Abstract: In an e-Government approach, focusing
on the citizen as customer, the General Secretariat for Information
Systems (GSIS) of the Greek Ministry of Economy and Finance has
deployed TAXISnet, a pilot project offering VAT e-filing services
directly to the general public, as a web-based extension to the
TAXIS internal information system. Experience from TAXISnet development
and operation has been generalized into a framework of critical
success factors for deploying e-service schemes, as well as e-service-centered
indicators for evaluating IT projects. GSIS has incorporated
these methodological guidelines in its overall IT and business
strategy for deploying horizontal e-service schemes and promoting
e-services as a catalyst for administrative convergence.
1. Introduction
The notion of "e-Government",
i.e. of governments and public administrations offering electronic
services directly to citizens and businesses has gained wide-spread
consensus in international fora and is being strongly promoted
by means of dedicated national and supra-national initiatives
[1,2]. In the context of the e-government approach, which forms
an integral part of the "Information Society" and "Digital
Economy" visions, governments find themselves confronted
with a broad range of political themes arising from the need
to re-establish their vision and role [3,4] and re-structure
their services around the "citizen as customer" concept
[5]. Thus, IT support for direct Government-to-Citizen (G2C)
and Government-to-Business (G2B) transaction schemes [6] becomes
critical, in order to provide citizens and businesses with ubiquitous
(anywhere, anytime, any service) assistance [7].
The Greek government has articulated
its strategic approach towards e-government and information society
in a 1999 report by the Prime Minister's Office [8], which places
great emphasis on planning-for-all and quality-of-service issues
in order to ensure social cohesion and living standards objectives.
Quality of the services offered to the citizens and businesses
is also a top-level priority for the General Secretariat for
Information Systems (GSIS, www.e-economia.gr) of the Greek Ministry
of Economy and Finance (GMoEF), whose task is to deploy and operate
information systems for taxation, customs and other business
areas, to formulate and implement the overall GMoEF's IT strategy
as well as to contribute to GMoEF's administrative modernization.
2. A Case Study: TAXIS and TAXISnet Projects
TAXIS (Taxation Information
System) is a 6-year IT project initiated by GMoEF after an IT
master plan in 1995. TAXIS, which represents one of GMoEF's strategic
IT investments with an overall budget of approx. 60 mn euros
contributed by national and EU (ERDF/ESF) funds, has provided
IT support to the central tax authorities, located in Athens,
as well as to local tax agencies, located all over Greece, for
carrying out tax filing, calculation and payment transactions
with citizens and businesses. The TAXIS information system is
based on a 3-tier data and application architecture over a virtual
private WAN and serves all tax payers and taxation transactions
in Greece.
TAXIS exploitation plans include
the deployment of an MIS shell to support GMoEF's policy-monitoring
and policy-making requirements and the enhancement of TAXIS WAN
with integrated data/voice/image services in order to support
all of GMoEF's internal communication requirements, as well as
to provide backbone network services to all of GMoEF's IT projects
(e.g. Customs Information System). Apart from that, TAXIS WAN
infrastructure and TAXIS database informational content can be
exploited for offering network services to other public administration
(PA) agencies as well as deploying cross-PA horizontal co-operation
schemes.
Although the deployment of
TAXIS has been complemented by a number of internal business
process stream-lining and re-engineering initiatives aiming at
better quality of service for citizens and businesses, it has
become evident that the original conception of this project,
dating back in 1995 when IT support for GMoEF's internal business
functions was urgently needed, suffers from a strong "introvert"
orientation, failing to place emphasis on direct government-to-citizen
and government-to-business service provision. This fact, combined
with the expansion of Internet and WWW as global communication
and transaction infrastructures for an emerging, world-wide,
digital economy, has led GSIS to the strategic conception of
making some "popular" internal TAXIS services directly
available to the citizen and business tax-payer communities,
thus providing the "missing interface" for extending
an internal IT infrastructure for introvert functions to IT support
for extrovert services.
This conception has resulted
in the TAXISnet project, whose services are directly accessible
to the public in the form of a web site (www.taxisnet.gr). TAXISnet
offers a web-based interface from which server-side applications
are used to initiate transactions and provide user services.
For security purposes, data retrievals for TAXISnet transactions
are performed upon an off-line-maintained replica of involved
TAXIS database tables, whereas data updates are replicated off-line
to the TAXIS database.
It should be noted that TAXISnet
applications have been developed from re-usable TAXIS application
components, whereas the aforementioned technical architecture
requires a minimal amount of re-engineering in the original TAXIS
applications and database schema. Therefore, the need for application
software modifications or any other architectural adjustments
has been minimized, thus also minimizing implementation time
and costs.
Generally speaking, the deployment
of TAXISnet services has not encountered any major implementation
problems, mainly due to careful design decisions. Experience
from operational exploitation of the service with increasing
numbers of users has shown that certain technical capacity enhancements
may be necessary in order to retain the present quality of service
under operation-in-the-large conditions, whereas a limited number
of technically sound and practically feasible extensions to the
functional and technical architecture are expected in order to
establish connectivity (off- or on-line) between the TAXISnet
service and banking system e-payment schemes.
After a short initial, fully
electronic, registration procedure, TAXISnet users receive electronic
credentials which enable them to access the full range of TAXISnet
services. TAXISnet offers e-filing services for VAT and income
tax accompanied by payments through bank accounts, with an objective
to enable e-payments via established banking system infrastructures
as the next step. Further development plans for TAXISnet include
e-filing services for all major tax forms, provision of TAXISnet
services through additional public access points and integration
on the long run with other national and European e-government
services.
In its current status, TAXISnet
offers 24x7 service availability and real-time response for all
transactions, plus on-line FAQs and email-based help desk services
for registered and prospective users. The main customer segments
addressed by TAXISnet are (a) individual citizens, with emphasis
on remote regions, (b) professional accountants and (c) private
businesses, with emphasis on SMEs. According to recent estimations,
TAXISnet services are used by more than half of the Internet-enabled
and VAT-liable citizens and businesses.
Operational exploitation has
involved a small number of legal issues, mainly relating to authenticity
of e-communication respondents and legal validity of e-VAT and
e-income tax forms; these have already been resolved by appropriate
regulatory acts and lightweight technical measures. No major
cultural obstacles, on the other hand, have discouraged end-users.
As the current end-user penetration levels and rate testify,
e-working habits as well as a trust-and-confidence culture have
already been established by a sufficient number of citizens and
businesses, who now act as a critical mass for maintaining the
"success momentum" and attracting new users to the
service.
The main comparative advantages
of TAXISnet, with respect to internal IT support for paper-based
transactions, include (a) elimination of paper work and physical
transport, (b) continuous service availability, reduced response
time and a substantial decrease of errors, and (c) open API specifications
for integration of TAXISnet service calls into third-party commercial
software products (office automation packages, ERP systems etc.)
A key issue in the deployment of TAXISnet services has been the
minimization of additional technical know-how and economic investments
required on behalf of end-users; since all TAXISnet applications
run server-side, only a low-end Internet-enabled computer and
a browser (most probably already available to end-users) are
needed to access the full range of TAXISnet services.
Furthermore, direct availability
of TAXISnet services to all Internet users eliminates the need
for additional distribution channels. Awareness on the service
is promoted via the mass media, via regional and sectoral events
as well as in co-operation with local Internet connectivity clusters
(e.g. university departments). Just as the case with TAXIS, GSIS
has outsourced the implementation of TAXISnet services to industrial
IT solution providers, whereas service maintenance has been initiated
on a co-sourcing basis.
3. Critical Success Factors
and Methodological Guidelines for Deploying e-Service Schemes
The initial conception and
subsequent deployment of the TAXISnet service has been approached
by GSIS in a systematic fashion, taking under consideration a
set of principles for formulating an optimal scope for the project
and ensuring that the functional/technical choices and design
decisions all contribute to the overall business objectives.
These principles, which can be viewed both as critical success
factors (CSFs) and as methodological guidelines for the design
and pilot scoping of e-government services, are as follows:
- In order for a PA agency (GSIS,
in particular) to promote the accumulation of a critical mass
of users for e-services there should be identified, in the first
place, certain business services characterized as of "critical
interest" for citizens and businesses, on the one hand,
as well as for the PA agency on the other. Furthermore, these
services should be prioritized according to strategic business
objectives, so that an overall time plan for their IT support
through e-service schemes can be formulated. GSIS has selected
VAT and income tax filing and payments to be a service of such
critical interest, whose business characteristics justify its
prioritization for e-service support.
- For each service included
in the e-service scheme project, the interested PA agency should
proactively identify and call for contributions all involved
service stakeholders, i.e. collective bodies of interested citizens
and businesses, as well as intermediary parties. With respect
to VAT services, GSIS has identified business associations and
professional bodies of accountants as interested stakeholders.
After a call on behalf of GSIS and a presentation of the overall
idea, most stakeholders have actively contributed to the investigation
of certain business and legal issues, as well as to the formulation
of operational procedures and functional specifications. This
consensus building approach has enabled GSIS not only to take
educated design decisions but, even more important, to establish
an early acceptance of the overall idea and promote awareness
to a maximal community of prospective users.
- Due to the novel nature of
e-services, which results in various political, cultural as well
as legal issues that have to be solved in order to achieve successful
implementation and use, the planning and implementation of an
e-service scheme for any given service should be preferably initiated
with a pilot system. This system, which must be designed for
seamless extension into the full-scale scheme, should offer the
core service functionality and satisfy the major non-functional
(e.g. response time, security etc.) requirements, so that it
can be exploited as an appropriate proof-of-feasibility and cost-effectiveness
showcase while, on the other hand, optimizing implementation
time and effort.
- Pilot system scoping consists
in specifying (i) involved stakeholders and prospective pilot
user communities, (ii) operational procedures and (iii) technical
architecture and platforms, with respect to the core functional
and non-functional requirements. These specifications should
take under consideration that
- participating stakeholders
should be selected according to maximum preparedness of IT infrastructures
and services, as well as cultural acceptance of e-services in
everyday business practices
- technical architecture should
promote the idea of server-side applications that can be produced
by re-using already available application software and access
"internal" databases via off-line replication; this
architectural scheme minimizes the extent of re-engineering necessary
to integrate e-service schemes with internal information systems
while, at the same time, nearly eliminating the technical complexity
on the end-user side and thus reducing additional requirements
posed to prospective end-users
- technological platforms should
be selected according to technical maturity and commercial availability
criteria, as well as in compliance to open architectures and
standards, so that bias or preferentiality towards specific technologies
is minimized.
4. An e-Service-Centered Evaluation
Framework for IT Projects
Experience drawn from the TAXISnet
project, as well as from the planning of additional e-services,
has been generalized by GSIS into a framework of indicators that
can be used for evaluating IT projects, whether currently operational
or under formulation, with respect to their contribution to the
establishment of e-service schemes.
The evaluation framework is
based on a categorization of e-services provided to citizens
and businesses by public administration agencies as (a) informational
and (b) transactional. Informational e-services include provision
of general (i.e. user-independent) information about some particular
service domain, as well as provision of personalized (i.e. user-specific)
information about matters such as economic rights and debts,
processing of an application and estimated completion time, and
the like. Transactional e-services, on the other hand, include
e-filing of applications, forms, etc., electronic submission
of accompanying documents, electronic production and dissemination
of legally valid certificates as well as e-payments.
It should be noted that the
following evaluation indicators are mainly qualitative and may
not be readily applicable to all cases of e-services; some domain-specific
specializations and quantifications may be necessary. Apart from
that, the list of indicators should rather be viewed as a representative,
rather than as an exhaustive one. Additional domain-specific
indicators are expected to be quite useful for certain cases.
A. evaluation indicators applicable
to IT infrastructures providing, or IT projects aiming to provide,
informational and transactional e-services
A.1 point-of-access density
A.1.1 absolute figures
A.1.2 density per capita of concerned citizens
A.1.3 density per geographical region
A.2 point-of-access usability
A.2.1 provision of single vs.
multiple services
A.2.2 complementary provision of third-party (e.g. banking system)
services
B. evaluation indicators applicable
to individual e-service schemes (for both informational and transactional
e-services), whether currently operational or in the planning
phase
B.1 facilitation of registration
procedures
B.1.1 necessity for registration
procedures
B.1.2 electronic submission channels for registration information
B.1.3 electronic distribution channels for registration credentials
B.1.4 normal completion time for registration procedures
B.2 facilitation of operational
procedures
B.2.1 electronic submission
channels for end-user information
B.2.2 electronic distribution channels for informational or transactional
results
B.2.3 synchronous (real-time) vs. asynchronous response to service
requests
B.2.4 (for asynchronous response) necessity for multiple sessions
B.2.5 necessity for accessing multiple different service points
vs. a single one
B.2.6 overall reduction of paper work (total, partial, exceptional
etc.)
B.2.7 overall elimination of physical transport (total, partial,
exceptional etc.)
B.2.8 on-line end-user support services
B.3 integration to third-party
services schemes
B.3.1 transparent initiation
of transactions with third-party service schemes in order to
complete service provision
B.3.2 transparent access to third-party information in order
to complete service provision
B.3.3 electronic credentials of individual user provide access
to third-party service schemes as well
B.4 promotional policies
B.4.1 dedicated awareness and
dissemination channels
B.4.2 exploitation of general-purpose media and events
B.4.3 end-user motivation policies
C. evaluation indicators applicable
to currently operational individual e-service schemes (for both
informational and transactional e-services)
C.1 quality of provided service
C.1.1 normal completion time
for service provision
C.1.2 improvement in service provision time with respect to predecessor
service schemes
C.1.3 maximum first-response time to end-user inquiries
C.1.4 frequency of end-user errors
C.2 penetration to user communities
C.2.1 estimated ratio of active/registered
to prospective users
C.2.2 (if predecessor service schemes continue to run in parallel)
estimated ratio of conventional to e-service transactions
C.2.3 business performance metrics (e.g. tax-collecting capability
of VAT e-payments)
C.3 acceptance by user communities
C.3.1 level of awareness of
prospective users (never heard of, aware that exists, aware about
details etc.)
C.3.2 level of satisfaction of active/registered users
5. Concluding Remarks : e-Services
as a Catalyst for Horizontal Initiatives and Administrative Convergence
The framework of critical success
factors and methodological guidelines which was presented in
a previous section for formulating pilot e-service schemes, as
well as the e-service-centered framework outlined above for evaluation
of master-planned, evolving or operational IT projects, have
been incorporated by GSIS as substantial part of its overall
business and IT strategy. With a vision of offering best-quality
services to the public, while at the same time exercising public
policy and serving the policy-monitoring and policy-making needs
of the Greek government, GSIS is oriented towards co-operation
with third-party stakeholders in order to establish single-stop
integrated services to citizens living and businesses operating
in Greece. In this respect, GSIS is interested in launching "horizontal
e-service initiatives" in co-operation with
- "e-service partners"
(regional, national or European public administration agencies,
sectoral professional bodies and bodies somehow representative
of affected citizens)
- "e-service enablers"
(banking system institutions, Internet, telecommunication as
well as postal service providers, secure infrastructure providers
including trusted third parties and certification authorities)
- "e-service facilitators"
(including promotion, dissemination and awareness channels)
- "e-service practicians"
(including existing e-service schemes as well as best e-practice
centers).
Apart from that, it is a fundamental
premise for GSIS that e-services have the potential to catalyze
modernization and re-engineering activities undertaken within
public administration in a manner some times ad hoc and ineffective.
Thus, e-service schemes are capable to substantially contribute
to the themes of the so-called "administrative convergence"
agenda recently set forward by the European Union as a critical
domain for convergence between the member states. As already
presented in the opening case study of this paper, even a small-scale
pilot project such as TAXISnet that addresses a critical domain
of service is able, once conceived and designed according to
a robust framework of CSFs and methodological guidelines, to
demonstrate considerable contribution to administrative effectiveness,
cost-efficiency of the public administration modus operandi as
well as quality of the services offered to the public, namely
to three of the major objectives for administrative convergence.
It is our belief, therefore,
that the main achievement of the TAXISnet e-service pilot, with
all its potential for offering additional services of improved
quality, may not be the service scheme per se; perhaps the most
valuable contribution of the TAXISnet project has been the promotion
of the "quality-of-service" concept as a top-level
objective in the public administration agenda, as well as the
experience accumulated with respect to critical success factors,
methodological guidelines and evaluation indicators that public
administration must cope with in order to deploy successful e-services.
GSIS intends to exploit this "business know-how" in
order to establish generalized e-service schemes in co-operation
with all interested and mature stakeholders, as well as to gain
preparedness for achieving the standards of quality required
by both the national administrative modernization and the European
administrative convergence agendas, with a view to assisting,
rather that failing to consider, e-Citizens and e-Business in
the years to come.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to acknowledge
the technical background information provided for the purposes
of this paper by the TAXISnet support team of GSIS (headed by
co-author Tassos Sagris), the TAXIS project team of GSIS headed
by Mr. Odysseas Kyriakopoulos as well as the TAXISnet application
development team of Intrasoft S.A. headed by Mr. Dimitris Milionis.
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