This option has been provided by the DDN project "Digital Service to the Citizens of North Denmark".
Extended business hours is one of three subprojects in the "Digital Service to the Citizens of North Denmark" project, and since October 1 you could ring the municipal services of Sejlflod, Støvring, Brønderslev and Dronninglund between 07.00am. and 11pm. With this initiative the municipalities have extended the telephone hours to the double.
Still, – when a citizen of Støvring calls the municipality, and a kind voice in the telephone says : "Hello, you have reached the Information desk of the Støvring municipality, How may I help you" – then he or she actually communicates with an employee of the KMD (Kommunedata's) KomCenter at Hadsundvej in Aalborg.
- When I get a call from the municipality of Støvring, I can tell on my screen. Next the Kom-base of Støvring will appear. It holds information on a lot of things covered by the citizens' queries. And if there is anythng we are not able to answer, we can send an e-mail to the administration of the municipality involved and ask them to call the citizen next day, explains support assistant Heidi Pedersen of KomCentret. She is one of the 10 employees rostering a day and night shift making sure that the citizens get the information they need – when they need it.
Better Citizen Service
- The employees of the townhall information desk know a little about everything, – including things that are of no direct relevance to public administration. This is why we thought: "How are the assistants at the KomCentre to keep track of all this information?" However, we have held an employees seminar with the extended hours on the agenda, and here we worked with e.g. identifying the information that was essential to make available to the KomCentre via our Kom -base, explains Karin Lynggaard, Head of Dept. of the townhall desk of the municipality of Støvring.
The Kom-base is an information database, created for each of the four municipalities involved in the project. Each municipality is placing all information that may conceivably be queried by the citizens into the Kom-base, and the assistants of the KomCentre can easily navigate the database, when the citizens call.

Yellow Stickers on the Retreat
- By the way, we gained the side benefit that slowly but surely the Kom-base is replacing the host of yellow stickers that was always decorating the employees' desktop. If one of our assistants was notified that a roadside tree had fallen, she would have to remember to tell this to everyone else. Now she is sharing this with her colleagues by adding it to the Kom-base; this way the base has become a tool for us as well, declares Karin Lynggaard.
Also the citizens are expressing their satisfaction with the service rendered by the extended hours.
- Actually we get calls like: "Could you please swing by at this and that case officer's desk in the Social Services Department and tell him I can't make it for the meeting tomorrow?" And we will have to explain that we are not located on the same premises as that case officer, but we will certainly e-mail him and let him know. And people accpt that – they are just pleased to be able to get the message across and be able to concentrate on something else, explains Heidi Pedersen.
That the commissioning phase with the extended telephone hours has been working so smoothly is owing to the fact that the KomCentre is already delivering similar services to other municipalities in the country. Over the first year one of the rural municipalities experienced an increase of 100 citizen calls counted on a 2 week basis.

News on the Net
At the time of the extended telephone hours premiere, the "Digital Service to the Citizens of North Denmark" project launched another subproject, the "Digital Citizen Service". In practice this means that four municipalities will get a brand new easy to use and active homepage with enhanced options for the citizens to help themselves. Three of the municipalities also take part in the subproject of extended telephone hours: the municipalities of Støvring, Brønderslev and Dronninglund, but adding to this the municipality of Sindal is involved with the homepage project.
The municipality of Støvring had a homepage previously. But with the new homepage the municipality has really entered the information society.
- This is a significant turn. Previously the homepage consisted of static information only. Now it has become much more news oriented. This again means that we must get our employees in the habit of making use of it – here and now. In the event a leak of organic fertilizer, neighbours and others involved should be able to read about it here on our homepage as soon as the Technical Department has been notified, explains Karin Lynggaard.
To the KomCentret, too, the new homepages make a tool that comes in handy.
- The homepage appears on the screen along with the Kom-base. If a citizen calls to ask if we know that the neighbour has had a leak of organic fertilizer, we can check our homepage, explains Heidi Pedersen.

Regional Portal - Not just Like That…
The "Digital Service to the Citizens of North Denmark" project has a third subproject, a "Regional Portal", and here the project group consisting of the KMD (Kommunedata A/S) and the municipalities of Brønderslev, Dronninglund, Frederikshavn, Sejlflod, Sindal and Støvring have got themselves quite a lump to chew.
- We have had to face that "Regional Portal" subproject has proved more difficult than anticipated. So right now we are lagging slightly behind the timeline. But here and now is premature to predict a postponed presentation of the Portal, which is scheduled for spring 2002, declares Torben Bertelsen, Projec Manager of the KMD, and he continues:
- The idea is to create a common regional portal, spanning across public facilities, institutions and private enterprises – and in the same go make a better and more userfriendly alternative to existing solutions. We realize that this is very ambitious – in particular considering that currently only six of the municipalities of the county are doing all the hard work. This is exactly the problem we are addressing right now.