Electronic Business Invading the Public Sector - Semantic Scholar

Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2001

Electronic Business Invading the Public Sector: Considerations on Change and Design Maria Wimmer and Roland Traunmüller University of Linz, Austria {mw, traunm}@ifs.uni-linz.ac.at Abstract Electronic Business (e-Business) is a powerful guiding vision for the transformation which the commercial and governmental sector have to undergo. Compared to Commerce, obviously, Government is lagging behind. Yet, for the public sector the rampant success of eCommerce has acted as a stimulus prompting to raise the engagement in e-Business. Change occurs far and wide and becomes a topic of reflection not only on Business and Government, but also on design. Here, we can only highlight some issues and so, just three issues are treated: impacts on Government; transfer of concepts and systems; consequences on the design of administrative systems.

1. Introductory overview The adaptation of Government to the virtual market needs careful deliberation. Accordingly, the first part of this article considers some effects when e-Business invades the realm of Government. Three examples may show the enormous amount of change involved: agencies re-organising their work processes; Public Administration reflecting its core objectives; knowledge net as a model improving the understanding of governance (sections 2 to 4). The second part focuses on the question of transferring concepts and systems to the public sector. The striking success of such concepts and systems in the commercial field had acted as a catalyst. Yet, there are several hindrances on the way of transferring concepts to the public sector with many of them rooted in the essential features of governance. No wonder that in Government e-Business needs proper and distinct design consideration (section 5 to 7). Both parts (and especially the caveats as mentioned in section 7) show that a mere transfer of systems will not suffice. So, the distinctiveness of systems design for administrative field needs closer consideration. It will be

Klaus Lenk University of Oldenburg, Germany [email protected] treated in the third part. The discussion is led at the systems level and performed in steps. A general picture of business systems in common is sketched and various elements that exert influence are deliberated. Then, a discussion is provided on how such forces might change when proceeding from the general case of design to a particular administrative example. By examining a Citizen Advice System, a balance of influencing system elements is considered. The closing section treats again considerations on change and design (sections 8 to 10).

2. E-Business changing administrative processes First issue under study deals with e-Business exerting impact on the public sector. Initially, the impacts were rather peripheral improving the interface with the client (as it was the case in the private sector). Yet soon, major concern was directed to the business as a whole and a much wider potential was uncovered. E-Business as a guiding vision provides a holistic view on business processes, communication and information resources. The whole fan of electronically mediated communication is put together, leading to a merger of external and internal processes. Impacts range from improving the communication with the citizens to ways of redesigning cooperation within and between governmental agencies. The vision of such a development implies that organisational boundaries will fade and will give way to innovative organisational design. In this way, co-operation between administrative agencies will span wide: over distances, across organisational boundaries and even across hierarchical echelons (e.g. European Union National (Federal) - State - Regional - Municipal levels). Addressees and agencies will benefit from improved facilities for co-operation such as: to share workloads, to co-operate with remote specialists and across organisational boundaries. Especially private actors in publicprivate partnerships will benefit from this. Thus, many ideas which have been claimed in the early Nineties (New

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Public Management, Business Process Reengineering etc.) will attain vigour. It is a different thing to have a vision or to work in an actual way on reengineering processes. BPR as a management doctrine is very frank in seeking drastic change. A closer inspection shows that applying the BPR approach to Public Administration needs a critical attitude: Some disapproval which is partly linked to the limited scope and partly to the inadequacies of the underlying Tayloristic work model exists. Yet, here we want to stress that there are individual and other reasons which are inherent to administrative work that urge for caution. A detailed discussion of such features is given in [10] and so, only some ideas are sketched: • In BPR the concepts of products and clients are central but they are difficult to be transferred to the field of Public Administration: Should someone getting a parking fine be considered as a client? • It is very difficult to individuate the processes: How can planning be considered as a process? • Many higher level activities are collaborative by nature. • Commonly, describing administrative processes is closer to data base models than to process models. • The specific domain knowledge of an agency is one of its most important assets. As far as routine jobs are concerned, domain knowledge might not be perceivable at first glance, but in exceptional cases or in emergencies the importance gets paramount. It might turn out disastrous to boil down administrative skills to a Mc-job level. • Administrative structures have a lot of additional functions: protecting the rights of citizens; ensuring procedures bound to the rules of law; safeguarding legal validity. All these are responsibilities that cannot be sacrificed for the sake of process optimisation. It should be added that not only process reengineering but also the implementation of workflow management systems are under critical inspection. They are suspected to erode the check and balances of the Weberian type of division of labour [18].

3. Public Administration reflecting core objectives Public Administration is still bound to absorb considerable shock as there is a pull from technology and a push from politics both of which urge for change. So, close considerations of the situation might alleviate and ought to start with the understanding of the implications of using IT in Government. Moreover, such consideration has to go

beyond the factual properties of the technology; Indeed, the socio-technical systems and institutions which evolved with the help of IT have to be investigated as a whole. Here, the already existing institutions of social and political life play a powerful role: They underline the existing ways of doing things in Government. Hence, the institutional setting is both restricting the extent and shaping the nature of innovation in Government. Both the pace and the selectivity of innovation in the public sector can be further elucidated by investigating the institutional perspective. Subsequently, there is a pressing need for Public Administration to direct reflection toward core objectives. This topic is discussed in more detail in [13]. Here, only a sketch is given: In a comprehensive view, reflection will start from the presently observable functions and institutions of Government in the widest sense. This includes flexible, less jurisdiction-bound capabilities for carrying out the business of Government which are often referred to with the term public governance. In general, three main purposes or functions of Government activity can be distinguished: an observing function; a cogitating function of elaborating information and of decisionmaking; and an acting function. Reflecting core objectives is an imperative issue and so, some notes should be adjoined. Observing comprises the gathering of information on individuals, on the society and on the state of the natural environment; one could speak of a monitoring function. It collects the information which forms the main asset of any reflection and action in the domain of public governance. The terms knowledge and organisational memory are used here to designate this asset. The reflecting function is concerned with policymaking and with strategy formulation, but also with decision-making in an operative and in a managerial sense. Acting means not only the provision and delivery of services to which the state is often reduced in an individualistic Weltanschauung (philosophy of life). Instead, it also includes the steering and regulating of society through the application of various policy instruments and through financial redistribution. As far as Public Administration is concerned, it has to be seen as subservient to a political body (not necessarily the nation-state). The traditional view is to perceive it as the executive arm of the latter. One of its two basic tasks is to intervene into society in order to stabilise or to change social relationships. The other task is to monitor the nature and network of actors constituting a society. All three types of governance activities - observing, cogitating and acting - involve: primary processes of various kinds, management functions, as well as auxiliary functions like the procurement or the management of personal and material resources for observation, reflection and action. Often, these functions are embodied in separate and dissociated institutions which harbour their own stock

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of knowledge (information stored in minds and in repositories of different kinds). Reflection does not provide quick fixes - its strength is a lasting and long-term effect. It was four years ago that we wrote: ‘The direct impact of information systems on administrative organisation is low. But they provide opportunities to transform the processes through which Public Administration fulfils its tasks’ [22]. The substantial and extensive initiatives for e-Government give reason far and wide to be confident.

4. Knowledge Net - a model improving the understanding of Governance Some opening remark on models: With the potential of IT providing novel instruments for governance the entire machinery of Government should be re-assessed. Models deserve higher importance and will attain more interest because they give help in strengthen and guiding reflection. A general discussion on models of administration and their relation to IT-concepts is given in [11, 13, 23]. Here, attention is drawn on the model of Public Administration as a knowledge net giving insight into governance. The model of Public Administration as a knowledge net emphasises two points. First, the notion knowledge refers to the domain knowledge of a particular agency. Domain knowledge is an asset of paramount importance. Already Max Weber who designated domain knowledge with the label “Dienstwissen”, stated its significance for the adequate functioning of administrations. Second, the notion net in knowledge net stresses connectivity as a core quality of knowledge: An individual’s knowledge is organised as a net with semantic connections; many relevant items of knowledge pertain to a group; learning makes knowledge expanding and growing in form of a net. As discussed in the previous section it comprises a lot: knowledge about the society, about the behaviour of the citizens, knowledge about norms and about the administrations themselves. There are overlapping realms of knowledge depending on whether the operational layer is concerned or the higher echelons. Often, domain knowledge might not be perceivable at routine work; yet in the case of exceptional events or in emergencies the importance becomes apparent. Focusing on the knowledge point of view has some practical implications: it is a natural antidote to overrating particular trends and it may spur innovative thinking. Adjusting the view means correcting biases. So, it acts against the recurring view of describing the administrations by means of production models. Such a statement deserves to be stressed explicitly because eager advocates of reengineering still nurture too naive believes. A simple distinction should demonstrate the

practical implications: Within the knowledge net the individual is appraised as benefit and human resource while in the production model persons are simply treated as a cost factor. The net model may also counterbalance encroaching fears of an adverse technology. The worry that bureaucratic dominance would be internalised in programs was expressed by Zuurmond [25] with the term infocracy. Adjusting views will incite new ideas. It is especially a synergy of two trends that will push innovation: 1. The knowledge net leads to Distributed Cognition (DC) and so can be deepened in drawing on the conceptual understanding and empirical strength of that scientific domain. 2. Understanding telecooperation needs both, a knowledge model of administrations and concepts of DC which are guiding ideas that fit together and plead each other. Distributed Cognition [2, 7] considers knowledge being distributed across people and artefacts. Cognition is not a property of individuals but rather a property of a system of individuals and artefacts carrying out some activity. According to the DC view, the ability of the human mind in processing symbolic information is strongly bounded to the cognitive artefacts employed thereby. Complex reasoning takes place in interaction with tools which help to overcome the processing limitations of the human mind [14]. Signs and cognitive artefacts are employed as external representations of knowledge to represent, store and process information. For example, they can indicate specific facts like the necessity of applying a certain procedure in a specific work situation. DC stresses that a human cognitive activity is not exclusively based on brain alone. Instead, it is distributed among the brain and the artefacts people employ to facilitate the performance of a given process. So, distributing knowledge is an implicit action in human behaviour and is done almost without conscious attention. Consequently, DC helps to understand the mediating role of procedures, methods and tools that people use to accomplish the objectives of their work. DC considers the whole human activity as the unit of analysis instead of decomposing activities into simple sequences of action. In this way, processes are conceived as taking place in cultural and material environment where the mediating cognitive artefacts play a central role. Let us come back to the actual question of change and design: Design of e-Business implies a considerable change in the knowledge distribution and hence, makes Distributed Cognition a must. Both, task analysis [3, 8] and scenario oriented design [1] rely heavily on the theory of DC. In their combination these concepts they may lead to a holistic design (cf. [24, 16]. Aspects of design will be

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discussed in more detail in the sections 8 to 10. The next sections address, however, questions of main importance which strongly interfere with the development of eGovernment systems: Is the transfer of systems from eCommerce to the public sector an adequate solution? Or will it be necessary to have design solution of their own?

5. The importance of e-Commerce acting as a stimulus Hence we turn to the second issue: transferring concepts and systems to the public sector. First and foremost, it is the rampant success of e-Commerce that increases the attraction for the public sector. For the public sector, e-Business concepts and systems provide an integral vision of IT use. Old dreams seem to become true: comprehensive management systems, ubiquitous computing and communication and instant access to any stored information are much easier to be realised now. Compared to Government, a number of fields exists where Commerce clearly is the forerunner (cf. [9]). Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - as a dominant issue - may be cited as one example: The need to build and maintain a close contact to customers has encouraged the usage of collaborative techniques, usability engineering and participatory development methods. Even though Citizen Advice Systems (see chapter 9) have their own agenda, a lot remains that can be learnt. The steady flux of concepts and systems from eCommerce is important because the public sector has a tendency to lag behind (though occasionally bold blueprints are made and innovative projects are launched such as the Austrian e-Government project help.gv1). One obvious explanation of this tendency may be the lack of market forces and incentives. Further, public institutions have their own life and they are sluggish on the way to modernise. The special characteristics of administrative work generate another slowdown. Hence, the steady stimulus from (electronic) Commerce is of paramount importance for an innovative Government where pioneering problem solutions which evolved in the private sector may help to break new ground. It is obvious: The success in the commercial field is the big stimulus for establishing e-Business in Government.

6. Stepping stones and stumbling stones ahead There are good reasons for the actual interest in transferring methods and systems which have been developed 1

for Commerce to the field of Public Administration. In principle, the public sector is a candidate with bright prospects for e-Business. This is due to the fact that nearly all administrative tasks are informational by nature. So, Telecooperation becomes the natural way of performing administrative work. This is especially the case for those tasks that are closely related to the core functions of Government which are: • Gathering information about the society in order to monitor the society and to intervene when necessary; • Intervening into the social fabric, chiefly by making decisions which allocate positions or resources to members of society. No wonder that quite early, Telecooperation focussed on Public Administration as a remarkable and distinct application domain [4, 17, 21, 22]. Relying on proven concepts and systems has considerable advantage. In some way, this can be seen as a turn to market forces. Given the decreasing effectiveness of state action, it may be justified in some respects. Moreover, it affects our willingness to create visions of a Public Administration of tomorrow which would rely on IT to a much greater extent than now. There are stumbling stones ahead as well. It often has proved to be short-sighted to copy information systems from the private sector without paying attention to specific aspects of the public sector. A striking example for problems and lessons learned is given with the introduction of workflow management systems [10, 11]. It became visible that conceiving Government as some sort of production plant transforming inputs into outputs misses important aspects of its mission. In order to gain an adequate understanding of the essence of its activity, it is not sufficient to view Government as a set of service delivering agencies. Its various products as well as the process in which these are produced, differ significantly from most processes and products in the sector of industry and commerce. Thus, the transfer of concepts needs careful deliberation. It has to pay attention to specific aspects of governance as well as to comply with the distinctive features of administrative work.

7. Particular features of Public Administration There are several matters that distinguish the public sector from the private one. To begin with the fundamental demarcation, the extraordinary complex goal structure of Public Administration has to be underlined. Government is the highest authority that can safeguard citizens’ life, good, and wellbeing. Public Administration has to guarantee (and enforce) a well-organised, struc-

http://www.help.gv.at/

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tured and save life and living quality within a common culture and society. So, there are always a lot of goals: • Proper functioning of legislation and jurisdiction; • Promotion of economic development; • Protection of principles of civic rights; • Preserving of nature; • Alerting for cases of emergency etc. All these goals will contradict to a certain extent; Yet, governance has to monitor that no basic right dominates the other ones (this is a big contrast to the domain of Commerce). Government has to search for equilibrated answers that bridge contradicting requests. Normally, the result is a rather complex solution. As the complexity is mirrored on the systems design, it has to deal with rather intricate requirements. A second differing issue is the pronounced emphasis on norms. Norms have to act as safeguards securing that none of the higher goals gets overpowered. This explains the high degree of legal structuring of administrative work. In addition, it guarantees transparency and accountability in administrative work. Law reveals itself as a big knowledge stakeholder in Public Administration. Yet, legal regulations are more than a particular source of knowledge - they represent a fundamental part in shaping and running the system of Public Administration. Law is one solution to maintain equilibrium of higher goals. A second one is given with the modes of reaching compromises. The weight of non-instrumental rationality applied throughout the whole public sector is heavy. Democratic deliberation, negotiations and discretionary action together with transparency and accountability become crucial. Subsequently, non-instrumental rationality is connected to norms and collaboration and so, pushes both. Such a way of exerting governance has the consequence that usually an administrative decision will involve quite a lot of persons. The number of people which may have an effect on administrative processes is quite big: actors from governance, executive and legislative; citizens and persons from businesses. Compared with the private sector, this is quite a difference. Moreover, in public agencies most types of work can be performed only in co-operation with other agencies. Administration is working via a complex tissue of co-operative acting entities. In the second part it has been demonstrated that eBusiness in Government deviates significantly from the commercial field. This has to be reflected in designing application systems which leads us to the next (and third) issue of the article: consequences on the design of administrative systems.

8. Elements exerting influence in business systems E-Business is an integral concept which urges for an adequate holistic development approach. A superior goal of good design is to successfully balance different elements contributing an e-Business process. First of all, an important aspect of the following discussion is that the debate will take place on a systemic level. Here, a preliminary remark on the tangible advantage of the systemic level will be appropriate: It is common experience that arguing about design has a lot of pitfalls. All too often it is the case that speaking of design one becomes entangled in details. One reason for the diversity of methods is due to the distinct basic settings for the different methods. Differences may be caused by varying choices in key concepts such as stages, components, perspectives, scenarios etc. Further on, notational differences are emerging (e.g. eleven (!) different notations for Entity-Relationship-Diagrams) which may be grounded in the attempt to substantially improve a method, in historical reasons or in deliberate choices. In any case, discussing on a systemic level has big advantages: It deals with many important elements that have to be integrated in the modelling activity. This means to regard the distinct influencing elements that - as quasiforces – make up a system and that have to be proper arranged and related in the development. Quite a lot of forces exist in building a system and therefore, not all could be included. We constrain the discussion to eight elements in order to get a rather clear view on the overall system and the inter-dependencies therein. The treatise is organised in the following three steps: 1. A general view on the chosen elements exerting influence in business systems; 2. A short description of Citizen Advice Systems as an example for further discussion; 3. Deliberating how the influencing forces may change in different administrative systems. Figure 1 demonstrates the elements exerting influence in business processes. Figure 2 may provide a qualitative impression on the fact that that these elements have different weight in various applications.

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Knowledge Persons

Organisation

Context

Norms

Collaboration

Coordination

Processes Figure 1. Elements exerting influence in business systems

Routine workflow process

Citizen advice system People

People Context

Organisation

Organisation Norms

Collaboration

Context Coordination

Coordination

Norms

Collaboration

Figure 2. The influence of elements varying for different applications

In the following, some initial comments on the elements are given, with a more substantial deliberation presented in section 10. Knowledge: As knowledge is an ample subject, only some main traits are mentioned. • A prime notable item is the broad scope as to cite the established list of five retention bins: individuals, culture, transformations, structures and ecology. • Consequently, a wide distribution of knowledge becomes a noteworthy feature. So, the knowledge applied in the execution of an administrative process is embodied in humans, machine agents, formal and informal work procedures, documents, methods and tools. • For this reason, both knowledge and processes are very closely corresponding elements. Only in understanding the distribution of knowledge one is able to redesign processes without incurring major losses of skill, expertise, know-how and goodwill.

• Documents are an important link between knowledge and processes. Whatever the actual degree of structure of the work process, documents are at the centre of the business processes. In many cases they constitute the product of action as well. Processes: To start with, e-Business demands that process design has to break new ground. This means to incorporate numerous aspects: different locations of service production and delivery; the organisational front office - back office divide; semi-structured processes; combining processes according to situation bound factors (e.g. life situations of citizens). Besides that, the actual working settings play an important role in the design of a process. Some examples of such considerable biases from the existing system environment are: • The organisational fabric of structure, procedures, regulations, instructions and objectives; • A vested IT architecture as general frame; • An ensemble of concrete IT solutions with balanced trade-offs; • A particular users’ attitude towards change; • A certain line-up, composition and dislocation of a work team; • A given awareness and behaviour of a group; • A net of regulations to be enforced etc. People: Systems are designed by people and for people. For this reason, the specific requests of the human actors deserve particular attention: • First thing to mention is the variety of human roles in application systems such as users, customers, executives, systems designers etc. • Human factors hold an essential relation with knowledge. Even when persons are not really conscious of the fact that they hold tacit knowledge, it is their knowledge that shapes their decisions and actions. The connection between the users and the organisation is established with the concept of processes: • Processes reflect the way in which users perceive their work; • People establish organisational activities; • In performing a process, people and other knowledge stakeholders co-operate and act on the objects of the information infrastructure in order to achieve the overall system goals. Hence processes play a pivotal role in designing information systems. Here, participatory design comes in. At first glance, work processes seem to be fixed; Yet, this picture is superficial because often, processes may be

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malleable. They even become more changeable when users are involved in the design. Co-ordination: A proper understanding of the nature of co-ordination becomes a concern: • Many work processes may be structured in a predefined sequence of individual steps (actions) to be performed. Each action is intrinsically related to preceding and succeeding ones where synchronisation becomes of paramount importance. • Processes have to be planned with reference to their mutual dependencies. It has to be cleared in advance whether a step can be taken sequentially or in parallel with another action or whether it requires group work. • Also, some contingency of structuring might be required. An obvious weakness of pure co-ordinated processes is that these do not allow for human discretion. Hence, as a supplement, a collaborative work mode is required. Collaboration: Collaboration arises from a particular kind of problems, i.e. from the needs that some processes can only be achieved by several people joining forces. The concept of collaboration implies a selected set of necessary conditions to be fulfilled: working together as a group, understanding the subtasks of other members and sharing the data. An underlying principle is articulation: when persons work together, they have to articulate their individual activities. Contrary to co-ordinated work, sequencing is decided on the spot and not a priori. Although collaboration has an overhead of articulation activities, the actual benefit is considerable: • Bringing in informal practices and experiences; • Handling exceptions and mastering unanticipated events; • Amplifying individual skills by combining them in action or in common consideration. Co-ordination and collaboration are two extremes of the same scale named co-operation. Essentially, alternative combinations of both are necessary. However, the tricky thing is to find the right mix of them. Two examples underline this issue: Structured actions may precede a meeting, the results thereof have to be integrated in the collaborative part of the meeting; The results of the meeting frequently have to be fed back to further procedural work. Organisation: Co-operative work is surrounded by a formal organisation. It is organisation - in its formal and informal parts - which shapes the course of action:

• Being deduced from the goals and objectives, organisational structures and features frame the work. Some examples are the governing structure, the defined hierarchies of responsibility and roles and the job descriptions for the various roles. • The perspective on organisation has considerable impact on the view of co-operative work: cooperative work arrangements, work organisation, formal organisation, enterprise etc. The organisational frame outlines a scope for the interaction within the organisation as well as to the external environment. Thus, organisations establish a frame for systems design within which a description of entities and relations takes place, naming processes, objects, actors and significant constraints. Amongst others, these include the possibility to access all resources needed for running a process. Reflecting the aspects of organisation, only a careful analysis thereof will lead to an adequate understanding of work. Norms: Legal regulations can be considered in a twofold manner: 1. Laws, judicial decrees as well as administrative directives, guidelines and instructions are part of knowledge repositories. 2. Legal considerations exert a descriptive influence on business processes, e.g. rules for international trade, mandatory audit trails or enforcing of privacy instructions. Structuring the system processes is a matter which is very sensitive to norms - to the material contents and to a chosen configuration or wording. Context: There are several contextual factors which collectively influence the design. Even well defined business processes may be strongly biased by their contextual settings. Some examples are: Technical factors such as the type of systems, the infrastructure etc.; Background factors such as the scale of a project, a well- or illdefined business area; characteristics of personnel (neophytes or senior level). Generally, design means redesigning an existing system. In fact, processes cannot be defined from scratch (as habitually assumed in the books); Instead, they have to fit into a given context. Further, processes are contingent and dependent because they are subject to a rather dynamic environment. The diversity and complexity of an actual business case which should not be underrated in design imply further important aspects of context such as: change of location, switching of media, diversity of information sources, iterations and alterations and unstable groups.

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Mutual dependencies: Mutual dependencies and interrelationships exist among the above described elements which turn out to be rather complex. For the sack of brevity, we will only sketch some examples of influencing forces and sophisticated feedback loops: • In self-service systems, the effort of co-ordination done beforehand is high; But afterwards, it decreases the amount of collaboration necessary. • Collaboration may increase when the need for legal interpretation enforces consensual decisions. • Established forms of administrative practice may modify procedures in a contingent way. • (Informal) Best practice solutions may alter official work procedures (at least in the long run). The following discussion deliberates the above introduced elements of distributed knowledge by means of Citizens Advice Systems [12].

9. Taking Citizens Advice Systems as an example A great potential exists to improve the interface between administrative agencies and the citizens (taken here as synonym for clients, customers, patients etc.). Thereby, the range of service delivery encompasses: • Mere information providing (public services, civic rights and duties or even general everyday information); • Common queries and explications (general advice, request on allowances, clarification on public service eligibility) • More complex requests (entitlement to allowances). One annotation is to be made: The following treatise is restricted to above advice functions. Yet, such service shops might also include administrative transactions such as registering, tax declaration, applying for a passport etc. In order to hold the example compact, neither aspects regarding the transactions nor issues such as digital signatures and digital authentification will be discussed here. Instead, reference is given to the literature (e.g. [5, 6, 19]. Matching the way of providing services with the way of gaining access to services results in a wide range of choices. Public services can become accessible from a variety of client-centred service points as well as from the home. Solutions span from municipal neighbourhood one-stop offices functioning like miniature town halls over purpose-oriented offices to multifunctional service centres. The latter ones may offer a wide range of public services from different providers as well as commercial services such as insurance or banking. Providing such a

choice means that an integrated access management becomes a must. Particular concern of the various solutions strongly affect the interface between the authorities and the citizens. They range from a mere human mediated form of interaction to intelligent software agents. In any case, individual human support should be available. As a matter of principle, people should be allowed to choose a certain access form and a particular interface of their preference without facing disadvantages. Not to forget the necessity of a user-friendly design and the use of advanced technical capabilities. For a kiosk might this mean: touch-screen, voice output, multi-media presentation and so on. In a virtual administration, it is feasible to have some jobs done automatically such as routing citizen demands to the agency with competencies in the legal sense. For example, autonomous software agents may immediately provide information to users on where to get online help and active support in specific cases. It is e.g. visible that these agents will automatically install a communication facility to the right assistant in a multifunctional service centre where the citizen gets online help. In the last section, the Citizen Advice System is investigated by means of the elements introduced in section 8.

10. A discussion of elements with regard to Citizen Advice Systems Knowledge: In Citizen Advice Systems, several storage bins exist where knowledge is retained: • Documents and databases: From an agency’s standpoint, knowledge accessible in storage is of prime concern. It is the documents that carry the content of any administrative case. • The human experts: Many administrative processes will need human actors sustained by technology. These experts will access documents and databases, too. • Software agents: Knowledge embodied in software agents will actively support users in accomplishing their work. Such agents may immediately provide information to users on where to get online help and active support in specific cases. Processes: The scope of a Citizen Advice System defines its processes in a global way. However, it may differ according to the specific purpose: • Processes that involve common information needs such as information regarding orientation and referral services, everyday information or mere where-to-go information - may be simple to a certain extent. • Yet, in complex questions - such as when legal advice is sought - processes become rather sophisticated.

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• Particular concerns of security come in when administrative transactions such as registering, applying for permits etc. are covered. Co-ordination: Common to administrative systems is the high amount of co-ordinated work. This may be grounded in the division of labour which is a general characteristic of governmental action and which is often congruent with a division of jurisdictions. The latter tends to delimit separate information domains within Government, thereby often protecting against unwanted intrusion by an omniscient Government. Various forms of co-ordination constitute the reverse side of this division of labour. Also in the case of Citizen Advice Systems, coordination turns out to be an important thing. Both the creation of a seamless Government and an Integrated Access Management need careful consideration and planning beforehand. The latter helps to take full advantage of new ways of accessing any service for example through the usage of the net, through call centres or via multifunctional service shops. People should be allowed to choose the access channel which suits them best without incurring financial disadvantages. Having embarked on one of these service access facilities, they should be able to switch e.g. from a kiosk-based communication to a personal visit in the service shop. Such a personal visit might also be provided over distance: online communication with a competent person in the relevant back office which is mediated by desktop video and document sharing. Collaboration: In Citizen Advice Systems, a technology-sustained net of experts is a big vision. Many processes will need human mediators supported with technology. Such a scenario may be described in the following way: Advanced multimedia-oriented communication technology can be used to operate such a permanent multimedia link between the service outlet staffed with 1 or 2 persons, and back-office personnel competent to answer any difficult question arising in connection with production and delivery of a determined service. The multimedia link also supports personal contacts between citizens on the premises together with staff of the service point, on one side, and the back-office personnel of various service providers, on the other, in what might be called a trialogue. Organisation: Public services will become accessible from a variety of client-centred service points and from home. Organisational matters are dependent on the range of options available thereby which may span wide: • Home administration and public kiosks; • Municipal neighbourhood one-stop offices functioning like miniature town halls;

• Purpose-oriented offices, e.g. a central office mediating the electronic inspection of administrative records kept by any agency; • Multifunctional service centres working like a travel agency offering a wide range of public and commercial services; Norms: The legal aspects are close to the very purpose of the system. The law as a citizen’s right has to be promoted as a matter of principal knowledge. Not only that the ethical legitimacy of law has a high priority; It also urges for transparency according to the principle ‘ignorantia legis non excusat’. An active participation of the citizens in democracy can only be achieved on the basis of knowledge. This is the paradox of legal knowledge: Only those who participate can know and only those who know can participate [15]. Diversifying legal publication by offering the net as an additional channel might tone down the conflict. The Internet is a great chance to fight against opacity in the legal realm. More urging than abstract rights may be everyday problems. For example, users not familiar with the logic of administrative thinking will need active help in finding the information items they are searching for. This means to translate the demands of the everyday world in the legal administrative jargon and vice versa. Context (general): First, a remark on context that may be common to a number of administrative systems: Several relevant processes are biased by law and politics and so, these are pre-disposed to several influences. Also, Citizen Advice Systems relate to the following points: • Processes are partly (to varying extents) structured by legal rules. • It is quite often the case that individual interpretation is demanded or that some amount of open or hidden discretion is allowed. • The plurality and diversity of administrative bodies should not be underestimated. • Processes are subject to political influences and bargaining, although considerations of justice and equity would often plead against taking into account those influences. Context (particular): Citizen Advice Systems have a particular context as well. Such a point having a disadvantageous effect is given by their history. They stand in a record of "near-miss projects" handed down in countless stories and narration. Reasons for these setback have been plentiful. Yet, the central deficiency is disingenuousness towards the idea of service. Often, information has been posted at some web site in an disinterested way (as to distribute lip service). Besides,

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efforts have been short of making such information really accessible and intelligible for ordinary citizens. References [1] Carroll, J. M., Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development, Wiley, 1995. [2] Cole, M., Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (reprint ed.), Belknap Press, 1998. [3] Dix, A., Finlay, J., Abowd, G., Beale, R., Humannd Computer Interaction (2 Edition), Prentice Hall, 1998. [4] Fiedler, H., "Telecooperation and the Need for Informational Guarantees". In [21], 1998, pp. 497-504. [5] Galindo, F., "Globalization, Security, and Democratic Engineering. Elements for Telecooperation", In [21], 1998, pp. 450-465. [6] Galindo, F., Quirchmayr, G. (eds.), Advances in Electronic Government, Proceedings of the IFIP 8.5 Confererence, February 2000, Univ. Zaragoza, 2000. [7] Hutchins, E., Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995. [8] Kirwan, B., Ainsworth, L.K., A Guide o Task Analysis, Taylor & Francis Ltd., London, 1992. [9] Klein, S., Gricar, J., Pucihar, A. (eds), Global Networked Organizations, Proceedings of the Twelfth Bled Conference on Electronic Commerce, Bled, Slovenia, June 7-9, 1999. [10] Lenk, K., “Business Process Re-Engineering. Sind Ansätze der Privatwirtschaft auf die öffentliche Verwaltung übertragbar?”, In R. Traunmüller (ed.), Geschäftsprozesse in öffentlichen Verwaltungen, Neugestaltung mit Informationstechnik, R. V. Decker’s Verlag, Heidelberg, 1995, S.27-44. [11] Lenk, K., “Verwaltungsmodelle und Informatikleitbilder – Zur theoretischen Grundlegung der Verwaltungsinformatik”, In K. Lenk, H. Reinermann, R. Traunmüller (eds.), Informatik in Recht und Verwaltung, Schriftenreihe Verwaltungsinformatik (17), R.v.Decker’s Verlag, Heidelberg, 1997, pp. 39-56. [12] Lenk, K., “From the Citizens Office towards multifunctional Service Shops”, In [21], pp 441-449.

[13] Lenk, K., Traunmüller, R. (eds.), Öffentliche Verwaltung und Informationstechnik - Perspektiven einer radikalen Neugestaltung der öffentlichen Verwaltung mit Informationstechnik, Schriftenreihe Verwaltungsinformatik (20), R.v.Decker’s Verlag, Heidelberg, 1999. [14] Norman, D.A., The Psychology of Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York, 1988. [15] Oliver-Lalana, D., “New Attempts of Making Law Public: A Sisiphean Fight Against Opacity?”, In [6], pp. 149-164. [16] Rizzo, A., Pasquini, A., Di Nucci, P., Bagnara, S., “ShelFS: Managing critical issues through experience feedback in railways”, Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing, Vol. 10 (1), 2000. [17] Shapiro, D., Traunmüller, R., “CSCW in Public Administration. A Review”, In Bonin (ed.), Systems Engineering in Public Administration, Proceedings of the IFIP TC8.5 Working Conference, Lüneburg, NorthHolland, Amsterdam, 1993, pp.1-18. [18] Snellen, I., “Street Level Bureaucracy in an Information Age”, In [17], 1998. [19] Snellen, I., van de Donk, W., Public Administration in an Information Age, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 1998. [20] Traunmüller, R., “Rechnergestützte Teamarbeit im Kommunalbereich: Stand, Perspektiven und Scenarien des CSCW”, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Vol. 33(6), December 1992. [21] Traunmüller, R., Csuhaj, E. (eds.), Telecooperation, Proceedings of the XV. IFIP World Computer Congress, OCG, Vienna, 1998. [22] Traunmüller, R., Lenk, K., “New Public Management and Enabling Technologies”, In Proceedings of the XIV. IFIP World Computer Congress, Chapman & Hall, London, 1996, pp 11-18. [23] Van de Donk, W., Snellen, I., “Towards a Theory of Public Administration in an Information Age?”, In [19]. [24] Wimmer, M., “Moving towards a holistic approach to design socio-technical systems”, In Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Information Management Talks (IDIMT 2000), Zadov, Czech Republic, 2000, pp 111 – 124. [25] Zuurmond, A., “From Bureaucrazy to Infocrazy. A Tale from two cities”, Informatization and the Public Sector, Vol. 3 (3 & 4), 1994.

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