizens to digital self-service. While previous digitalization efforts using either bottom-up or top-down approaches, these changes often fail to deliver the expected outcomes, in terms of increased efficiency. This case study illustrates that change can take place from the middle-out through the introduction of municipal contact centers. Using a routine dynamics lens, we illustrate that by guiding and educating both citizens and departments, the contact center changes how routines are performed by citizens, contact centers, and departments alike. The departments have to adjust to the contact center’s demands for increased standardization, codification and interoperability of routines and processes, and contact centers drive cross-departmental change incrementally using digital artefacts such as scripts. These findings contribute to our understanding how citizen-centric change can come about in local authority and how routine interdependencies can be used to leverage organizational change.