Alice is an emancipated young woman. Although she loves her job, today she is not able to fully concentrate on it. Her thoughts keep slipping away and her hands perform the trained movements rather automatically. She is impatiently waiting for the end of working hours to return to her dream – a brand new flat located in a housing estate in the middle of a quiet suburb.
She was dreaming about her own flat for many years – since the time of her very first lodgings. She remembers all the rooms she found herself in – small, noisy, alien spaces with limited privacy to live in. And finally, her dreams have become true. She gave back the key from her last lodging and started a new period of her life.
She managed to move house physically thanks to friends who helped her to turn the dream into reality. What remains is to move house also in an administrative way – to carry out a procedure for changing permanent address and subsequently perform all related operations resulting from this change. Thus, Alice faces a serious problem, since she has only a hazy recollection what to do. The problem is, that she does not know:
· What services offered by governmental bodies and/or public authorities are relevant to the situation she is facing (which services cover her case). To make matters worse, several services offered by different institutions should be combined together.
· Which institutions should she contact (e.g. based on her new address).
To cope with this problem she can receive some support, which can be of two forms (before and after the Access-eGov project):
… before the implementation of the Access-eGov project:
Alice is lucky enough to live in a town which is served by the so-called “Responsibility Finder” (Zuständigkeitsfinder) (RF) – a very popular service for citizens and businesses to find the responsible PA agency and/or to find an online e-government service to take care of her matters, while taking into account location or other relevant case-based information (thus within the Access-eGov project also the transfer of the existing good practice from the old EU member state to the new member states will take place). The system is meant to be a starting point or an entry gate to eGov processes.
The RF system provides Alice with the opportunity to find all relevant information she needs (services to use, which service is offered by which institution, where relevant institutions are located, their working hours, how it is possible to get there, what information/documents it is necessary to submit when applying for a service, etc.). But she can benefit from the RF only if she knows what to search for. Otherwise, the RF is of little help.
To cope with the problem, Alice uses her web browser to access a local RF-like system. Fortunately, a friend of her faced the problem of moving house recently, so that Alice knows which types of services to search for. So she is looking up all the services her friend used when moving house, except for visiting the Traffic Police registration office since she has no car and therefore she does not require any service from this institution. Having received information on the relevant services, she drafts her personal work-plan (workflow) – a sequence in which she intends to use particular services (some services depend on results received from previous services, e.g. it is necessary first to register permanent residence and then use the confirmation produced by this service to ask for relevant change of data in identification card etc.).
Finally, she starts to execute her workplan. If some service is available electronically, Alice is redirected to that service. Preparing required information and submitting it to the service is left up to her. If the service is not available in an electronic way, she can use obtained information to collect required documents and visit the relevant institution personally.
Unfortunately, things are not running so smoothly as Alice has expected. Some pitfalls occur when she tries to use some services. When visiting the citizen registration office of the local authority she belonged to according to her previous address, in order to unregister her permanent residence, she found her visit useless because local authorities within the town she lives in are partly interconnected and it is enough to visit the registration office of the local authority she belongs after moving house in order to register her new permanent residence. This registration will result in subsequent un-registering permanent residence in an automatic way (but not in case of moving to another town – in this case both visits are necessary).
Moreover, her first visit to municipal registration centre for fee for TV and radio concessions was not successful. She relied on information obtained from the RF but due to recent change of working hours (not reflected in RF) she missed the clerk responsible for registering citizens and maintaining their data including permanent address. Similar situation arose when Alice visited the office for municipal waste disposal. The difference was that Alice came within working hours – but without a document required to use the relevant service.
Lastly, Alice becomes a lawbreaker. She does not register her pet (a pup Bill) at the local authority in district of which her new flat is located. The reason is trivial – her friend (the one from whom she obtained information what services to use) had no pet.
... and after the implementation of the Access-eGov project:
Alice does not need to ask anybody experienced in moving flat in order to find out which types of services she should use to complete her moving flat procedure. Instead of it she simply uses her web browser to visit a local node of the Access-eGov Mediator (AGM) – a system representing a real starting or entry point to eGov processes, being in charge of an e-government gateway and of all e-government transaction services in the region.
The core of the AGM system is based on the principle embodied in 'Responsibility Finder', but greatly enhanced vertically as well as horizontally. In addition to the ability to find the responsible PA agency and/or to find a relevant e-government service, it is able to compose particular services into more complicated metaservices while ensuring semantic interoperability among those particular services. Citizens' (or businesses') requests and related case-based data are combined with other information resources and processed in a meaningful manner. Users are provided with support for executing the relevant services. Moreover, the system is able to scale up from local and municipal levels through regional level up to international and European levels.
In the meantime, Alice answered a few questions in order to identify her case (e.g. previous and new permanent address, whether she has a car or not, etc.). Based on the information extracted from her answers, she is provided with a workplan in the form of a workflow (now constructed by the AGM) comprising required types of services along with information on responsible institutions and/or locations of those services which are accessible online. The workflow is not a general one but it is customised to Alice's case – it consists of only those services which are relevant to her (i.e. no visit to the Traffic Police is recommended). On the other hand, it is fairly complete – all required services are included (e.g. in addition to above mentioned services also changes of permanent address in a registration offices of the Tax Office and Health Insurance company are suggested). Since the AGM system creates a shared information space with governmental services, the risk of any pitfall during executing the proposed workflow is minimal.
Next, Alice receives a question, whether she needs an assistance to execute the proposed workplan to solve the problem of changing permanent address she faces. In order to continue in our example, let us suppose that she eagerly accepts a helpful hand from the AGM.
A personal software assistant is assigned to her by AGM in order to execute the workplan to cope with her case. The assistant monitors the execution of the workflow. If some activity can be done in an electronic way (e.g. by accessing some web service), the assistant can carry out this task on behalf of Alice. If the next activity from the proposed workflow cannot be performed electronically, but Alice should visit some institution personally or approach it by phone, fax, etc., then the assistant provides her with helpful information on location and working hours of the institution to be visited, which documents are necessary to submit (and if possible, the assistant prepares them), etc.
During the execution of the workflow or after its completion, Alice has the possibility to jot down her experience with the way her case was satisfied. Her 'good practice' will be stored together with a context. Next time some another AGM’s user tries to solve a similar problem, not only a workplan how to solve it will be generated, but he/she will be provided with Alice's and other users' good practices (filtered in an appropriate way – only those practices will be shown, which have the same or similar context).
How to cooperate?
If you want information about possibility of cooperation do not hesitate to contact us.
Access-eGov Coordinator e-mail: Tomas.Sabol@tuke.sk
