A Web Based Platform for the Design of Administrational Reference Process Models

Public administrations are increasingly confronted with a modernization and service gap. Within the scope of eGovernment initiatives in the last few years, administrations try to overcome this gap by reorganizing and automating their business processes. In order to increase the quality of operations and processes, reference process models can be used as a valuable design support. Reference process models show a high level of reusability and thus allow for an extensive exploitation of synergy potentials as well as a reduction of redundancies. For the design of reference process models public administrations need to identify the best practice or common practice within the regarded domain. In order to support the identification of best practice or common practice a communication platform is needed that contains process descriptions of the specific administrations that can be provided by the administrations themselves. The aim of our paper is to propose a conceptual framework of such a web based platform as well as application scenarios in the German public administration domain. 1 Knowledge Deficits in Municipalities as a Driver for Reference Process Models in eGovernment Public administrations are increasingly confronted with a modernization and service gap which results from a rising task load at simultaneous decreasing liquid funds [1]. E. g., extra tasks arise from accepting competencies from higher administration instances, increasing requirements from citizens and organizations as well as the handling of more complex administration-specific information systems. Administration performance downgrades due to a continuing bad economic situation, decreasing tax gains, increasing encumbrance and problematic demographical development. In order to close the modernization and service gap, municipalities start to take part in a national and international competition and adopt business management concepts (New Public Management) [8]. On the technical layer, public administrations try to increase efficiency as well as “citizen-friendliness” by applying innovative technologies. In order to handle the resulting complexity many municipalities join regional software choice and user groups. Nevertheless, the 2 Jörg Becker, Lars Algermissen, Patrick Delfmann, Björn Niehaves economic situation of the public administrations is keeping on getting worse. One cause are knowledge deficits on supra-municipal, intra-municipal and inter-municipal layer. 1.1 Supra-municipal knowledge deficits: Public administrations are not aware of the requirements they have to fulfill in terms of future establishments and laws. They do not know which responsibilities or even new freedoms for process execution they will face, and how organizational and technical requirements can be realized in an efficient way [2], [3]. From the legislator’s point of view, the effectiveness of laws and establishments cannot be controlled adequately. Moreover, it is difficult to quickly put innovations across to the concerned municipalities. 1.2 Intermunicipal knowledge deficits: Many municipalities “re-invent the wheel”, because they do not possess the knowledge how other municipalities solve similar problems or have already solved problems respectively [12]. Furthermore, there is no awareness of existing problems because information of structure and process quality is missing and optimization potentials are remaining unrevealed. Municipality comparison communities seem to provide a solution of these problems. These are so far based on business ratios and hence provide indications, who is doing something better, but do not show why and under which conditions (comparison of symptoms, not of causes). Specific characteristics of municipalities are not taken into account. For the same reason, the creation of regional software choice and user groups is not always reasonable. The basis of these communities should not be spatial nearness, but rather similar structures and processes. 1.3 Intramunicipal knowledge deficits: In terms of organizational design, a structured and transparent preparation of relevant information about administrational processes is missing. Besides a user groupadequate visualization of processes and their interdependencies, organizational units within and between public administrations as well as performance ratios belong to this information. In fact, performance ratios are used in product catalogues. Because the ratio instances do not provide inferences of their cause in the business processes, they can not always be used to generate action recommendations for the organizational design. Knowledge is rarely provided in a transparent and structured form in order to support employees in the execution of operational routine processes. At the same time, employees do not possess the knowledge about the placement of their own tasks in an overall business process, as well as legal interdependencies and process and organizational relationships. A Web Based Platform for the Design of Administrational Reference Process Models 3 In terms of application design, CIOs are confronted with a complex market of domain-specific applications, server technologies and standards. Many CIOs are overstrained with the choice of new software and the adoption of new technologies. They shy at radical changes, because they do not want to commit without the required knowledge. A compensation of the mentioned knowledge deficits promises a high improvement potential of municipality process performance [10]. In order to provide the required knowledge, an adequate knowledge base is needed. A great knowledge base for public administrations is their own business processes, or the business processes of many public administrations respectively [6]. Especially by learning from other public administrations that might perform the “best practice processes” in the public domain, the above mentioned modernization and service gaps and the resulting deficits can be overcome. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework of a web based platform which will be able to support the identification of best practice processes in the public administration domain. For this purpose, the platform is designed to host process descriptions of the specific administrations that can be provided, viewed and compared by the administrations themselves. 4 Jörg Becker, Lars Algermissen, Patrick Delfmann, Björn Niehaves 2 Structure of a Knowledge Base for Reference Process Models The framework which delivers the structure for the knowledge bases is divided in 4 different layers [7]. Within each layer the level of refinement raises (see Fig.1).