United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

Looking from project management perspective, business case for the project has been based on organizational needs and citizens expectations from the government. The first and the most important problem for the government was that user satisfaction from the vehicle registration and driver licensing services was low. In an effort to determine citizen satisfaction from motor vehicle registration and driver licensing services, a survey was conducted by the Office of The Prime Minister (OPM) in 2006. The survey was carried out face to face with citizens who had used the services at the car registration office in Ankara. The aim of the survey was to measure public perception of the service quality and the requirements of a modernized service. Survey results indicated that citizen satisfaction was only 23.3 percent and the respondent demanded a faster, cheaper and error free integrated online service. Hundred percent of the respondents agreed that car registration services should be automated and delivered from a single point of access.
Second, as indicated by the 2006 Survey, there were lots of red tapes and redundant business processes in the old system. As an example, to be able to sell their cars, car owners were required to get a document from the tax office and deliver it to notary in order to prove that they did not have an unpaid tax or fines.
As the third problem, the rate of increase in the number of registered motor vehicles and the driving licenses issued indicated that physical sizes of public buildings and the number of government personnel were not enough to achieve the service quality demanded by the users. There were only 3 million registered vehicles in 1990 compared to 12 million vehicles in 2006 and 15 million in 2010.
Finally, car registration services were too costly for the government as the supplier and for citizens as the users. In 2009, for a car valued at ten thousands Turkish Liras (TL), the buyer was charged a service fee of around 200 TL for buying and 70 TL for registering the car. The standard cost model based study on vehicle registration services conducted by the Office of The Prime Ministry showed that total cost of new car registrations was 203.7 Million TL ($140 Million) in 2005 for the citizens. From the government perspective, public agencies employed more than five thousand personnel and consumed more than five million papers per year in the delivery of the service. The number of car registration branches increased from 119 in 1990 to 553 in 2006. Another cost incurred by the government was the long delays experienced in the collection of tax revenues and traffic fines.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The scope of the project (ASBIS) was to develop and implement a new system that would support motor vehicle registration and driver licensing with information technologies. The system was designed to improve business processes to enhance the delivery of the services for citizens, businesses, government agencies and public employees. The project has three components: (i) registration of new cars, (ii) registration of used cars and (iii) issuance of driver licenses. The used car component has been in service since May 3, 2010 and the new cars component was launched in November 21, 2011. The business processes for registering used cars prior to initiative were complex and time consuming. First of all, the seller must obtain a document from tax authorities as a proof clearance from taxes and traffic fines in order to be eligible to sell the car. Then, the seller and the buyer must go to a notary to sign a bill of sale. They could only conduct this transaction at the notary that was located in their place of residence. The buyer had to buy two copies of Car Registration Application and Processing Form from the Chamber of Drivers. As a legal requirement, no other types of forms such as one printed from a computer could be used. The initiative simplifies the business processes described above. When seller and buyer go to a notary for a transaction about an already registered car, they present only their IDs and registration certificate. The notary sends an online request to ASBIS through e-notary system for starting the transaction. Upon this request, ASBIS gets information on insurance, tax and any unpaid fines or fees, inspection and legal restrictions by means of web services from five different data bases owned and operated by different public agencies. If there is any restriction on the car, the seller and the buyer are notified about the problem. They can start the transaction again as soon as the restrictions are removed. In cases there are no restrictions that prevent business processes, the notary completes the bill of sale and sends the required information to reregister the car for the name of the new owner. As soon as it gets bill of sale information, ASBIS completes the registration and sends necessary updates to other systems. The notary prints the temporary registration certificate from ASBIS and gives it to the buyer. The buyer is allowed to drive the vehicle with the temporary certificate for thirty days. The buyer has two options to receive the official certificate. It can either be collected from the nearest police location within five business days or it can be mailed through certified mail to the address on the file. The impact of the initiative was measured through a citizen satisfaction survey conducted nationwide. The survey results indicated that %96 of respondents were satisfied or partially satisfied from the initiative. Compared to the 2006 survey, the initiative improved citizen satisfaction by 410 percent.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
Electronic car registration and driver licensing was one of the 111 projects planned by the State Planning Organization (SPO) which is the agency responsible for coordinating information society policies and activities. The SPO published Information Society Strategy of 2006-2010 in January 2008 and the Action Plan annexed to the Strategy encompasses Online Car Registration and Driver Licensing as the 41th action (SPO, 2008). The Office of The Prime Minster started an undertaking to select E-Government projects that could be finished within one year without any additional cost and could generate most public value. Online Car registration was the first Project among 11 projects that were selected after examining and rating 300 projects. Stakeholders of the initiative included citizens, public organizations, NGOs and private companies such as car dealers and manufacturers. Public organizations include State Planning Organization, Turkish National Police, Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Industry and Trade. NGOs covered The Association of Car Manufacturers, The Association of Car Dealers and The Turkish Association of Notaries. One of the primary functions of Turkish National Police (TNP) is the oversight of drivers and motor vehicles operating on the roads. This includes registration of cars and issuance of driver licenses. Vehicles include cars, trucks, motorcycles, busses and trailers. The TNP has established car registration offices in its organizational structure in order to carry out those functions. Notaries are responsible for all transactions associated with creating, updating, transferring and changing the status of a vehicle title of ownership of a used car. New car dealers conduct the titling transactions for new cars. Any vehicle on the public roads must be inspected regularly by inspection stations that are operated by a government contractor. Financial accounting including tax allocation, tracking of fees and fines is conducted by The Ministry of Finance. ASBIS is integrated with five other information systems in terms of used car registration transactions. ASBIS system retrieves information on tax and traffic fines and the data for the name and addresses of legal persons from The Department of Finance, car inspection data from the Department of Transportation, the names, addresses and citizenship number of real persons from General Directorate of Civil Registration and Nationality, information on the liability car insurance from The Chamber of Insurance and Reassurance Corporations and titling information on the cars is retrieved from the Chamber of Notaries. All of the above information retrievals occur online.

Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
a. What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
As far as the car registration services, there were many public players in the system and the processes were complex and ambiguous and included lots of redundancies. Notaries, The Department of Finance, Insurance Agencies, Car Registration Offices, The Chamber of Car Drivers, Car Inspection Stations, Traffic Consultants and an unknown number of intermediaries played a role in the system. In terms public records for cars and drivers, there were different data bases owned by The Department of Finance, The Department of Transportation, The Department of Industry and Trade, The General Directorate of Security, and the Traffic Insurance Information Center. Those five data bases were not interoperable and there were inconsistences between them. Th objective of the initiative was to streamline processes and create a seamless public service for registering cars and responding to the needs of the stakeholders. The strategy was to redesign work flows, reengineeer business processes and use information and communication technologies to create an online service as a replacement for the previously paper based service.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
Along with the project, business processes have been redesigned based on public demands, organizational needs and e-government best practices from around the world. Project management organization included a project steering committee and a project management team. The steering committee is headed by deputy undersecretary of the Ministry of Interior. All of the public organizations that take part in the delivery of the services are represented in the committee which meets once a month. Moreover, private sector is represented in the committee by nonprofit organizations. The project management team is composed of TNP’s IT personnel and the members of the oversight contractor. Although TNP has contracted with an IT management oversight contractor, project management and approval of deliverables are the responsibility of TNP. The purpose for oversight is to verify that the appropriate project management and system development processes are in place. The contractor also assures that the project is on time, within budget and that deliverables will meet the requirements and expectations of the TNP. The IT Department of TNP developed the IT system in collaboration with the contractor. The contractor was responsible for performing project services including assisting with project management, requirements analysis, business process redesign and system architecture. Moreover, validation, verification and test, as well as user acceptance testing were among responsibilities of the contractor.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
One of the main obstacles encountered during the implementation was different rules and procedures of the public organizations taking part in the delivery of the service. As a solution, a joint committee including representatives of the agencies was established to resolve inconsistencies and advise interagency practices. Another obstacle was financial and human resources shortcomings for the initiative. A new implementation model was adopted to overcome the obstacle. That model was basically a public-private partnership for the realization of the technical solution to meet the business requirements of the modernized service. The model lowered the cost of the project and eliminated the need to recruit new public employees.

d. What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
The initiative was carried out based on Service Oriented Architecture for software development and data sharing among stakeholders. As far as the complexity considerations and domain specific knowledge requirements of the vehicle registration service scalability, expandability and easy-to-maintain principles were pursued. The project incurred a cost of around 3 million dollars in terms of financial resources. Human resources included more than fifty personnel who worked for public agencies and around ten people from private contractors. In terms of technical costs, the initiative required the procurement of new IT hardware and establishment of e-signature infrastructure within Turkish National Police.

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The initiative is highly sustainable since its associated cost is much less than the older paper based car registration service. On the other hand, public demand is very high for the online service making it sustainable in terms of social and institutional aspects. The online system is used nationwide and can easily be replicated at the international level. The existence of established international standards in the domain of vehicle registration is a key enabler for the transferability of the initiative from Turkey to other countries.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The initiative brings numerous benefits for public agencies, citizens and businesses. Citizens and businesses can access the services through a single window over the counter at any notary. This provides a faster and more accurate public service for users. With the launch of ASBIS, government is now more efficient and saves valuable financial and human resources. Savings form the service enable the government to make the service even better and to focus on strategic endeavors instead of on routine tasks. Instead of going to five different public organizations and bearing the burden of collecting from or submitting papers to those agencies, citizens now go to only to a notary which is the single window to electronic car sale and registration services. All of the transactions are handled electronically as a seamless and integrated service. It takes not more than five minutes to complete all the transactions from the time of first application for the service to getting the temporary registration certificate. In the previous system, registration of a used car was taking between three to five days. In terms of financial savings, users save TL 3.4 Million a year from transportation costs as a result of avoiding travel to a tax office to collect a clearance document. In addition, citizens saved 3.4 million application forms that cost TL 1.53 million a year. It is a saving of TL 57 million a year from not getting the application forms filled by an unofficial agent for a fee of TL 10 per form. After the initiative, buyers pay only a fixed amount of TL 76 for titling and registration compared to a minimum of TL 200 in the previous system. In addition to benefits for citizens, public agencies have several financial and administrative gains emerging from using the online service. Used car transactions account for 55 percent of all the transactions. TNP’s car registration offices saved the employee time spent for these tractions since they are automatically handled by the system. Forgery cases emerged from non-reregistered cars are eliminated since the reregistration is done with the change of ownership. Another benefit of decreasing the number of unregistered cars is that legal cases in the courts about car transactions are going to decrease as a result of integration and online information sharing between public agencies. In terms of lessons learned, the initiative revealed that electronic delivery of widely used services such as car registration brings a great number of benefits for agencies and users. However, E-Government project selection should be based on user needs and expectations Another takeout of the initiative is that the key enabler for successful implementation of cross agency projects is the use of a sound management methodology and an effective management structure. High level ownership within organization and collaboration with primary stakeholders support project implementation in the public sector. A project steering committee in which all major stakeholders are represented can facilitate interagency collaboration and cooperation in large scale E-Government projects.


Institution Name:		Turkish National Police (Emniyet Genel Mudurlugu)
Institution Type:		Government Agency
Contact Person:		UFUK GOKSEL
Title:		Deputy Department Head
Telephone/ Fax:		+90 412 30 00
Institution's / Project's Website:		www.asbis.gov.tr
E-mail:		ugoksel@egm.gov.tr
Address:		Ayranci Mahallesi Dikmen Caddesi No: 11
Postal Code:
City:		Ankara
State/Province:
Country:		Turkey

The Problem

Solution and Key Benefits

Actors and Stakeholders

(a) Strategies

(b) Implementation

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

(d) Use of Resources

Sustainability and Transferability

Lessons Learned

Contact Information