Week 5: Single Entry Point / One-Stop-Government

This week we have met our client, Ms Masi, Chief Project Officer from Government of South Australia. She outlined our task, to build up an assessment model of SA Government’s one-stop website.

By searching I had a first impression on Single Entry Point. It refers to the integration of public services from a citizen's point of view, also can be viewed as a site where users can find information, images and resources from all government agencies and government funded sites.

A lot of researches have been made in the field of One-Stop-Gov (OSG), similar to SEPO but funded by the European Commission. Generally it is a life-event oriented, integrated, interoperable platform for an all-inclusive one-stop government that is based on the concept of active life-event portals.

In the 2012 E-Government Survey it finds that e-Government in many countries are moving from a decentralized single-purpose organization model, to an integrated unified OSG model with higher efficiency and effectiveness. This new model aims at realizing an entry point of service entrance and a single portal where citizens can access all government-supplied services, regardless of which government authority provides them.

The difference of structures between OSG and the traditional mode is shown as followed.

There are two prerequisites of OSG. Firstly, public services must be integrated. Secondly, the customers must be able to access these services in a well-structured and well understandable manner meeting their perspectives and needs.

Besides, a holistic reference framework (shown below) can support in investigating the many influencing issues. We can see a multidimensional consideration, which ranging from the strategic layer to the technical layer, of distinct aspects and the core phases of an electronic process, ranging from information to transaction and settlement.

This framework supports the following:

• Technical viewpoint (focusing on the technical implementation of the system)
• View on people (deliberating the needs and requirements for the different user groups: citizens, businesses, public administration employees)
• Security aspects (deliberating the security requests for public services and for the one-stop government system)
• Legal issues (investigating legal constraints, frames etc.)
• Organizational aspects (structural fragmentation of public administration and division of domain expertise, responsibilities, etc.)
• Social and political aspects (considering political decisions, social impacts, etc.)
• View on data and information (designing information objects, databases etc.).

The eGOV integrated online one-stop government system should lead to an increased quality of public services as well as to improved efficiency of the public sector. Based on the framework, there are some basic requirements for OSG:

• Customers can access public services via a single entry point even if the services are provided by different departments or authorities, without needing to know to which public authority the functional competency is assigned to;
• Different stages can be approached for a service: simple what-is, what-is-required and where-to-go information on the service;
• Possibility to contact people and to get further information; downloading and handing in forms for applications of public services; handling a complete service; citizen relationship management or complaints management; 
• Public authorities are interconnected and can be accessed via different channels and devices.
• Official proceedings are adapted for Internet performance.
• Front- and back-office are smoothly integrated.
• Underlying laws and prescriptions are clarified and updated. Administrative terms should be understood by customers.

To provide a better user experience, the OSG website builder should take into account other aspects.

• Consumers come from different groups with specified requirements. Therefore, functions aimed at different group of people (such as seniors and teenagers) should be modified to meet their special requirements.
• The required level of technical knowledge for users, especially individual citizens, to use the website should be as low as possible. The user should have the feeling that the system is easy to use, that s/he can operate it intuitively.
•  UIs should be predictable, meaning that user should not be surprised by the way the system reacts, and possess basic interaction abilities within desirable feedback time.
• Other suggestions like multi-linguistic, learnability, memorability, low error rate, and etc. are also raised up by researchers.

Reference:

[1] Marketing One-stop e-Government Solutions: the European OneStopGov Project, Marios Chatzidimitriou and Adamantios Koumpis

[2] United Nations E-Government Survey 2012-eGovernment for the People, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs

[3] Online One-Stop Government: A working framework and requirements, Maria A. Wimmer and Efthimios Tambouris*