1 eGovernment research: the making of a success story E-Learning on the rescue Research Programmes Division ALTEC S.A., Greece

2 What is common wisdom (elsewhere?...) The Biggest Successes are Often Bred from Failures! What distinguishes a research project is not its successes, but the way in which it deals with failures. The central issue is about experimentation, innovation, and taking new risks. Only projects that can deal with failure and still make money can exist in this environment. What is usual is to face many, many failures and a few extraordinary successes.

3 Reality check we are not facing a lack on enabling technologies but we are indeed facing a lack on paradigms to successfully deploy them In this context we turned to capacity building, in order to provide the means for public organizations to develop a set of relevant capacities that will help them adopt our solutions

4 Capacity building… What is different from e-Learning? –Or: Is it different from e-Learning? Let’s look at our (ALTEC’s) experiences…

5 ALTEC’s capacity building portal We used moodle –Why? No cost, much experience out there, good support We selected material from all e-Gov projects that ALTEC participated and organised it in sessions in order to facilitate learning processes Till this point, everything runs like in a conventional e-Learning project!

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7 From e-Learning to Capacity Building: The case of the IST OneStopGov project (1/2) What the project is about? Introduction of a life-event model and the corresponding IT solution to address e- Government service needs in the enlarged Europe

8 From e-Learning to Capacity Building: The case of the IST OneStopGov project (2/2) Situation as is: –A small team from each Public Administration participates in the project activities –Either high-rank officers or temporary employed for the needs of the project Result: after the project ends, no – or limited - intellectual capital remains at the PA side

9 OneStopGov and e-Gov service Coaching 30 – 40 Standard Operating Procedures 12 – 15 working hours per week 1 Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) per week 1st F2F* (3 days) 2nd F2F (3 days) 3rd F2F (3 days) ca. 8 months coaching and training 18 Teaching professionals Management and CEOs ** Online Reporting & Coaching on Organisational Development 3 – 6 Standard Operating Procedures 5 – 8 working hours per week ca. 1 Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) per month 1st F2F (1-2 days) 2nd F2F (1-2 days) 3rd F2F (1-2 days) OneStopGov readiness assessment Start: Structure for capacity building on OneStopGov service development

10 Experiences… It is difficult to impose this process on a voluntary base –Example: in one project, none of the involved PAs exhibited any interest in communicating the existence of the portal to its employees. The case is typical. Capacity building efforts should be tightly coupled with the dissemination and exploitation activities of all consortium members Reluctance to access and use the portal from the PA sides can unveil much about the real value they get from the research projects We are fully committed in continuing our investments in this direction – it is a one-way for increasing the value of our research within the end users’ communities

11 Pathway to future projects Users should be encouraged to organise themselves into Communities The Communities should be helped to express their needs Technology should be naturally implemented and not part of a head-fake exercise (I have the solution – show me the problem!) The importance of helping the users build their own capacities should become a natural part of all e-Gov projects

12 Two ideas for future projects Our effort is repository-based (like a repository of best practices for e-Gov etc.) One idea is to research the area of networks of best practice for e-Gov A second idea is for setting up a laboratory for e- democracy that would help organisations (local or regional or central government) to converge into practices that are optimal for application and use in different contexts

13 Follow-up Idea nr 1: Network of e-Gov best practices –Mail_to: Adamantios Koumpis and Garyfallos Fragidis Idea nr 2: De-Lab (e-Democracy Laboratory) –Mail_to: Apostolos Vontas and Francesco Molinari