Life-Event Approach: Comparison between Countries Authors: Anamarija Leben, Mirko Vintar University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Administration, Gosarjeva 5, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
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Abstract. Designing user-friendly public e-services is one of the prime concerns of most e-government initiatives and programmes. In this context a life-event based approach seems to be one of the most promising. There are several research projects and several live-event description and design methodologies under development, most of them still in an early stage. In the paper we are trying to focus and compare three selected methodological approaches to designing live-events. Main aim of our research was to compare the selected approaches and outline their main characteristics as well as differences between them.
1
Introduction
A life-event approach in designing public services has proved to be one of important initiatives in e-government programmes in Europe and worldwide. Many public web portals use this approach. At University of Ljubljana, this approach was employed in the project 'Development of an Intelligent Life-Event Portal' [5,6]. Within this project, the concepts of an active life-event portal were introduced. The core system of such portal is a knowledge-based system that uses a pre-defined structure of particular lifeevent to form an active dialog with the user and in this way helps him to identify and solve his problem related to a particular life-event. The development of an adequate methodology for description of life-events was one of the major tasks in this project. When evaluating the developed methodology, we found out, that in some other European countries similar methodologies were introduced. We find two projects especially interesting: 'Life Event Access Project' in Great Britain [2] and 'An Integrating Platform for Realising Online One-Stop Government' [1], which is a joined project of three countries (Austria, Greece and Switzerland). Our main aim in this paper was to compare these approaches and point out some differences between them.
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Life-Event Methodologies
LEAP – Life Events Access Project is a partnership project within a group of Councils in Great Britain [2]. It aims to utilise knowledge management in order to improve service provision to customers. LEAP combines services around life-events.
The LEAP project applications will query the user about their needs and requirements and steer them to the processes and information they require. eGOV – An Integrating Platform for Realising Online One-Stop Government has as a main objective the provision of an open, extensible and scalable platform for realizing online one-stop government [1]. ILEP – Development of an Intelligent Life-Event Portal aims to develop a prototype of an intelligent life-event portal [5], a language for description of lifeevents, life-events models, an on-line repository of life-events and supporting system for managing this repository. LEAP Methodology LEAP concentrates on developing knowledge about local services, which are typically organized under service headings. For different reasons [2], services are broken down into discreet processes. Sets of these processes are then aggregated under particular life-event. A service can comprise one or more functions and a function one or more processes. A function can also be described as a branch process, a branch process usually comprises one or more leaf processes and a leaf process is an operation or a group of related activities. Branch processes are high-level processes. Leaf level processes are self-contained; they should contain all the functionality to allow them to operate as self-contained units. The same leaf level process can be used in different branch processes. The model of branch process indicates its hierarchical structure. The project requires agreeing a standard methodology for mapping life events and services. Expert knowledge about how specific services are delivered is captured in the process maps to enable non-expert front-line staff to make correct decisions and give expert advice. The chosen method for process mapping is required to capture customer-facing processes in order that they may act as a guide to generic staff and also to be transposed into rule based software systems. Decision tree diagramming method was selected with some additional features from standard flow chart diagrams [2]. Only leaf level processes are modelled as decision trees [3]. The end-points of a process map presents information whether a customer is eligible to certain public service or not with additional information about process. The depth of a process map depends on the depth of customer involvement. A map stops when the customer involvement ceases. eGOV Methodology Within this project, a framework including a terminology that links “life events” and “business situations” with “public services” and “processes” was developed [4]. A public service consists of one or more processes. A particular process may be a part of different public services. In a further decomposition, a process may be composed of several process steps and operations. The methodology proposes two types of public services: an elementary public service is public service produced by a single public organisation, a composite public service is composed of one or more elementary public services and addresses a specific need of a user.
Life events indicate the overall semantic content to facilitate the customer's navigation, orientation and search through the complete public authorities' offers. However, the customer does not consume a life-event but public services as the concrete products. Therefore, public services are the core concept to be handled by the eGOV integrated platform. Life-events and public services present an external viewpoint, while processes and process steps present an internal viewpoint of public administration functioning. In literature, available about eGOV project on Internet, diagramming methods for modelling basic concepts of presented framework are not especially defined, although in some examples UML use case diagrams and sequence diagrams are used [4]. ILEP Methodology According to the ILEP structural design, an intelligent guide through life-event has three levels [6]: (1) level of topics, where life-event is identified; (2) level of lifeevents that results in a list of generic administrative procedures required to solve a life-event (also a sequence and/or parallelism of these procedures must be apparent) and (3) level of procedures, where a variant for each generic administrative procedure is identified (for each variant, required documents and guidelines are defined). A lifeevent is understood as a whole process of solving a particular user's problem. An implemented methodology for description of life-events captures these three levels. For each level, different diagramming techniques were selected for modelling. A model of a main topic is a tree, presenting its hierarchical structure. Leafs of these tree are composed life-events. To model the decision-making process related to the execution of a life-event, the concepts from eEPC (extended event-driven process chain) diagrams where used. A function (an element presenting an action in eEPC diagrams) can present a life-event, an elementary life-event or generic administrative procedure depending on the level of particular life-event. The model of generic administrative procedure that aims to identify parameters to define a variant of the procedure is based on AND/OR graph.
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Comparison of the Methodologies
The comparison of described methodologies (Table 1) is based on different features. A design method refers to a process of structuring and describing life-events. Within LEAP project, processes are starting points of this analysis what indicates that mainly bottom-up approach was implemented. Within other two projects, a top-down approach is implemented. The BPR feature indicates whether a business process reengineering is implemented or not. LEAP project especially instruct that no BPR is allowed [3], while eGOV project particularly requires BPR [4, Pg. 20]. In ILEP project, only redesign of processes is planned. There are two viewpoints of PA functioning: external refers to characteristics important to customer, while internal viewpoint refers to characteristics important for PA itself. In eGOV project, both viewpoints are considered, while LEAP project deals only with external point of view [3]. ILEP methodology is focused manly on external viewpoint with some internal aspects to identify all procedures and their parameters for a particular life-event.
Public service could be divided in four phases [4]: (1) information and intention building phase, (2) contracting phase, (3) service delivery and payment phase, and (4) aftercare phase. Therefore, a next compared feature indicates, which phases of public services are considered in particular methodology. A very important aspect is, whether a life-event is regarded as a process or not. In a broad sense, a life-event presents a concept, where processes are combined in one complex process. On the other hand, a life-event can be only regarded as a topic, under which all corresponding processes are gathered. Whether implemented methodology enables to depict a parallelism in process or life-events execution or not, is a very important aspect if we want a methodology to be comprehensive enough to describe all types of processes involved in a public service delivery. This aspect suggests also diagramming techniques applied to model processes and life-event.
compared
Table 1. Comparison of presented methodologies for description of life-events
Design method BPR Viewpoint Phases of public services Life-event as a process Parallelism Diagramming techniques
Methodology for description of life-events LEAP eGOV ILEP mainly bottom-up top-down top-down no reengineering redesign external external and internal mainly external information all phases information no partly yes no yes yes Decision trees UML tools eEPC, AND/OR graphs
A comparison of presented methodologies indicates that the comprehension of implemented methodologies corresponds to the scope and objectives of particular project. The intention of this comparison is not to criticize one methodology or another or to point out which one is the best. The results of comparison should encourage the developers and designers to consider different aspects of life-events, which are important if we want to achieve real benefits from life-event approach for customers as well as for public institutions and organisations.
References 1. eGOV - An Integrating Platform for Realising Online One-Stop Government. http://www.egov-project.org/default.htm (February 2003) 2. LEAP - Life Event Access Project. http://www.leap.gov.uk. (February 2003) 3. LEAP - The LEAP Process Mapping Guide (released on January 2001). http://www.leap.gov.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/training/000063.pdf 4. Tambouris E., Spanos E., Kavadias G. (Eds.), eGOV Services and Process Models Functional Specifications (Jan 2002). http://xml.coverpages.org/eGOV-D121.pdf 5. Vintar et all. Development of the Intelligent Life-Event Portal, Year Report. School of Public Administration, Ljubljana, November 2002. (in Slovene) 6. Vintar, M., Leben, A. The Concepts of an Active Life-event Public Portal. In: Traunmüller, R., Lenk, K. (Eds.), Electronic Government, Proceedings of the First International Conference, EGOV 2002, Aix-en-Provence, France, September 2002. Springer-Verlag. Pg. 383-390.
