United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

For a long time the process of starting a business and setting up a company have had an image of being a very complicated process and also being a process that’s quite difficult to get a grip on. The new entrepreneur did ask himself; where do I start? What do I have to do? In what order should I do it? A large cloud full of different actors and stakeholders was facing the new entrepreneur, all with information, services and advice. But the complete picture was not there. There was no clear overview of the path to follow for starting a business enterprise. In worst case the different stakeholders could give contradicting information, and in many cases important information never reached the new entrepreneur. The problem was the involved actors didn’t cooperate in a sufficient way.

In the past, the authorities' information to aspiring new business was wide-reaching and presented in different places and in different forms, mainly in brochures and websites. The personal meeting with authorities would, without exception, take place in the office of each individual authority. Each authority took more or less comprehensive steps to develop information and services for enterprises. But while each authority provided satisfactory service in its own demarcated area, new enterprises still found difficulty in getting a clear overview of the path to starting a business.
Lack of information was not the problem; the problem lay in the lack of structured, targeted and cohesive information. It was a muddle that grew every day.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The path to starting a business has cleared the muddle for all new entrepreneurs. In less than one year more than 500 000 contacts have been made, based on the new information and new services. Besides the increased quality and value of the information and service in these contacts the volume has increased several times. Each contact could have a significant effect for each potential start-up. Evaluations show that the information and services are much appreciated and the customer values it to something that makes a difference for them. The citizens are the main beneficiaries from this initiative, both as users (entrepreneurs) and taxpayers. This approach has improved both customer-perceived quality and resource utilisation in the government authorities. Starting a business is simpler, takes less time and is more stimulating when all the pieces are in one place. The key element in our case is the design of a process description of company start-ups. The description, made from the entrepreneur’s perspective, is both an improvement in it selves and also the source material for the development of different services within the process. The description helps the entrepreneur to understand the process and by that makes it easier to make right decisions and search for information and contacts in a more effective and efficient way. The description also helps the involved government authorities to coordinate and integrate their services with the customer in focus. The improvements that have been made cover many different forms of interaction between the entrepreneurs and the government authorities, including technical-, written- and face to face meetings. The improvements of the links to the e-service Företagarguiden (entrepreneur guide) from the authorities’ websites have made it easier for the entrepreneur to find related information. The checklist (an interactive guide on the internet) gives the entrepreneur individually tailored information and pointers for how to start a company. The service helps the entrepreneur to sort out only the information that is relevant for his or hers specific business situation. A development project have been started to develop a comprehensive e-service for business start-ups. When this e-service is up and running the entrepreneur could interact with all the involved government authorities in the start-up process from one website. A common brochure with integrated information from all the involved government authorities gives all the relevant information to the entrepreneur in one paper product. A glossary has also been developed to help the entrepreneur to understand the information easier. The 'Start a business' information meetings give the entrepreneurs the possibility to meet people from all the involved government authorities at the same time, during one day. The meetings are a success which has drawn the highest possible praise from participants. Together all these improvements will make starting a business simpler and less time consuming for the entrepreneur.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The initiator of the joint action group for starting a business was Ulf Larsson at Nutek (the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth), Daniel Sjöberg at Bolagsverket (the Swedish Companies Registration Office) and Ann-Sofie Malmberg, Skatteverket (the Swedish Tax Agency). They met in different circumstances but announced and marketed their authorities' information and services individually. As they shared the same message to enterprises, i.e. 'use our information and services', they began to collaborate. And since 2003 they and their government authorities have been working on a joint marketing project aimed at businesses and the self-employed. There was also already some degree of collaboration between the authorities within the framework of the e-services Företagarguiden and Företagsregistrering (company registration). But the civil servants saw a need to extend the collaboration to cover more authorities and to deepen the collaboration. Instead of just working together in joint customer meetings at information meetings and in the marketing they proposed a joint approach to providing information and service to enterprises and entrepreneurs. Since the initiative was well formulated and had substance they received the support of their superiors for this proposal. In May 2005 the Director-Generals of Bolagsverket, Nutek, Skatteverket, Statskontoret (the Swedish Agency for Public Management) and Tullverket (Swedish Customs) met and decided to set up a pan-authority project group to produce a proposal for how to simplify the process of starting a company. Other stakeholders were then invited and today the joint action group consist of: Arbetsförmedlingen (the Swedish Employment Agency), Bolagsverket, Försäkringskassan (the Swedish Social Insurance Agency), Nutek, Skatteverket, Tullverket and Verva (the Swedish Administrative Development Agency).

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.
The main objectives of the initiative are to simplify the processes and contacts between companies and government authorities and to make the whole experience less complicated, less costly and more enjoyable for business enterprises. The strategy was to set up a joint action group and to start with focus on just one process, the start-up, instead of taking the whole lot at the beginning. The strategy was also to make incremental and very concrete improvements that could be delivered to the customer quite fast, no long inquiries and no big and complicated projects. Also in the strategy was to map the process from the customers’ views and to identify problem areas which could be solved with joint action and by improved information and services. The strategy was first formed bottom-up by the members in the joint action group, mainly to convince the Director-Generals of the feasibility of the project. It was up to the joint action group to deliver results within the given resources and in time frame.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
Some workshops were first held where ideas of improvements were discussed and at the same time a process mapping activity started to find out the path to starting a business from the entrepreneur's perspective was carried out. This was made by in-depth interviews of twenty new entrepreneurs. This gave the quality assessed picture of were the need of improvements were. With these two inputs ideas of solutions and improvements were discussed and with the use of the adopted strategy the ideas were chosen and prioritized by the joint action group and the Director-Generals. Work groups were then formed to realize the decided projects within the initiative. The joint action group was coordinating the sub-projects and made sure results were reused among them; i.e. informative text produced by the work group for a joint brochure was reused by the work group responsible for the interactive check-list generator. When most workgroups had delivered their result information and marketing activities, both internally within the government authorities and externally, started in order to get the new products known and used. After the deployment phase the joint action group has carefully followed the results and reactions both among the colleagues within the government authorities, among other stakeholders and not least among the new entrepreneurs. From this positive experience the next step for joint actions were proposed to the group of Director-Generals in October 2007. This include a plan to keep on with the joint information and service products produced, keep on developing new improvements and also to expand beyond the start-up process

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
Breaking the silos are always challenging. The governmental structure in Sweden is part of the problem this initiative was set to solve; to make the different stakeholders/government authorities to work together more as one unit towards the new business enterprises. Within this initiative this was tackled by getting the support on the highest levels at each stakeholder, the Director-Generals. But that’s not always enough since middle management and other key persons within the organizations such as resource owners have to deal with the narrow goals and budgets for their silo. Even if they by their mind see the benefits, their role is difficult. How to be horizontal in a vertical reality? To overcome this joint action group worked with getting an agreed frame budget to work within. And in the parts this failed some stakeholders showed their will and strength by filling the gaps. One problem was that our need of resources wasn’t synced with the planning and budget cycle in each authority. But not to loose almost one year, again some stakeholders filled the gaps.

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
In the beginning the resources used were mainly human. And they more or less allocated them selves as part of their jobs and their devotion to the scope of the initiative. When the scope of work were identified the financial resources and extra human resources where estimated and was presented to the each resource keeper among the stakeholder to see if it was possible to get a commitment for each to provide their share. In the big scale the investment put in his initiative should easily be gained by reduced costs, but maybe in a different budget. Some flexibility among the stakeholders to fill some gaps was necessary not to delay everything by freezing everything and wait for a new budget cycle and fiscal year. One sub-project, Mitt företag (My Company), is a larger one in terms of resources and is handled separately with its own budget, steering committee and it also got external co-funding for the initial phases by a programme supporting development of public sector e-services towards companies.

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
From the beginning sustainability was important for the joint action group. Developing information and services is one thing, but keeping them and running them is the real thing. Its then the value is created. A model of commitments running on three years to take joint responsibility for each product or service produced jointly within the initiative was put in place in October 2007. This will ensure that the products will survive and will be updated etc. and also that the new culture of working together with both development and with administration of common processes will continue to bloom. To identify one horizontal process that runs through several organizations, use process mapping as a method to identify problem areas and then solve them with joint actions on improved information and services could be used in many areas. The approach is currently being re-used by ourselves in our next step when taking care of other interactions between companies and the government.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
Our focus was to make a difference for the customer, the user. In our initiative this was the new entrepreneur. This focus did lead us to the model of collaboration where we by joint actions produced new information and new services. Looking back these improvements seems quite simple and obvious, and one can wonder why they were not implemented before. A lesson learned is that a key factor for success in collaboration projects is to keep things simple and make sure that delivered effects and benefits that are visible for all stakeholders. The parties in a joint action project should before the development stage be in agreement about how the developed services are administrated when they are complete and how costs are distributed and which other resources are required in the development and administration work, and which collaboration partner will provide these resources. In a workgroup or joint action group a clear mandate for each representative from his/her organization is essential. Otherwise the decision-making processes become unnecessarily long and drawn out. Early planning of how the result should be made known and used by each organization. People in a joint action work should be willing to compromise and always take the enterprise's needs into account. Many decisions are taken on a more or less unconscious level from a more internal perspective. Each stakeholder in joint actions has a normally different definition of the target groups and the terminology is not consistent. Use of language is closely related to professional identity and culture. Authorities have different roles and have developed different attitudes and approaches to new enterprises. It is important to bridge these differences by constantly paying attention to the issue within all kinds of collaboration. We learned that we had even more use of the design of the process description of a company start-up than we could imagine. This illustration function as a core reference for a lot of the work and have a harmonising effect. In the end starting a business is simpler, takes less time and is more stimulating when all the pieces are in one place.


Institution Name:		Cluster of seven government authorities
Institution Type:		Government Agency
Contact Person:		Ulf Larsson
Title:		Projectleader
Telephone/ Fax:		+46 8 681 94 04
Institution's / Project's Website:
E-mail:		ulf.larsson@nutek.se
Address:		Box 4044
Postal Code:		SE 102 61
City:		Stockholm
State/Province:
Country:		Sweden

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