An Integrated Platform for Realising Online One-Stop Government: The eGOV Project Efthimios Tambouris Archetypon S.A. 236 Sygrou Ave., 176-72 Kallithea, Athens, Greece
[email protected]
Abstract One-stop government refers to the integration of public services from a citizen’s point of view. Currently, the realisation of online one-stop government in Europe is in an infant state. The eGOV project recognises that online one-stop government can only realise its full potential if supported by an integrated, open and extensible platform. The aim of the project is to develop and evaluate this platform, which will include the next generation of governmental portals, the service repository and service creation environment, the Governmental Markup Language, and the supporting network architecture. The use of the platform is expected to provide significant benefits to both citizens and public authorities. This platform will be evaluated by public authorities in three European counties including two ministries in charge of realising online one-shop government.
1. Introduction One-Stop-Government refers to the integration of public services from a citizen’s –or customer of public services- point of view. Online one-stop government allows citizens to have 24 hours access to public services from their home or even on the move. Currently however online one-stop government is at its first only steps [7]. Ideally, online one-stop government requires that all public authorities are interconnected and that the citizen is able to access public services by a single point even if these services are actually provided by different departments or authorities. Furthermore, that the citizen is able to access these services in terms of life-events and without knowledge of the functional fragmentation of the public sector. For example, “getting married” is a lifeevent and ideally the citizen should have been able to electronically handle all interactions with the public sector
that are required for getting married using a single point of access. This paper presents an integrated platform for realising one-stop government. This platform will be specified, designed, implemented and deployed within the eGOV project [3]. The eGOV is a 2-years project that is financially supported by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies Programme of the Fifth RTD Framework [9]. The rest of the paper is organised as follows. In Section 2 related work on one-stop government is reviewed. In Section 3 an overview of the eGOV project is given. In Section 4 the work to be carried out is in more detail presented. Finally, in Section 5 the conclusions are presented.
2. Related Work According to the European Commission “the issue at stake is not that Member States should produce more information, but that the information which is already available to the public should be clearer and more accessible to potential users” [5]. The eEurope 2002 Action Plan suggests: “eGovernment could transform old public organisation and provide faster, more responsive services. It can increase efficiency, cut costs, increase transparency and speed up standard administrative processes for citizens and business” [2]. The results from a study conducted by G8 also indicated that making information available and delivering information is one of the most important aspects of realising electronic government [6]. The concept of “one-stop service” allows the provision of information and services in a more integrated form. A study on one-stop government, that considers 11 European countries within the COST programme, suggests that the public sector is highly fragmented and does not reflect a customer’s perspective, who expects or prefers to have all
issues concerning a certain event or situation to be taken care of by one or a few, but not many service providers [7]. One-stop government is a solution for this problem as it provides integration. However, its promises are realised if integration is also coupled with fast delivery speed and broad accessibility. The main conclusion of this report is that: “One-stop government in Europe, on the whole, is in an infant state”. National portals to public services that support onestop government are in their first only steps [14]. Such portals have been implemented in many European counties e.g. www.ukonline.gov.uk (UK), www.help.gv.ac (Austria), www.polites.gr (Greece), www.opas.vn.fi (Finland), www.admifrance.gouv.fr (France), www.infocid.pt (Portugal), etc. Currently, however, these portals do not provide users with advanced characteristics such as those commonly found in commercial portals. Furthermore, currently these portals are not somehow interconnected with the public authorities that provide the content and services. Usually, the portals inform the citizens on the procedure that should be followed and let them contact the relevant public authorities to perform the required transaction(s) or obtain further information. A number of studies and products have been lately produced to assist in developing portals to realise online one-stop government [1][8][11]. These however should be also integrated into a more general framework and strategy for electronic government, as in [10] or [13]. A number of problems arise from the fact that public authorities are not integrated with the national portal. First of all, public services are usually not delivered by the portal itself but the citizen has to visit the relevant authorities. Secondly, it is often the case that the same information on certain life-events are replicated at the Web sites of many authorities that stand at the same level of the public sector’s hierarchy e.g. municipalities. Finally, it is virtually impossible for the public or private sector to create added-value content and services based on the public information. This has been realised in the United States and resulted in a large number of new jobs. Lately, the use of XML technologies is investigated to develop a standard format for public services [4][12]. Furthermore, it is recognised that technological aspects are not the only problems; legal and social aspects need also to be resolved and training is required before Europe can effectively achieve the same results with the United States [5]. Finally, organisational aspects including process models and re-engineering methods are widely used in the business sector but are not a common practice in the public sector.
3. Overview The objective of the eGOV project is to specify,
develop, deploy and demonstrate an integrated platform for realising online one-stop government. More specific objectives include: • To specify and develop the next generation of governmental portals featuring advanced characteristics (e.g. personalisation, multilinguality, access from different devices, digital signatures, etc.) that will allow citizens to access public content and services based on life-events. • To specify and develop a content and service repository where all life-events and supporting material (e.g. certificates) will be stored and a service creation environment for the administration of the repository. • To specify and implement the ‘Governmental Markup Language’ to enable the data flow between the portal and the service repository. • To specify and develop the network architecture that will provide security, authentication, authorisation etc. • To use the service creation environment in order to create a number of national and local life-events and services or port existing content into the service repository. The offered services will be determined within the project, however it is expected that they will include: o Information for the general public (emergencies, gas stations, hospitals, etc.) o Push services to remind citizens and companies on their obligations to the public administration according to the provided profile e.g. submission of taxes report, payment of road taxes etc. o Information for the interaction between citizens or companies and public authorities (registration of new company, tax legislation, etc.) o A variety of certificates. • To deploy and evaluate the platform in three European countries, namely Austria, Greece and Switzerland. The portal and national service repository will be deployed in the respective governmental authorities (mainly ministries) that are responsible for realising national one-stop government. The local service repository will be deployed in at least one of the collaborating local authorities. The eGOV project recognises that technological aspects are as important as human aspects and organisational aspects. In this context, the eGOV project also aims to investigate social aspects and suggest relevant workflows and process models thus allowing public organisations to fully exploit the benefits of the proposed platform.
From an operational point of view the main users of this platform are three: • The citizens and companies who are the end users. Citizens and companies will be provided with ubiquitous, 24 hours access to public services bundled around life-events through one national portal. The portal will allow access from different devices, such as Internet and digital TV, on-themove by means of WAP-enabled devices etc. It will further allow personalised content delivery and customisation while it will support multilingual content provision and push services and digital signatures. • One central government authority per country (commonly a department within a ministry). This authority will be responsible for administrating the national portal and the national service repository. The national service repository contains all lifeevents and related services provided at national level. • Ideally all public authorities. These will administrate a local service repository. This will include local life-events as well as local services (e.g. certificates etc.) As an example, consider again the citizen who insists to get married. He accesses the portal from his home PC or WAP-enabled device and selects the “getting married” life-event. The portal provides him with the procedure and all certificates required including relevant authorities e.g. that a birth certificate is required from the municipality that the citizen is registered. These data are stored in the national service repository. The portal will further ask the citizen if he would like all certificates to be sent to his home address (if this service is available). Suppose that the citizen would like to obtain the birth certificate himself and that he has already been registered with the portal and has provided his home address. Then by clicking on the birth certificate the portal will be connected to the local service repository of his municipality. The citizen will then be provided with the procedure required for obtaining the certificate including contact person, opening hours etc. By the end of this project, the platform will have been deployed and evaluated in three European counties, namely Austria, Greece and Switzerland. In Austria and Greece, this portal will be deployed and evaluated by the ministries that are responsible for realising national online one-stop government, namely the Austrian ministry of Public Services and Sports and the Hellenic ministry of Interior, Public Administration and Decentralisation. Furthermore, the service creation environment will have been deployed and evaluated in four European public authorities.
As a result of the project’s activities it is anticipated that at least in two European countries the developed portal might replace existing national portals to act as the main “window” to public services for citizens and businesses alike. The citizens will experience public services that are at least of the same quality as services provided by the private sector. The portal will support access from different devices, personalisation, security etc. Furthermore, the service creation environment will allow European public authorities to rapidly create and manage public content and services in a user-friendly, intuitive manner. The fact that a single national point will manage life-events will reduce redundancy in the information provided by various public authorities (usually common information are replicated in the Web sites of public authorities of the same hierarchy lever). Finally, the use of a common “language” for the public sector (namely GML) will ensure extensibility and interoperability, thus will guarantee the scalability and viability of the project. In summary, it is anticipated that the proposed platform will improve public authorities internal operation and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery to the public. Moreover, provide convenience, accessibility and quality of interaction with the public and businesses, revive processes within the public sector and promote the quality of services and the productivity of public organizations.
4. Description of Work One-stop government has the potential to transform the interaction between the public sector and the citizens and business. As stated by the eEurope initiative “it can increase efficiency, cut costs, increase transparency and speed up standard administrative processes for citizens and business” [2]. However, the realisation of one-stop government is a non-trivial exercise that calls for advances in a number of areas. The eGOV project identifies and addresses four key areas: • The eGOV platform that includes the governmental portals and network architecture. • The content and service repository and the service creation environment. • A common format for the data flow between the portal and the service repositories in different public authorities (this is termed Governmental Markup Language). • Associated social aspects and process models. An overview of the eGOV system is illustrated in figure 1. The main actors in the eGOV system three: • The citizens and businesses are the end users of this platform.
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A central governmental authority (usually a minister) is the administrator of the eGOV portal and the national service repository. This contains all national life-events and information on public services. The administration is performed using the eGOV service creation environment. Within the eGOV project, three authorities that already administrate existing portals will act as trial sites for evaluating the eGOV portals.
Virtually all other public authorities are the administrators of the local service repository. This contains all life-events and processes that have local only scope and information on public services provided by the public authority. The administration is performed using the eGOV service creation environment.
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Figure 1. Overview of the eGOV system The resulting eGOV system will have the following characteristics:
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Citizens will be able to access online public services that are bundled around life-events thus adhere to
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their needs and not the functional fragmentation of the public sector. Citizens will experience high-quality service provision with characteristics that match or even outperform those of commercial portals. These characteristics include: personalised content delivery, customisation, support of multilingual content, support of access from different media (including Web and WAP-enabled devices), support of push services, support for digital signatures, etc. Public authorities will be able to administrate the service repository in a user-friendly, intuitive way using a Web interface. Furthermore, the service repository will be as simple as a Word document or as complex as an RDBMS. This suggests that public authorities do not necessarily have to invest significant amount of money or know-how in order to be integrated into the eGOV system. Public authorities will be able to easily join the eGOV system in order for their services to be integrated and provided to citizens through the eGOV portal. The eGOV system is inherently extensible thus allows creating innovative services that will add value to the public content and services.
5. Conclusions and Future Work In this paper, the “integrated platform for realising online one-stop government” (eGOV) project is outlined. Within the eGOV project, various areas of online one-stop government will be investigated from frameworks for electronic government to technological and to social and organisational aspects. The main technological objectives include the development of the next generation of governmental portals, the content and service repository, the service creation environment (to be used by the operators at the public sector) and the Governmental Markup Language (GML). GML will be an XML application to support the life-event metaphor and will be promoted as an open standard to support interoperability between the national portal and other public authorities that provide content to the portal. The eGOV platform will be evaluated in three European countries, namely Austria, Greece and Switzerland.
6. Acknowledgements The work presented in this paper was carried out as a part of the eGOV project [3]. The eGOV project (eGOV IST-2000-28471) is partially funded by the European Commission under the IST programme of the Fifth RTD Framework and the author would like to acknowledge this support. The ideas expressed in this paper are those of the
author and do not necessarily express the ideas of other partners.
References [1] Deloitte Research, ‘Through the Portal: Enterprize Transformation for e-Government’, available at www.deloitte.com [Accessed on May 14th 2001], 2000. [2] eEurope 2002, An information Society for All Action Plan, http://europa.eu.int/comm./information_society/ eeurope/documentation/index_en.htm, 2000. [3] eGOV project, provisionally available at www.archetypon.gr/egov [Accessed on May 14th 2001]. [4] Ergi P., ‘GovXML: The Essence of eGovernment’, available at www.govXML.com [Accessed on May 14th 2001], 2001. [5] European Commission, ‘Public Sector Information: A Key Resource for Europe’, Green paper on Public Sector Information in the Information Society, ftp.echo.lu/pub/ info2000/publicsector/gppublicen.doc, 1999. [6] G8 GOL Democracy Team, ‘Democracy and Government On-Line Services’, www.statskontoret.se/ gol-democracy, 2000. [7] Hagen M., Kubicek H. (editors), ‘One-StopGovernment in Europe: Results of 11 national surveys’, University of Bremen, Bremen, www.fgtk.informatik.unibremen.de/cost, 2000. [8] IBM Global Industries, ‘Creating and implementing an e-government portal solution’, technical report, available at ibm.com/solutions/government, 2000. [9] Information Society Technologies Programme, www.cordis.lu/ist [Accessed on May 14th 2001], 2001. [10] Lenk K., Tranmüller R., 2000, ‘A Framework for Electronic Government’, DEXA 2000, IEEE Press, pp. 271-277. [11] Microsoft, ‘Microsoft in Government’, company report, available at www.microsoft.com/europe/industry/ government [Accessed on May 14th 2001]. [12] Salminen A., Lyytikäinen, Tiitinen P., ‘SGML for EGovernance: The Case of the Finnish Parliament’, DEXA 2000, IEEE Press, 2000, pp. 349-353. [13] Stamoulis D., Georgiadis P., ‘Vision, Roles and Steps for Governments in Transition to the Digital Age’, DEXA 2000, IEEE Press, 2000, pp. 369-376. [14] Suter W., ‘Rapport d’ Etude sur les guichets virtuels dans le monde’, available at www.admin.ch/egov/inhalt_fr.html [Accessed on May 14th 2001], 2000.
