Policy Context and Legal Framework

The e-Catalunya project is an accompanying measure intrinsically linked to the evolvement of a new vision of eGovernment services. The case is focused on how to provide guidance, support and contribution to design, develop and implement a new policy paradigm where value is defined by the users and citizens. Knowledge in this new scenario has to be generated collectively, under a collaborative environment, and the technology to implement innovative public services will have to follow the advice and conclusions gathered by a wide number of Communities of Practice.

In this sense, the application of Web 2.0 concept is of paramount importance, and was seen from the very beginning as the base to create enabling social networks. Its focused application is characterized by deepening user's participation and interactions, thus directly aligned with the key aim of gathering and generating shared and common knowledge by the support of collaborative work and learning processes.

The Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya developed by year 2004 a strategic approach to innovate eGovernment services, where a change of paradigm resulted in the need to recognize the key importance of collective ideas as the root to promote better public services. That implied an explicit acknowledgement of the value of the implicitly existing knowledge to generate additional efficiency.

The impulse to create operational Communities of Practice was seen as a way to create knowledge and new learning processes, inducing also specific proposals on how to exploit it. It was also recognized the existence of this "implicit knowledge", normally hold in a non structured and not documented way (no paper, no digital record or support) by the civil servants, related professionals and even by the citizens themselves.

This knowledge was also identified as highly fragmented and non exhaustive, thus lacking rigour and completeness to be able to be transferred into design or operational processes of new services. The adoption of a specific platform supporting the creation of numerous Communities of Practice allowed facilitating a proper gathering, treatment and storage of this implicit knowledge, complemented by the dynamics of tight interaction among the involved stakeholders.

The main strategy was based in structuring and securing the generation of explicit knowledge, alleviating the impact of retirement or job rotation. Sharing knowledge and experience helps getting a better ROI in training and human resources, at the same time that improves decision-making processes by involving all related levels in the organisation.

Implementation and Management Approach

The e-Catalunya project has been implemented and managed based upon a number of well defined components:

Technology solution

The e-Catalunya project is supported by a technological platform allowing for a secure, WAI AA-compliant and 24x7 online operation of all CoP, thus giving access to all needed functionalities to support online collaboration and members participation.

The e-Catalunya platform is a shared service platform, part of the corporate technological infrastructure of the Generalitat de Catalunya. The platform was designed in order to facilitate the easiest way to build instances for new CoP without having to incur in further developments, software licenses acquisition or changes in installations. CoPs benefits instantly of any new platform versions provided by the project, without having to devote any specific attention for platform developments or adaptations..

The technical platform is the results of integrating a combination of a broad number of open source software tools together with some ad-hoc specific developments, supported by open software architectures. Simplicity of use and security were taken as the key development principles. The overall advice and development support for this innovative platform was provided by the Polytechnical University of Catalunya.

The platform is running on the corporate data centre of the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya, fulfils all mandatory privacy and data protection dimensions and it is composed of the following components:

Management Tools

• File storage space, organized in hierarchical folders
• Distribution lists
• Photo albums
• RSS and alarms

Collaborative Tools

• Blogs
• Forums
• Social networks and knowledge networks maps (providing a visual representation of relational networks and domain involvements
• Participative processes (questionnaires, polls, and its related exploitation tools)
• Tag clouds
• Wikis

The basic infrastructure is supported by Linux OS, running on Apache web servers, Tomcat application servers, and using MySQL as database engine and OpenLDAP to secure authentication processes.

The portals are supported by the exoPlatform software platform, supported by JOSSO (Java Open Single Sign-On) an open source J2EE and Spring-based SSO infrastructure aimed to provide a solution for centralized, platform neutral, user authentication and authorization.

Collaborative tools for Forum are based upon phpBB software, toolbar text editing bar is based on FCKeditor, whilst distribution lists are supported by Sympa software, being the e-Catalunya searching engine based on Apache Lucene. The rest of software for Wikis, Weblogs Calendar, File Storage Space Management and Photo Albums was specifically developed and integrated for the project by the Polytechnical University of Catalunya.

Impact

The e-Catalunya project started on April 2006, and gives support currently to 1.100 Communities of Practice, composed of 15.000 members. The number of Communities of Practice have been growing at a sustained pace of 80-100% per year.

These members are getting access to 53 specific web portals, attracting a total of 20.000 visits/month and 9.000 nominated users/month.

In order to frame results the perceived benefits and impacts for all stakeholders involved a number of qualitative impact indicators could be mentioned:

• Improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of working procedures, now better based in ubiquitous and more asynchronous interactions.
• Community-building and reinforcement of the corporate identity. Civil servants and professionals are no longer working isolated from each other in their respective domains of interest or responsibility.
• Acquisition of a better and more standardized (and documented) praxis, thus having a direct influence in quality improvement.
• Increase of civil servants' and professionals' satisfaction level and institutional commitment.
• Equal-to-equal interactions, thus inducing a smooth change from a rather vertical (hierarchical) organisation towards a more transversal and horizontal structure, where the opinions and contributions of all CoP participants are taken into consideration.
• Overall alignment of the objectives of the CoPs with the specific objectives defined by the Strategic Plan of the Government of Generalitat de Catalunya.
• Creation of CoPs supported by a single and common technical platform, thus avoiding having to incur into specific technology developments.
• Implicit learning effect on the use and understanding of the potential of ICT, thus having an impact in fulfilling eventual digital gaps.

As far as more quantitative indicators, they are normally linked to each specific CoP impact. As an example, it could be presented the case of the "Compartim" (Let's Share) CoP of the Justice Department (www.gencat.cat/justicia/compartim). In this particular case, beyond the applicable qualitative indicators (better quality and usefulness of the delivered services) the metric is based upon four types of quantitative indicators (which tend to be very specific to each CoP, thus not allowing for direct comparison):

1. Production indicators: number of "knowledge products" (the outcomes of the CoP) generated, number of consultations to the knowledge products generated.
2. Process indicators: time spent connected online to the CoP during working (labour) time, representative percentage of each professional collective group in the CoP. In this particular CoP (Compartim) it was noted that the level of "representation" of each possible collective professional group was of about 15% (thus exceeding the average reported by the available research literature).
3. Impact indicators: in terms of direct and formal implementation and application at the institutional level of all "knowledge products" generated by the CoP

• o Number of similar cases where a protocol or a procedure developed by the CoP was applied
• o Number of professionals having benefited from the use of the protocol or procedure developed by the CoP.

4. Economic efficiency indicator: savings generated by improvement in the effectiveness of protocols or procedures.

The collaborative work in each of the CoPs results in the improvement of the related domain services. Overall this could described in the following way:

The collective work of the e-Catalunya model increases the quality of the object service of improvement. The results are ratios that show the efficiency of the model:

1. Data traffic reduction. As a consequence of the availability of shared data and the platform support to multi-peer interactions the network traffic is optimized, as there is no need to circulate unnecessary data replication. The distributed communication of the e-Catalunya model allows addressing the interlocutors in a more efficient way. This could be measured in terms of the volume of data transferred along the communications network.
2. Face to face meetings and ubiquitous work. By using e-Catalunya the members of the CoPs avoid travelling throughout the Catalan territory (estimated average of 120 km travel for each face to face meeting). This results in an estimated trips reduction in the range of 25% to 50%.
3. Use of standardized solutions in project's definition. The average duration of project definition phases in the case of complex organizations amounts for 4 up to 6 months. The adherence to standard procedures supported by collaborative work allows for a project design phases duration to be reduced from 40% up to 60%.
4. Collaborative learning. Participating in CoPs implies that their member become exposed to an implicit training effect. The cost savings of this non-formal training compared with the more conventional training procedures (with external trainer) is of 100% (or of 50% in those cases where the leading training person of the CoP gets remunerated for these particular activities).

Track record of sharing

The e-Catalunya project is by nature about sharing, but at the institutional level in an organisation, the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya, which is composed of an extremely complex and fragmented structure, this is 15 Departments, 28 Autonomous Bodies, 70 Public Companies and participation in 53 Consortia.

The project focused significant efforts in offering the benefits of applying an innovative vision to change management to the entire organisation, intended to boost an improvement in public services and on efficiency and effectiveness of service procedures, both at the general level and also at very specific level (areas, departments, groups).

The project has developed a significantly activity running dissemination sessions involving representatives of the e-Catalunya project and also of many of the supported Communities of Practice. Sharing of experience and knowledge has sometimes been transferred into specific conferences or events, like in the case of one of the CoPs "Compartim" (Let's share) - www.gencat.cat/justicia/compartim) having participated in the following conferences:

• - 8^th European Conference on Knowledge. Barcelona, 6-7 September 2007
• - 5^th International Conference on Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management & Organisational Learning. New York Institute of Technology: Nova York, 9-10 October 2008
• - XIII Congreso del CLAD sobre la Reforma del Estado y de la Administración Pública. Buenos Aires, 4-7 November 2008
• - Knowledge Management Conference (National Probation Service England & Wales). London, 2nd December 2008

The e-Catalunya project has organized dissemination actions at the National level, aimed to offer sharing the gathered experience in running an innovative exercise but also access to the developed platform to Public Authorities.

The project was nominated by the study "State-of-art in Good Practice Exchange" (ePractice project, deliverable D1.1.1, 2007) as one of the three most relevant cases of Practice Exchange at the European level, and reference was made to the adequate coupling with the Web 2.0 concept, the good combination between online/offline dynamics and its success generated basically by leadership and benefits for the members.

Having been secured a solid credibility and track record at the institutional level inside the organisational structure of the Government of Generalitat de Catalunya, it's now time to open access and sharing to other stakeholders at the international level interested in sharing and jointly evolving the vision and results obtained so far. For this particular purpose, fully aligned with the institutional strategy of Generalitat de Catalunya, the support and recognition from ePractice is seen as of paramount importance.

Lessons learnt

The experience gathered by the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya during the first three years of exploitation of the e-Catalunya project allows for issuing a number of lessons learned. It should be noted that a very specific remark on a number of particular impacts should be made, namely the increasing in perceived (by the citizens but also by the civil servants and involved professionals) transparency, accountability, participation and overall inclusiveness. There is a "net social capital" created due to the effect of transferring initiatives coming with the involvement and direct participation of the citizens, thus transforming public knowledge into net value.

In terms of lessons learned, the existence of a number of critical success factors should be noted:

• Institutional support. The objectives of Communities of Practice should be aligned with those of the mother institution, in order to secure the highest institutional support.
• Technologies are enablers. They help to create the needed conditions, and are instrumental in operation, but this is not enough. There is a need to make CoP's objectives explicit and manageable, giving visibility to leadership, working rules and expected benefits. Change management is needed to block uncertainties.
• First presence contact, then virtual contact. Getting to know each other before hand helps for a more stable and fruitful collaboration and participation schemes.
• Moderators and Community managers are key. They should act as facilitators, thus catalyzing group dynamics.
• Communities of Practice participants need training and support. Training is needed to enable and facilitate working in presence groups (strategies for collaborative work) and virtual groups (activating communities, managing intellectual property issues, confidentiality and privacy issues).
• External experts. It is highly recommended to incorporate the participation of external experts and consultants able to provide methodological advice when running CoPs.