Seamless, Ctzen-Orented Servce Delvery According to the Capgemini report (Capgemini, 2005) on online availability of public ser- vices (the survey covered 17 countries and examined 20 basic public services), the online sophistication of public service delivery in Europe is situated between one-way interaction (stage 2) and two-way interaction (stage 3) (measurement October 2004). Moreover when results are broken down into the target groups, citizens and businesses, it appears that online sophistication for governmental services are significantly higher for businesses than for citizens. The results of the survey also sketch out e-government progress: e-service improve- ments in the period 2001-2004 register an increase of six percentage points (Capgemini, 2005). This means that over the last three years, online development of public service has improved but much work still remains to reach the highest level of complete transactional public services (Halligan & Moore, 2004). There is more and more need for providing the glue interconnecting separate initiatives and efforts into a single and global approach (an integration model enabling the collaboration between participating governmental agencies and citizens).
The next stages of e-government will involve the development of hidden infrastructure, joined-up back-office systems, possible reengineering of administrative processes and more considerable funding with benefits which are likely to emerge slowly and be less evident.
However this new phase is essential for seamless service delivery becoming a reality. The logic of customer-focus, seamless, and integrated e-government and the need to work in cooperation to ensure interoperability and reduce duplication applies as much as across jurisdictions as it does across agencies at the same level of government, and involves a number of issues, including:
• Ease-of-use and user-friendliness
• Personalized and accessible services
• Support of citizen migration across different countries
• Respect of public administration autonomy
• Integration of public administration legacy system
• Private and public service integration
• Continuous improvement and evolution of e-government solutions
In the following a detailed analysis of requirements for seamless service delivery from both citizen and public administration point of view is provided.
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and efficiency is perceived from citizens; in this case the main requirements for a seamless service delivery concern user satisfaction about government services (user-friendliness, information accessibility, ease-of-use, etc.). On the other hand back-office refers to the in- ternal operations of an organization that are not accessible or visible to the general public;
in this case the main requirements for a seamless service delivery are about integration of heterogeneous information systems, interoperability between agencies, and so forth. Hence, the main requirements for a quality service delivery change align with the two different points of view: the citizen point of view and the public administration point of view.
From the citizen point of view the main requirements for seamless service delivery are about citizen-centered, effective, and efficient services; in particular the following needs can be outlined:
• Focus.on.users’.needs: So far, services offered by public administrations were mainly focused on the expectations of the administrations themselves rather than on the real needs of the citizens. Public services should not be designed around public administra- tion needs. Instead, they should be centered according to citizen needs (for instance either increasing the number of online services or decreasing administrative response time).
• User-friendly.services: Provide citizen-oriented services hiding to the citizen the complexity and fragmentation of public administration performing the necessary operations for collecting the information to deliver government services instead of the citizen. Citizen comfort depends on the ergonomics of the services offered: the simplicity of the tasks to be carried out and the terminology used, but also the unifor- mity of presentation of services provided by different agencies. Moreover the move from one administration to another should not be troubling for the citizen: similar data should have similar names and similar actions have to be presented in the same way.
• Personalized.services: Personalization of services over time by tailoring what the government provides to the individual citizen (Accenture, 2004). The development of e-government permits personalized processing, centered on the individual needs of each citizen; services can interpret available data within the context of a particular time, whereby services and information change as certain events occur.
• Access.and.accessibility: Provide 24/7 service availability (i.e., provide services to citizens every time they need them, wherever they are, increasing access possibili- ties while reducing delays). Services should be completely available to anyone with Internet access, or an opposite terminal should be provided, in order to save citizens from having to travel for simple matters (a better access to public services is important in peripheral or rural areas).
• Transaction.handling: Allow service delivery at the transaction level (the highest interaction level between citizen and administration, supporting online handling of a complete service). Users can enter information and engage in electronic transaction with the administration. Seamless services at the transaction level require real-time responsiveness by government agencies to the service demand of citizens and the administration ability to share data with the other governmental agencies. This way,
Seamless, Ctzen-Orented Servce Delvery citizens can obtain high-level services without having to provide the same documentation or data time and time again and without having to move to several administrations.
• Support.migration across.different.countries: Help citizens during their migration from one country to another. Since the integration of Europe into a single market, the citizens of the European Community member states should be able to migrate from one European country to another with as few problems as possible. Yet, mobile European citizens have to deal with time and money consuming administrative procedures. If the collecting of required documents costs a lot of time and money for citizens in their home country, for foreign citizens, the situation is even worse.
• Quality.of.service: Citizens should benefit from the information given, which must be up to date and offer relevant self-service options. Seamless services should improve citizen life providing simplified procedures and preventing them from wasting money and time. Moreover services should enable users to find out the status of their official papers or the progress of their requests and should reduce as much as possible the need for users to provide redundant information already held by the authorities.
From the administration point of view the main requirements of quality seamless service delivery include, among others, data reuse, services sharing as well as legacy system integration. Hence “interoperability” and “integration” are crucial issues for developing and implementing seamless services. It is worth noting that interoperability is not only a technical issue dealing with distributed computing, but it deals also with information sharing among different administrations and the redesign of administrative processes to support more effective delivery of e-government services. Three levels of interoperability are relevant to seamless service delivery: technical, semantic, and organizational (European Commission, 2003). The first one refers to technical issue of connecting computer systems, defining common communication protocols, and data formats. The second one concerns the exchange of information in an understandable way even between applications that were not initially developed for this purpose. The third one refers to enabling processes cooperation between agencies at the same level of government as well as across different jurisdictions.
The main requirements for seamless service delivery according to the administration point of view are:
• Flexibility: Refers to efficient reuse of information while respecting technical and political capabilities of different administrations. Reuse refers to the possibility of reusing services and information instead of duplicated them at different agencies.
Efficiency refers to the ability to quickly and easily create new services using a com- bination of new and already existing services. Finally “respect technical and political capabilities” means allowing each administration to provide services according to different interoperability levels that do not require the same level of technological sophistication.
• Data.storage:.Seamless services require the administrations to share information they hold. The qualitative and economic advantages of e-government are based on the pos- sibility of sharing and exchanging data regarding the citizens. Therefore appropriate data storage and access mechanisms are required.
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• Integration.of.legacy.systems: Refers to promoting integration of legacy systems allowing a gradual transition from already existing information systems to the new ones. Different and heterogeneous applications should be able to exchange data and participate in a business process regardless of the implementation details (for instance, operating system or programming languages) underlying those applications, thus al- lowing technical interoperability.
• Shared.services: Refer to the consolidation of administrative or support functions (human resources, information technologies, etc.) from several departments or agen- cies into a single organizational entity (Accenture, 2005); that is, services provided by different agencies are shared and composed in order to deliver more complex services to citizens, allowing organizational interoperability.
• Interagency.cooperation:.Public services are composed of several activities involving different agencies and frequently need to link and use data from multiple and diverse information resources. Therefore in order to deliver seamless services to citizens, it is necessary to enable a real interagency cooperation which allows services and information sharing, reducing the need for users to provide redundant information already held by the authorities. Interagency cooperation is about definition of sharing rules, cooperation policies as well as a common standard language thus allowing for organizational and semantic interoperability.
• Horizontal.and.vertical.integration: Refers to promoting integration among agencies and departments within the same level of government (horizontal) and integration of central government services with state, local, or municipal services (vertical) (OECD, 2004). While horizontal integration has long been a goal of many countries and is still a challenge area, governments are now beginning to look beyond this to the next challenge: vertical integration. Vertical integration adds a layer of complexity to the e-government challenge but it is a fundamental challenge to integrate services for a seamless interaction for citizens.
• Scalability.and.evolution.over.time: Provide a flexible, scalable, and evolutionary solution in order to support changing and evolving needs of public administration. As public sector administrative organization, functional division, as well as legislative regulations evolve continuously, it is necessary to provide a technology-independent solution for seamless service delivery which facilitates system evolution over time.
Finally, the use of standards and modeling techniques for formalizing system speci- fication and conceptualization allow a better support of system evolution over time.
Table 2 summarizes the requirements elicited throughout the previous paragraphs for quality seamless service delivery.
Many interesting solutions have been developed so far, the majority of them based on providing an Internet site where citizens can find information about governmental agencies and providing limited interaction functionalities (Belgium Web site, n.d.; Austrian Web site, n.d.). While some portal provides information concerning service delivered by multiple administrations together with contact information, another portal goes one step further pro- viding downloadable forms to request services. Very often, no support for complete online handling of the whole service is provided.
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More recently various middleware solutions are emerging as the dominant approach to tech- nical integration in several countries, allowing a cooperative data exchange for the delivery of certain services (such as business services or taxation) or for providing increased quality services to citizens (services at stages 3 and 4) (Baldoni, Mecella, Contenti, & Termini, 2003;
Pappa et al., 2003; Riedl, 2001). However a middleware oriented approach limits somehow the flexibility of the proposed solution in terms of both its integration with heterogeneous systems and its evolution over time. In order to design a flexible and interoperable system capable of easily evolving over the time a model-driven approach for system conceptualiza- tion and formalization is necessary. A model-driven system design, which is implementation and technology independent, allows overcoming limits of technology oriented systems in terms of reusability, interoperability, and transferability across different contexts. Moreover as front-office and back-office components are the two faces of the same coin, issues of both quality service provision and administration interoperability have to be fulfilled in order to provide seamless services. In order to address all these requirements it is necessary to pro- vide an operating model of shared service, that is, a model of cooperative and open service sharing and information reuse between agencies. The concept of the e-government service marketplace aims at proposing a conceptual approach for defining an operating model of shared services which abstracts from implementation constraints and technological details hence easing flexibility, interoperability, and evolution over time.