Impact
The novelty of ePractice.eu lies in blending online and offline service delivery to several convergent communities of practice and in the tie-in of many European Commission contractors and studies who now share a common interface to the outside world. The good practice cases featured on ePractice.eu have an average size of €1.3 mn and a total implementation cost of altogether €1.1 bn. However, there is still room to grow, as European eGovernment expenditure was measured at €11.9 bn by the EU-funded eGEP study (2004). ePractice.eu has 14,000 members from 46 countries, lists 900 cases (300% growth since Nov. 2007), issues 2.900 news items (around 40 per month) and over 700 events (average of 30 per month), most of them proposed by portal members, a live blog, and 14 communities in a wide variety of themes facilitated by key experts from the area with more than 1.300 members registered in the communities. In terms of the ePractice workshops, held face-to-face in central locations in Europe, more than 560 portal members attended to meet peer professionals, exchange views and discuss best practices all over Europe. An average of 95% of participants have expressed to be very satisfied or satisfied with the workshop. In addition, there is a co-branding strategy which will yield additional workshops with content coming onto the portal -more than 10 co-branded workshops have been added to the list. The portal migrated 300 cases from the Good Practice Framework as well as the news and library items from the IDABC eGovernment Observatory. Major goals as we move forward include growth in cases, news, library items, workshops, members - and stronger bonds between community members - in the end showing measurable effectiveness through sharing. We actively work to increase the number of visitors who become registered members, with full profile, to contribute to the blog and submit and present case experiences, take part in the workshops and join the communities of interest.
Track record of sharing
ePractice.eu is being looked at by several European administrations to be used as their own repository and exchange platform. Around 14 communities are building on epractice for their own needs. Finally thematic networks issued by CIP PSP calls will use epractice as their exchange website.
Lessons learnt
Lesson 1 - Create leadership buy-in in all concerned domains before launching the project.
Lesson 2 - Make sure deadlines are realistic and that the project survives when adjusted to changing circumstances.
Lesson 3 - Successful projects require strong, but humble leadership from start-to-end from a party who is respected or can build relations widely.
Project or service
Promotion/awareness campaign
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Further exploiting the potential of ePractice
I would like to share some thoughts about the ePractices tool(s) and the role of the EC in more general terms with regard to the exchange of best practice and the development of Pan European eGovernment services (PEGS).
It seems to me that there would be merit in assessing the exchange function of ePractice and to raise the question about which support is desired at the EU level and how this can be organised best to make the exchange happen. At what level should this take place: applications, organisational or technological? It seems to me that this is a market problem, where the EC is brokering the supply and demand for good practice. Do supply and demand actually match at ePractice or is it merely a supply/dissemination tool? The supply is signalling its successes and the EC is using success to breed success; i.e. as a source of inspiration. Does this presentation of the supply actually service the demand, or do case owners and developers need more concrete solutions, and operational support? Is this a layered process where ePractices does the flagging and the interested case owners take bilateral action when needed? If so must this follow on process be facilitated by the EC? Should the EC actively pursue the cases that have strong PEGS potential and invest in their transfer? What are the PE multipliers that could be presented as essential building blocks for allowing PE access (e.g. citizen centricity and organisation around life events).
The ePractices endeavour and the effective brokerage role of the EC, provide crucial services for good practice exchange and the emergence of PEGS. Even though ePractices is young and it may be hard to draw firm conclusions, it is in the spirit of this Web 2.0 day and age, to allow feedback and continuous adaptation. The users’ feedback can than be rapidly turned into better service provision. I understand that this is already happening to a certain degree, and the site is continually up dated.
I would like to get a practitioners view on how ePractice could further exploit its potential and become a tool for adaptive decision making, organisational learning and continuous improvement. Obviously its reach and impact can only go as far as the participants allow it to go; depending on the level of their engagement.
ePractice as good practice case of pan-European eGovernment
The remarks about the role of ePractice are very interesting, not only from the perspective of increasing the effectiveness of the EC in its brokerage function, but also from a more fundamental perspective: analysing new ways in which supply and demand find each other, and more in particular the issue of transaction costs. The way good practice transfer is set up until now has many of the characteristics of what economists call the 'gift economy', in which time and effort is exchanged without money as an intermediary but through reciprocal 'gifts' (not even gift-exchange between two actors, but 'gifts' of an actor to the community, the actor having benefits of being part of that community).
It would be interesting to see to what extent this mechanism works and when it fails to work - for example, what happens when practicioners have to put in substantial time, effort and money for the actual transfer of good practice to other contexts in other Member States? Are the costs and benefits distributed in an optimal way? Putting in more (European) money to facilitate good practice transfer by covering these costs is not the answer; in fact, research shows that monetary incentives can 'crowd out' other types of motivations and in effect may lead to less rather than more exchange. However, what other ways are there to stimulate actual transfer (rather than merely exchange) of good practices across borders? ePractice.eu is a 'good practice' in itself and an effective instrument for exchange; but how effective is it exactly, what works and what does not work, and why? What can we learn in more general terms about exchange and brokerage? At the European level, government-of-government will often consist of brokerage-type activity, given the autonomy of Member States; thus it is very important to learn more about how eGovernment can support European brokerage, and ePractice is a fascinating case for this.
ePractice pyramid
I see ePractice as a pyramid: with continuous improvement at the large base, organisational learning in the middle and adaptive decision making at the small top. Participants, and that can basically be anybody with an interest in the matter, will keep making improvements (or at least suggest them). Better solutions will continuously be invented. Learning is the next step, participants must be willing to learn from others and their suggested solutions.
Especially local governments are often turned inwards, their minds fixed on their own organisation and their own solutions that have worked for them in the past. Learning implies listening to others, engaging in discussions with others and drawing conclusions based on the opinions and experiences of others. Local governments must, in order to do so, broaden their horizon. There are many good ideas and good practices out there in Europe, but you must be willing to go out and find them.
When ePractice is actually to become a tool for adaptive decision making, we must make the last step: our decision makers must be truly engaged in ePractice and willing to adept solutions suggested and/or proven effective by others. I think that many (local) politicians are not (yet) willing to de so. It will take a different mindset, a different approach and a different way of working altogether. To help our decision makers on the way of becoming European ePractitioners is in my view the biggest challenge we face.
ePractice for dummies
There are loads of ideas to act on here already, but I wanted to share another one. Should ePractice issue How-to-guides on things like eProcurement, Running an eGovernment Project, etc? If so, in what format? Quick videos uploaded by users? Simply using the case format? Other ideas?
Some general observations about ePractice.
I would like to post some general observations about ePractice (of which I know some are outdated because they are to be expected in the coming upgrade of ePractice).
- As the amount of cases in ePractice.eu is growing it becomes increasingly important to rank and order cases to remain meaningful for practitioners. The rating system is already being deployed, it would be good to make it possible for the ratings to be used as a filter as well. Condition here is that users start rating the value of information more as this is currently not done enough.
- Getting rid of ghost cases, cases which are outdated and cases that are not perceived as valuable by ePractice visitors. Making use of the ratings could also here be a way to downgrade inactive and low value cases which furthermore has the advantage of the community instead of one administrator determining what is useful and what is not.
- Support the creation and further development of thematic networks in ePractice.eu. The three themes used now (e.g. eHealth, eInclusion, eGovernment) are not sufficient for the wide range of eGovernment applications available. Think of adding for example ePortals, eTaxes, eCadastres etc where a case owner should have the possibility to classify its case in more then one domain.
- Increasing the scope and use of communities (more prominent, central place for all information regarding a certain topic/ domain (news, blogs, events, cases).