Although many local authorities are introducing electronic services, there is still often no alternative but to go to the town hall and fill in a form. How can the citizen find their way through a maze of different services delivered in different ways?
“This is where we differ from other projects which only deal with e-services,” says Tomas Sabol of the Technical University of Košice in Slovakia who is coordinating the 11-member Access-eGov project. “We are trying to combine electronic and traditional services.”
In Access-eGov’s vision, citizens or businesses go to a web page where a ‘virtual personal assistant’ guides them through a menu of choices for the problem they are seeking help with. “The system then tries to find a service or a combination of services which will lead to achieving this goal. It provides a plan consisting of electronic services, if they are available, as well as traditional face-to-face services.”
Built-in flexibility
The assistant can invoke electronic services directly while explaining how to use any traditional services that may be appropriate, including how to find the office, opening hours and any documents required. The interface is designed with the needs of disabled users in mind as well.
Flexibility is also important. “Once a new e-government service becomes available it should be very easy to introduce it into the Access-eGov platform and to switch from traditional to e-government services,” Sabol says.
Access-eGov is being tested in three pilot schemes which are due to start in the autumn of 2007.
In Slovakia, the Košice regional authority is working with the municipality of Michalovce in a pilot on land-use planning and obtaining a building permit. This is a complex and confusing procedure which can require as many as 25 personal visits but Access-eGov will simplify matters by making the process as transparent and efficient as possible. The saving in time should be 15-20% immediately but could reach 30-40% when more electronic services become available.
The second pilot is being run by the city of Gliwice, in Poland, in co-operation with the Cities on Internet Association, which promotes the use of e-government in Polish municipalities. It will handle procedures for setting up a new company, a process that can be slow and cumbersome. In the local pilot alone, the time saved could amount to 20% but this could rise to 40% if national government offices, such as tax, social insurance and statistics, are linked in as well.
Responsibility finder
In Germany, the state government of Schleswig-Holstein is planning to use Access-eGov in a field test to upgrade its on-line ‘responsibility finder’ by adding a ‘semantic layer’ to help citizens locate services across different levels of state and local authorities. With four independent cities and more than 1 000 municipalities, the problem here is to keep the information up to date. The scenario is a German citizen wishing to marry a Slovak and the plan is to provide them with information about traditional services, all tailored to their specific case.
To test how these systems can cope with enquiries from outside the EU, the German University in Cairo is involved in all three pilots.
The project design is complete and the partners are now well into building the software. When the project finishes, at the end of 2008, Access-eGov will be made available as an open-source package to other public bodies together with guidance on how to use it. “We hope that public administrations will be enthusiastic enough to implement Access-eGov and to use it,” Sabol says. “That’s the main aim. It’s not about technology it’s about people.”
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