Applying participatory design and collaboration in digital public services for discovering and re-designing e-Government services
Introduction
E-Government development is currently based on strategic plans that are designed under the responsibility of governments and that all specify similar targets for public administration modernization: cost and time minimization during public service execution and the development of an improved, citizen-centered public administration.
In general, the development of e-Government strategic plans is a “top-down” procedure, meaning that central governments supervise the design and execution of national e-Government initiatives. The “top-down” procedure is defined in detail by means of educational methods (Jorgensen, 2005), where an instructor presents the general concept of a system and proceeds to its subsystems. In e-Government initiatives, the instructor is the government – usually with the support and knowledge of special consultants invited from the private sector – which plans and monitors multiple projects. “Top-down” developed e-Government plans contain policies and targets, but not methods and principles. Information and Telecommunication Technology (ICT) vendors have provided solutions for e-Government and for digital service execution that are mainly e-Commerce-based applications, transformed and parameterized to public administration methodologies (Lawry, Albrecht, Nunamaker & Lee, 2002).
Surveys conducted around the world show that although current e-Government initiatives have succeeded in time and cost savings for both citizens and public administration (European Commission, 2004), current designation procedure of government plans inhibits the acceptance of e-Government by both citizens and public administration.
New considerations arise from citizens' evaluations of e-Government solutions and digital services, and from the reluctance of civil servants – as evidenced in surveys conducted in Greece – to participate in e-Government evolution. These considerations concern the expectations of both citizens and civil servants from the modernization of public administration. The involvement of civil servants in e-Government design can lead to the “bottom-up” design of e-Government, which can be regarded as the procedure whereby different participants (end-users, public seniors, politicians) participate, share knowledge, and support administration modernization. The “bottom-up” design, too, is defined in detail by means of educational methods (Jorgensen, 2005), where participants consider e-Government as a hierarchical system consisting of multiple elements (subsystems) that need to be identified, combined and analyzed – from multiple perspectives – in order for the whole system to be realized. Participants' start by setting out their expectations with regard to e-Government systems, digital public services and their simplification, and the smooth transition from traditional to ICT-based procedures.
The eGG (from the initials e-Government Groupware, which has a metaphorical meaning of the re-birth of public administration) is a tool that can be used for establishing public servants' involvement in the design of digital services and of e-Government in general. The eGG is a cross-border collaboration application through which civil servants can offer and execute all possible digital public services. The concept of the system has been presented in WCIT 2004 (Anthopoulos, 2004) and in EEE05 (Anthopoulos, 2005).
This article presents the benefits for e-Government of the “bottom-up” design, executed with the participation and knowledge sharing of public servants via such an application, while the incorporation of participatory design methods is proposed as a means to support the discovery and essential improvement of digital public services and to achieve their social acceptance.
In Section 2 of this article, current e-Government design is analyzed according to strategic plans from leading countries in e-Government. In 3 Public administration perspective, 4 Citizen consideration, public administration and citizen perspectives on e-Government are presented, showing the benefits of the “bottom-up” design. In Section 5, the involvement of civil servants in the execution of digital services via the eGG system is described. In Section 6, this involvement is extended to the participatory design of digital public services and to the collection of distributed knowledge that can support service improvement. In Section 7, information is given about how easily this involvement can be established, according to data collected from the digital city of Trikala, Greece. Finally, in Section 8 the impact of the eGG system and civil servant participation on e-Government evolution is presented.
Section snippets
e-Government strategic plans
Four major strategic plans were investigated in order for the top-down method of e-Government development to be analyzed. The aims of the investigation were (a) the identification of the procedure followed before and during e-Government implementation, (b) the discovery of targets set for e-Government in different countries/regions, (c) the resulting ICT platforms and applications developed under those plans, and (d) current results and the outlook for achievements. The strategic plans
Public administration perspective
A “top-down” design, combined with the particularities of public administration presented above, leads to the following problems:
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Strategic plans are general and they present policies and targets and no solutions, resulting in the non-treatment of each special need for public administration, without each solution installed being combined with the pre-installed ones, in order to result in a global digital environment.
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There is not an association between different e-Government actions. Different
Citizen consideration
Top-down design does not consider how citizens experience public transactions: citizens visit public organizations without knowing what service to apply for, or the methodology they must follow. Citizens act according to special life events or their personal demands. Most e-Government projects group public services according to life events. If simulation of real life “suffers” in e-Government projects or citizens fail to access and execute the proper service due to usability errors, social
Participation of public servants in e-Government
The above results lead to thoughts on the re-designing of e-Government platforms offering public services. Some useful data supports this re-designing: citizens feel more confident and familiar transacting with local town-hall agencies (Layne & Jungwoo, 2001). Moreover, in the Digital City of Trikala, Greece (Anthopoulos, 2005), a survey was conducted, with the use of questionnaires, in which 1000 citizens, the heads of all 40 local agencies, and 200 public servants were questioned about
Presentation of the eGG system
The technical implementation of the components of the eGG system is beyond the purposes of this article. The eGG considers public administration as a unit. Civil servants are grouped according to specific roles that they will have to play during cooperation procedures, and not according to their title and the agency to which they belong. This consideration leads to the “suppression of physical borders” between different public agencies, and the elimination of the hierarchical, Weberian (Tat-Kei
Participatory design of public services over the eGG system
According to the eEurope 2005 action plan (European Commission, 2002), 15 services for citizens and 10 services for enterprises must be made digital by the end of 2005 in all EU member countries. During the last three years, citizen access points – KEP (www.kep.gov.gr) – have been established throughout Greece. These offices work as agents who discover and execute public services within the Greek public administration. According to KEP data, in Trikala alone (Anthopoulos, 2005) citizens applied
Future steps
The eGG system has been designed in order for real one-stop e-Government shops to be developed and administration modernization to be achieved. However, the collaboration scenario and the execution procedure raise some critical issues:
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Executives from different agencies – Y, Z, W, K – will probably participate in the execution of a public service for which Agency X is responsible. This issue requires proper legislation.
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Information previously generated, stored, and belonging to Agency X will be
The contribution of the eGG to e-Government
The eGG system has been designed as a supplementary component of the global e-Government architecture. It can work either standalone – in cases/countries where no e-Government architectures have been installed – or in cooperation with other e-Government platforms as presented in this article, without influencing other e-Government initiatives. The eGG's benefits can be summarized as follows:
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It delivers all possible public services online, via a one-stop government portal.
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It encourages civil
Conclusions
The route to e-Government is currently based on general and political plans, which do not include citizen or public administration expectations. As a result, what appears is the partial offering of digital public services and the definition of financial and commercial targets.
Furthermore, ICT infrastructures installed for e-Government are based on e-Commerce solutions, parameterized to public administration characteristics. E-Government infrastructures focus on time and cost savings for both
Dr Leo G. Anthopoulos holds a BS in Computer Sciences and a PhD in the e-Government area, from the Computer Science Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece. He is a Computer Science Expert of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs and he has worked for many organizations such as the Greek Ministry of Education, the Research Committee (AUTh), the Information Society S.A. (Ministry of Interior of Greece), etc., and he was the scientific coordinator of the
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Dr Leo G. Anthopoulos holds a BS in Computer Sciences and a PhD in the e-Government area, from the Computer Science Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece. He is a Computer Science Expert of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs and he has worked for many organizations such as the Greek Ministry of Education, the Research Committee (AUTh), the Information Society S.A. (Ministry of Interior of Greece), etc., and he was the scientific coordinator of the "e-Trikala Digital City" project from 2003 to 2005. His research interests concern the Information Society and the e-Government areas, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the aspects of digital communities. He has published more than ten articles in international journals, magazines and conferences.
Panagiotis D. Siozos is a post-graduate student at the Multimedia Lab of the Computer Science Department, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a BS in Computer Sciences from the same department. He has extensive work experience, both as a secondary education computer science teacher and as a software developer, having taken part in several EU-funded research projects. His research interests include Computer Assisted Assessment, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Educational Metadata and Computer Ethics. He has published papers in journals such as the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning and the Journal of Information Systems Education, and conferences such as the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), and the E-Learn International Conference.
Professor Ioannis A. Tsoukalas was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, where he completed his education and obtained his B.Sc. in Physics from the Department of Physics at the Aristotle University (AUTh). His Master Degree in Electronics was obtained from the same department as well as his PhD in Solid State Physics in 1975. His postgraduate studies were performed in Liverpool, UK, in Grenoble (CNRS), and in Braunschweig. He visited for long stays as senior visiting lecturer and professor MIT as well as various other institutions and universities. He was elected as full Professor in the Physics Department (AUTh) (1986) and in the Computer Science Department (AUTh) (1992). His current research and scientific interests concern Information Society Technologies, Computer Assisted Education and modern technological materials.
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