Project of the Month November 2003
These months the 24-hour city hall opens in three municipalities of North Denmark. Here the citizens can apply, record and view the cases they have pending with the municipality – and they will be guided through all the procedures on the new municipal portal. All it requires is a digital signature to access the new service.
By Naia Bang / Texthuset Aalborg
November 10th is a special day on the City Hall in municipality of Frederikshavn. That day the City Hall is open round the clock to serve the citizen. And this is how it will be in the future – seven days of the week. Including X-Mas Eve.
It doesn't work the way that the doors are opened to the administration block on Rådhus Allé 100. In stead the Municipality opens a portal via the municipal Web-site http://www.frederikshavn.dk/. From this portal all citizens of the municipality can serve themselves - whenever they have the time and need. All it takes is a digital signature – a kind of electronic fingerprint.
The new portal has been created as a project under the Digital North Denmark. ”Your open Municipality – Digital Administration for the Future – from vision to Reality” is a partnership project between Dafolo A/S, Form.dk and the municipalities of Skagen, Frederikshavn and Skørping. The general goal has been the capability of offering citizens an enhanced municipal service while utilising resources in an optimal way. And now, a couple of months before the project conclusion, the goal seems to be achieved.
Forms make a substantial part of the day in a municipal administration like that of Frederikshavn. But with the ”Your Open City Hall” project Egon Petersen, service manager, hopes that a great deal of the paper formulas can be replaced by electronically filled in formulas.
Photos: Ajs Nielsen.
Better Service to Citizens
- Our idea was that we found it might be more convenient with another way of reporting to the public services than what we have known so far. Being able to download a form, printing it and sending it to the municipal administration was not enough. The citizen should have the option of guidance throughout the procedure. Also we wanted a process of democratization, a greater openness, offering citizens an opportunity to monitor the processing of their own cases, explains Per Bo Christensen, marketing director of Dafolo A/S, who is in charge of the project for Your Open Municipality. And he elaborates:
- If the system were to be efficient, it would be also be a requirement to integrate the various systems within the municipal case processing system in order to reduce the time of throughput. So this would also mean saving benefits from the streamlining. This in turn required a competence development campaign for the staff of the three municipal administrations in parallel with the process of creating the portal.
In relation to the project a questionnaire was prepared and sent to 2.500 enterprises and citizens of the three municipalities. Around 1.300 responded to the questionnaire, and the answer gave the project group a map of the needs, and an impression of the preparedness in the three municipalities for the change towards digital self service. And as Dafolo had performed a large scale survey in the use of forms a couple of years ago the project was well equipped to identify the processes appropriate for digitizing and to deal with them.
Forms with Errors
Forms make a substantial part of the order of the day within the public services. We fill out forms when moving, when registering kids to the kindergarten, when applying for health benefits, when building a new garage et cetera.
- Today a near 50 percent of the forms being processed at the city hall have errors in some fields. It may be that the citizen has forgotten to fill out a field, or he/she has provided a wrong answer. And having the caseworkers check the information and maybe check with the citizen to ask him/her to fill out the missing or faulty fields, is demanding on resources. And it takes a long time of processing, explains Egon Petersen who is service manager of the municipality of Frederikshavn, and he continues:
- Using electronic forms brings us in an interactive dialogue with the citizens: The citizen fills out a field and clicks his way on. If the field was filled out in error, – or not filled out at all – the citizen cannot click on to the next field. Once the citizen has filled out and clicked through all the questions the last click is on ”Accept” – and the form is now on the server of the city hall.
The digital signature giving access to the 24-hour open city hall can be downloaded via the TDC, the Internet provider's, Web site http://www.tdc.dk/.
By using the digital signature that is just as unique as our civil registration number, the CPR-number, no unauthorised intruders can ”peep over the shoulder”. For all electronic information exchanged between the citizen and the municipal services will be encrypted so hackers and others will have no access.
Per Bo Christensen marketing director of Dafolo A/S, thinks that the first citizens to take up the new electronic service offers from ”Your Open Municipality” will be the municipal administrative staff members themselves.
Photos: Ajs Nielsen.
Easy for the Citizens
The Your Open Municipality project has selected 18 processes, which have been electronically enabled. This could be reporting the move to a new home address. Here you just enter the municipal Web site, you log in with your digital signature – just as we know it from home banking – and now you can enter and press ”Move Address”. Owing to the digital signature the system already knows a lot of information – so this is not necessary to fill out. This covers master data like civil registration number, name, address etc. Now the electronic form will ask where you want to move to, and whether the entire household is moving. For example if you are moving further than 15 kilometres away from your present general practitioner, the form will ask you to choose a new doctor – and it will tell which doctors to choose from. And so on. So the system is guiding the citizen through all the various procedures you would normally have to keep track of yourself when moving.
- Most of the 18 procedures are focused on the citizens but there are also processes, aimed directly at enterprises. For example application for sickness benefit for an employee. Also clubs and associations benefit from the portal. For example they can apply for subsidies for premises according to the Danish Act covering leisure-time education, tells Egon Petersen.
Moderate Expectations
November 10th is the official opening day for Your Open Municipality in Frederikshavn and Skørping. The municipality of Skagen will ve opening their 24-hour open city hall at a later time.
Expectations are high – but the forecasts of a breakthrough for the success are conservative.
- I believe that the first ones to adopt this will be the very staff members of the public adminstrations. And after all, this is quite a large group - often the municipal service is the largest place of work in the local area. Next are the enterprises used to work with homebanking, and where time is money. And last in line are the citizens, assumes Per Bo Christensen, and Egon Petersen adds:
- This will be a process in line with the introduction of the national Dankort creditcard. The start was hesitant – but then people adopted the Dankort and things accelerated.
The citizens being able to serve themselves does not mean that from that day on nobody goes to the city hall to get a paper form. Speaking to analogue humans in flesh and blood will still be an option. And to the citizens choosing to use the new portal the case worker is only a mouse-click away. In style with being able to monitor the processing of your case, you can just e-mail the municipal civil servant processing your case.
Read more about the Your Open Municipality project on www.thedigitalnorthdenmark.dk or on www.daak.dk
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