Service flow management: caring for the citizen's concern in designing e-government transaction processes

Abstract

Many authorities have started to use web sites to provide services based on transactions. The guiding vision is often a process portal for citizens that provides access to the countless variations of administrative processes (transactions). But connecting the portal's functionality with internal IT supported processes of the various administrative units is not only a technical challenge. As expectations towards complex online services rise, innovations in process automation need to be combined with maintaining and/or enhancing service quality.In this paper, we follow service as the guiding vision and try to explore what it needs to enable the service providers (governmental institutions and private partners) to fulfill their mission, i.e. the satisfaction of citizens' needs and concerns. Based on an e-service implementation in the city state of Hamburg, we suggest the serviceflow management approach to model patterns of consecutive service points as well as to represent individual process information using XML. Focussing on transparency for citizens, flexibility for staff, and synergy within provider networks, we claim that reaching a serviceflow management agreement improves the service quality beyond delivering e-government functions.

Serviceflow beyond workflow? IT support for managing inter-organizational service processes

“…Although it enables interoperability between heterogeneous systems of different organizations it leaves open how each provider enables the actual system support. This proved to be successful in providing the postal vote application service through www.hamburg.de [17,44].…”

“…More often than not, organizations primarily focus on their internal processes instead of designing customer contact points. Furthermore, the metaphor may also be applied in order to redesign or design new electronic services by carefully deciding which of the service points may get transferred into e-service points [10,44]. Considering the healthcare example, it seems difficult to impossible to introduce e-services as most of the time the patient has to be physically present to Fig.…”

“…Taking the insights from BPR, Wf, CSCW as a starting point, we have introduced Serviceflow Management [43,10,44]. The approach exploits both, process-related and Internet technology, while adding further customer-related aspects.…”

Process ownership challenges in IT-enabled transformation of interorganizational business processes

“…The case has been highlighted from different angles before [63][64][65][66][67]. Here we solely focus on the new challenges of process ownership according to the issues pointed out above.…”

“…All partners involved accepted the concept of serviceflow management [65,66] as suggested by the researchers from univerity. Based on object-oriented, workflow and user-oriented modelling techniques, serviceflow patterns were modeled by identifying sequences of service points, each capturing the specific service tasks and their respective pre-and postconditions from the provider's point of view.…”