Policy Context and Legal Framework

Administrative simplification and electronic administration (e-Government) are decisive challenges if we are to raise standards of competitivity, economic growth and quality of life in Portugal. With decisive support from information technologies (ITs), their main goals are to make life easier for people and economic agents, make interaction with the State more convenient and transparent, and make the internal workings of the Public Administration faster and more flexible.

The objectives of the modernisation of the Public Administration are an essential part of the process of putting Portugal in the group of European countries that are leading the way to achievement of the Lisbon Strategy, which is now focusing on growth and employment in Europe via the launch of the “i2010 – A European Information Society for Growth and Employment” initiative.

In answer to this major challenge, the Portuguese Government has brought all the different commitments and goals together in one far-reaching strategic plan known as the Simplex Programme.

In practice the Simplex Programme incorporates a vast Administrative and Legislative Simplification Programme designed to reduce bureaucracy, increase the State’s transparency and the Public Administration’s efficiency, and improve people’s relationship with public departments.

The Lisbon Declaration, signed during the Portuguese Presidency of the European Council in 2007, reinforces the need to “increase social impact by ensuring that all citizens benefit from eGovernment services. Contribute to the achievement of a better social environment; higher cohesion, greater effectiveness and impact of Government services targeted towards groups in need of social support and those who do not themselves directly use ICT. Make available targeted, combined, flexible and accessible multi-channel services, including face-to-face delivery support and advanced ICT tools, whilst preserving and assuring traditional channels. Facilitate combined delivery of services and better coordination between the different stakeholders engaged in service delivery at all levels, with special focus given to public agents who need to be trained and be legally enabled to act, if required, on behalf of the citizen.”

This project responds directly to this purpose.

Implementation and Management Approach

All Portuguese Public Administration (Central and Local) can contribute/participate to this governmental project.

The Agency for Public Services Modernization (AMA) managed the entire Project including IT, reengineering and change management.

The public entities can join this project in several ways:

• Offering services in multiservice and integrated desks, managed by the AMA;
• Using the technology platform in their oun desks when in attendance in the Citizen’s Shops

The main role of AMA as coordinator is to:

• Provide services in multiservice and integrated desks on behalf of partners organizations
• Provide the technological platform
• Ensure all costs involved in the adaptation of services to the new desks, particularly in the frontoffice;
• Respect the agreed service levels

The main role of public entities is to:

• Develop with AMA, the functional analysis of the services.
• Respect the agreed service levels.
• Provide access to information systems when necessary in order to integrate the systems.
• Provide the essential information to produce attendance guidelines;
• Accept, when applicable, the electronic authentication of Citizens Card.

Until know AMA established legal protocols with 15 public entities from central and local government.

Technology solution

The Government Multichannel Platform: At Citizens and Businesses Service

Our world is changing rapidly, and so is the ongoing relationship between governments and the customers it serves. Today, the demands on governments to serve citizens and businesses have never been greater.

With the input of a large number of government partners, we have created the Government Multichannel Platform, a solution set that helps the Portuguese government solve its unique business challenges. Component-based, Services Oriented Architecture and rapidly configurable, Government Multichannel Platform can support common technology and process foundations across agencies – helping government agencies to deliver high quality, and highly efficient, service to citizens and businesses, everywhere.

The Government Multichannel Platform is a comprehensive solution designed to help government agencies nationally wide to serve citizens and businesses. Leveraging the Microsoft product stack, Siebel CRM and template applications, Government Multichannel Platform delivers a wide range of business capabilities, meeting the following needs for:

·         Communication applications: Applications to enable an agency’s employees to receive and send e-mail, to manage calendars, to communicate in real-time, and more;

·         Search: Functionality for desktop and Internet content search;

·         Citizen portal: A Web site that provides search capabilities, links to other Internet resources, and functionality for personalizing information and services pages for citizens and businesses;

·         Interactive forms: Services application forms that citizens and businesses can fill out and submit online;

·         Geographical information systems (GIS): Tools for cartographic data entry, mapping/spatial query, and visualization of maps;

·         Intranet portal: Provides staff with an integrated view of information across an organization with single sign-on to Web-based applications; ·     

·         Citizen contact center (citizen relationship management): The ability to provide multichannel access (phone, Web, e-mail, and instant messaging) to the information and services of a government agency, and to integrate with case management;

·         Case management: Functionalities that, in response to internal or external event triggers, enable government employees to set up workflows to assess, plan, perform, monitor, and evaluate the options and services required by constituents;

·         Document and record management: Applications that enable gathering and feeding of documents and other media into collections, formatting and conversion, organizing and maintaining information, and managing user access and editing rights.

Impact

With the 2nd Generation of Citizen’s Shop Project, Portugal aims to achieve many objectives in a short-term and in a long-term period. Some of the impacts are observed at the opening moment of a Citizen’s Shop, but the main results, especially the quantitative ones, are obtained in the chain of events of the public services delivery.

Some of the mail objectives and impacts for the stakeholders, whether they are the local and central government or the citizens, are:

·         More efficiency and transparency in Public Administration;

·         More trust in public departments and civil servants;

·         A new system to provide public services, where the organizations is according to the people’s needs and not the organization of the Portuguese public administration;

·         Share of experiences, IT systems, human resources and costs;

·         Decentralized public services delivery;

·         Multi-channel services and information delivery;

·         To give the same information in all channels available to deliver the services (face-to-face, telephone or online);

·         Context and administrative costs reduction;

·         Waiting time and dislocation time reduced;

·         Simplification and integration of cross-departmental processes;

·         Processes and procedures central management;

·         Business Intelligence and control indicators comparable at national level;

·         Employment growth and more competitive businesses.

In a long-term vision, Portugal expects to grant more quality of life, more opportunities, more competitively and efficiency for all citizens and the public administration itself. In the future, the Portuguese public administration may have a single face to establish the contact with citizen’s that assures quality and professionalism in their public activities.

Track record of sharing

Any Public Administration can learn from us and replicate this services delivery model. In the several eGov European groups that Portugal participates, the project has been presented in two ways: as a practical example or as a global model for the services delivery. In both is has obtained positive reactions.

In the eGov group of the EUPAN Network and in the Learning Team about Administrative Burdens for Citizens, for example, the 2nd Generation of Citizen’s Shop has been presented and we have shared our knowledge in the meetings or by e-mail with the Member-State representatives.

Greece and France are in the implementation phase of one of these desks, the Integrated Document Renewal Desk. Germany has also showed some interest in the concept but has not yet started an implementation project. The change of experiences has been made directly between project managers of each country.

Other Member-States such as Romania have asked us for detailed information about processes orchestration and the platform architecture, including infrastructure, communications and knowledgebase integration.

Several governmental Project teams have come to Portugal to visit the 2nd Generation of Citizen’s Shop in operation to observe the desks, services dynamics and processes organization. The United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan and Cape Verde are some of the countries that have visited us and with whom we have shared experiences, lessons learn and documentation.

Lessons learnt

·         Project Management, High Level Governance, processes design and IT implementation enabled us to support this public service delivery evolution and to assure the cross-organizational cooperation

·         Involve the entities since the project design is a guarantee of success.

·         Relation between different public entities with a common target accelerates the reengineering of administrative procedures.

·         If public entities have direct advantages of a service implementation, the process is better accepted for all.