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

3. INTRODUCTION

4. 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

5. SITUATION FACED

6. 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

7. 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.”

8. ACTION TAKEN

9. 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

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

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

12. Action taken
Degree of reusability in the pilot digital chains

13. RESULTS ACHIEVED

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

15. 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

16. 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)

17. 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)

18. LESSONS LEARNED

19. 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