Intelligent Virtual Citizens Attention Service

Acronym of the case:

iSAC

Web address of the case:

http://isac.terrassa.cat/isac

Country of the case:

Spain

City/region:

Terrassa (Catalunya)

Posting Date:

6 February 2008

Last Edited Date:

07 January 2010

Author:

M Merce Rovira Regas (Ajuntament/ Universitat de Girona)

intelligent | municipality | semantics

Type of initiative

Project or service

Case Abstract

iSAC is a virtual intelligent service, based upon the same philosophy of existing face-to-face & telephone conventional citizen attention services. However, these are many times overloaded and they risk to fail meeting the needs of citizens. Replicating and improving these services is expensive and complex, but with the use of ICT and AI the Spanish Municipality of Terrassa has extended the service to serve more people, 24 hours a day, using different channels to satisfy queries for work, private and social life. The iSACs is an OSS tool; it understands queries in the natural language of citizens, with no administrative jargon, and uses local specific semantics to give clear precise answers. iSAC retrieves information from existing information DB with a zero maintenance cost. It is multilingual and multimodal, with learning semi-automated abilities.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Multi-channel Delivery | Open Source | Regional and Local | User-centric Services

Sector

Education, Science and Research | Local/Regional Community Development | Other Social Services

Start date - End date

October 2004 (Ongoing)

Date operational

December 2006

Target Users

Administrative | Citizen | Civil society

Target Users Description

iSAC target is the common citizen in its daily life. Everyone in need will be satisfied with iSAC availability everywhere, anytime: from the professionals and the middle class with their precise questions, to the less educated, ageing people, non professional women, immigrants. Here its inclusiveness.

Scope

International | Local (city or municipality)

Status

Operation

Language(s)

Spanish

Other

Catalan

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The leadership for the project is due to a special context in which the University of Girona and the City government built an innovation team in the year 2000 to design eGovernment solutions. A major effort was done from 2000 to 2004 to build interactive solutions for eGov in the existing, already very active from 1996, city website. But it was mainly a success experience, due to the fact that people from academia and from government were working together to designing new tools, sharing experience, knowledge and challenging their own contexts. The agreement for cooperation between the two organizations was extended to 2007, and then to 2010. A research and transference team was created in a university lab. The University of Girona was interested in creating a center for research and innovation (technology transference) on local administration, now on its way to formalization. The city of Terrassa, one of the most innovative local organization in Catalonia, was in need of an IT solution to help the Citizens Attention and Information Service (SAC) to overcome their saturation with no higher costs. The Consortia for the Open Administration in Catalonia (AOC) accepted for funding a project proposal of Terrassa to build "the virtual leg" of their existing service. A contract was signed within the three institutions to develop an OSS solution intended to being offered to all municipalities in Catalonia in the near future. Several collateral projects arose from then: SMS, PDA, DTV solutions, ISAIAS for internal information retrieving and aggregation, etc. Some of them were funded by the Spanish government, some by several agencies of the Catalan government, from industry to research approaches. The support of the Catalan Agency for eGov is a guaranty that it is intended to serve the general population, to steer ICT use through local government.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Inclusive services of general interest

Overall Implementation approach

Public administration

Technology choice

Open source software

Funding source

Public funding regional | Public funding local

Project size

Implementation: €300-499,000

Implementation and Management Approach

iSAC system can be implemented now in the municipality website, internet access points and quioscs. DTV, IP TV, pda, mobile voice recognition, etc. are on their way on R+D+I programs under the University of Girona leadership. iSAC is able to access public DB and fulfill any company/citizen/organization information need. Integration of information from diverse support and format systems within a specific government agency allows a better access to information for internal users in a collaborative work environment. Web indexing tool facilitates access to all public organizations, local, regional, national, European sites for non trained citizenship.

Technology solution

Designed and developed in a Triple Helix R+D+I context.

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

iSAC is not just a technological tool. Far away from an automated service, iSAC has always a city service at its backoffice: all unsolved questions or unsatisfying answers will encourage citizens to ask for a personal attention through their best means in each situation: a phone call at a desired time, an SMS , etc. The official in charge of the support service will have available on the system's administrator, information on the session in which the attention did not meet the objective. Along the year 2007, 70.914 questions were launched to iSAC from the website of the city of Terrassa, an average of 6.394 queries per month. The most intensive service hours of iSAC are from 9am to 2pm, similar to the rest of service channels previously offered. But iSAC attended 23.466 queries during night time in which other services were closed, an average of 1.955 queries per month from 6pm to 9am.

Track record of sharing

An EU ICT-PSP project proposal was submitted in October 23rd, and an ICT research project proposal is being written for the 3rd call, April 8, 2008.

Lessons learnt

1. Information and Attention services are a reference point for citizens in the local context. Use of ICT and advanced technologies -intelligent agents, web semantics- may help citizens to reach information and services, 24h no-time-dependent-ubiquitously, and governments to offer self-access to frequent questions more efficiently. 2. Using ICT to access information and services without a major effort and training is a social responsibility. Technology has to make the effort to reach people, not people adapt and constantly and hardly train to learn how to use IT solutions! 3. Intelligent systems can learn how to understand citizens' needs expressed in their own way and words, and anticipate relevant information by learning from past use of system. 4. iSAC is a wonderful tool for the organization to learn and improve its services from citizens feedback. 5. Citizens have to be part of the design of services intended for them. There is a whole world to learn with and from them. 6. Ability to work collaboratively is an excellent way to produce the best services. 3Helix model teams government-research-companies ensure a success story. 7. OSS and standards are also a social responsibility, and a rich context for innovative developments 8. Citizens express needs differently from one another, and within geographic and cultural contexts, and ask for different things depending on the services they are offered. iSAC provides tools for localization and (in the future) for personalization. 9. Communities have a say on iSAC. It needs to be trained, but includes the ability for it!, to serve a specific community. People rely on communities to fulfill their needs. 10. When iSAC works for citizens, organizations want it implemented internally. Aggregation of information was not and issue for the team of the project initially, but is became a top level objective in small-medium local organizations.

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