Amy Van Looy Sabine Rotthier Kiss the documents! How the City of Ghent digitizes its service processes. Amy Van Looy Sabine Rotthier

INTRODUCTION

Introduction Case: City of Ghent (public sector, Belgium) 250,000 citizens; 65,000 residential students; 3,000 employers 5,000 civil servants Elected politicians Monopoly of services for delivering >300 products Digitization of service processes in front office and back office

SITUATION FACED

Situation faced Before 2014: silo mentality Digital services limited to web forms in three departments Downloadable forms in other departments Different applications Multiple user names and passwords to be managed Much manual work Result: digital investments did not pay off Need for an integrated approach Need for more efficient, customer-oriented processes

Situation faced After 2014: LEO master plan LEO objectives: “The administrative services in the City of Ghent maximally run through digital channels. The products delivered by the City of Ghent are offered in an efficient and customer-friendly manner through the digital channels. Citizens are maximally aware of the digitally offered products.”

ACTION TAKEN

Action taken 15 reusable building blocks To guide the realization of projects Building blocks were built as generic e-service components or process activities To stimulate reuse Generic components translated to three pilot chains

Action taken 15 digitization principles (or building blocks) in the City of Ghent

Action taken Generic e-service components in the City of Ghent

Action taken Degree of reusability in the pilot digital chains

RESULTS ACHIEVED

Results achieved Pilot for tax submissions (anno 2016) Significant increase in digital tax submissions More prefilled tax proposals

Results achieved Pilot for environment-related subsidies (anno 2016) All subsidy requests are digitally processed in the back office Digital alternatives for receiving and responding to subsidy requests in the front office

Results achieved Pilot for citizen affairs (anno 2016) Still running Highest ROI to be expected Highest workload due to the largest number of forms to be handled (circa 70,000 certificates each year)

Results achieved What about the future? Main idea: develop once, reuse it maximally Generalization of digitization principles (or building blocks) Towards all services in the City of Ghent Towards all business processes in the City of Ghent Towards other projects (e.g. for a participation platform or intranet)

LESSONS LEARNED

Lessons learned Semantically align with external partners E.g. Linked open data Be pragmatic instead of dogmatic to achieve success E.g. Regarding the concretization of initial principles Be open for temporary workarounds to achieve quick wins Assist departments E.g. Internal support office or competence center Switch from silos to a single profile per customer Advantages for customers and internal collaboration