The Challenges of e-Appointment: Process Modeling, Infrastructure, and Organizational Context

This contribution focuses on the question why eappointment has not (yet) become a “killer application”. It reports on two strategic efforts to introduce e-appointment applications in a given environment: (1) the Hamburg city state administration seeking to improve its e-government services through allowing citizens to make appointments with administrative staff, and (2) the Hamburg medical association seeking e-appointment solutions for doctors’ practices to relate with their patients. In both cases it turned out that the main challenges on the road to successful e-appointment are a detailed understanding of the appointmentmaking process, a technical infrastructure which enables communication between distributed software components, and organizational circumstances which support the e-appointment application. The summary indicates lessons learned from the web engineering as well as from the information management point of view.