United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

The ePractice web portal was launched in June 2007 to provide a leading-edge service to professionals involved in public services across Europe.
Among the core exchange features of the portal are the following:
• User-driven communities for members willing to work closer on given topics;
• The ability to directly contribute to the portal content by submitting events announcements proposals or case studies;
• The possibility to rate and publicly comment content;
• An offline exchange framework with regular workshops, face-to-face meetings and public presentations.
The new portal incorporates the above features along with the best elements from several existing Commission initiatives. It introduces innovative and network building elements, together with providing a single access point that enables the integration, gathering and exchange of news, cases, events, a library and country summaries (the factsheets) that were previously dispersed, and quite difficult to access and use.

Apart from its use as an information service, the portal offers an online meeting place where professionals working in public services can share good practice experiences, contacts and resources with peers around the world. As a matter of fact, ePractice is designed to be highly interactive by constantly being enhanced though the feedback and suggestions received by its members.

Similarly, ePractice affects a number of communities. Primarily, the portal affects professionals from the public, private and non-profit sectors that value networking, good practice exchange and taking part in a community of practice. Secondary, epractice can support the wider community of public sector stakeholders who might need e-insight for specific tasks they undertake. Finally, it supports students and researchers by giving them the opportunity to share their work and experience through the submission of cases and the publication of workshops and events dedicated to their interests.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
ePractice is a reference information tool on public services issues and developments across Europe. It represents a real bridge between the domains of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth, as there is a high potential of interesting lessons to be learnt by all sides. The portal provides the community of decision-makers and public professionals, at EU and Member State level, with a unique set of information resources and with valuable insight into strategies, initiatives and projects in Europe and beyond. By doing so, it supports the Community and the Member States in the identification and better understanding of public services, and contributes to the emergence of European strategies. In 2003 and 2004 epractice.eu focused on raising the quality and quantity of content published, improving geographical and topical coverage, enhancing website usability, expanding the user base and raising the profile of the epractice.eu towards senior eGovernment professionals across Europe. A user survey performed in mid-2004 delivered very positive results concerning the performance of the epractice.eu and the satisfaction of its customers. 86% of respondents said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the overall quality of the services provided by epractice.eu, and 92% said they agreed or partially agreed to say that the epractice.eu is the reference European information source for the community of eGovernment professionals. These results have shown that the epractice.eu is meeting a real information need, fulfilling its mission and achieving its strategic objectives. According to the 2008 ePractice user survey the domains of interest are distributed as follows: 54% eGovernment, 32% eInclusion and 14% eHealth. In addition, in terms of the actual member’s participation and use of the portal, the ePractice statistics evidence that there are 21040 members, 1282 cases, 3661 events and 1025 selected documents. The portal also gathers 29 communities of users working closer in specific topics. Finally the portal benefits citizens, public administrations and businesses in an equal manner. ePractice enables citizens to access the latest information on public achievements and developments in Europe. In this respect, epractice.eu contributes to bringing the initiatives of the public administrations closer to citizens. In conclusion, epractice.eu provides input to organisations involved in public services to better understand the essential market requirements and trends.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The epractice portal was proposed by the European Commission, following the initial idea to merge several previous initiatives into one. This was idea was implemented by the several contractors that enabled the provision of an array of services and options (communities, workshops, news, library items, messaging, blogging, calendar, document sharing tools, and networking opportunities) both in terms of technical and content capabilities, thus enabling private and public institutions, educational/research communities to be interested in this effort and contribute their excerpts for publication in the portal.

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.
epractice is a platform for professionals in public administration. Ultimately, the goal is to help these professionals meet, share and learn. For this reason, the portal combines online activities with frequent offline exchanges: workshops, meetings and public presentations. In addition, a large knowledge base of real-life case studies submitted by portal members is freely available, while the portal also hosts the European Journal of ePractice, a digital publication to further promote the sharing of good practices and services implementation. Concurrently, epractice helps to increase efficiency and effectiveness of leadership by organizing workshops, where leaders can meet, share and learn from each other (around 2 workshops per month, intended for an average of 40 participants). Epractice fosters change and motivation by challenging the different case studies and their leaders with web 2.0 tools (ratings, comments) and also with face-to-face workshops. Epractice is a platform where many projects cooperate and complement each other. European Commission-funded thematic networks and innovative pilots set communities at epractice in order to improve methods for self-reflection, development and improvement of professionals in public organisations. The European Commission manages epractice. Overall, epractice is the result of merging different Commission activities in order to provide a better service to its customers. The outcome of this merger is a proven improvement in its service and top management, thus yielding to a common accepted strategy, shared vision and aligned values according to the expectations of the customers.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
The management of epractice is proactive and based on clear routines, deadlines and strategies. Since it is coordinated across several countries, multi-channel communication (telephone, email, face-to-face) is crucial to its continuous growth and success. ePractice blends online and offline service delivery by providing a web portal community together with face-to-face workshops. Up to date (Dec 2009), 47 workshops have been held covering thematic themes related to the 3 domains and 29 on-line communities have been created. The implementation steps were: Firstly, reflection on the needs of the target users of the different initiatives that finally merged. Secondly, reflection on the trends existing in the internet to create interaction (basically, the web 2.0 world) Thirdly, the creation of a brand new portal to support all these needs. Finally, the establishment of procedures to run the portal, support the users and invite them users to provide content. We have performed several limited promotion campaigns, but most users come to epractice by invitation of other users or just finding us in the net.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The major obstacle was internal. We needed to convince ourselves to apply at home the same principles that we were preaching to our stakeholders: cooperate instead of duplicate, do not reinvent the wheel, create services based on your users and not on your internal structure. It's difficult to recognize that you are not moving into the right direction, but once we did it, the move was fast. We also faced technical problems when we moved from a first proprietary version into an open source-based system. We underestimated the effort and we suffered from delays.

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
Financial resources The European Commission invests around €300.000 per year in the technical maintenance of epractice. In addition, around €400.000 are invested in providing content and helping users to provide content. On top of this direct fund by the Commission, many initiatives use epractice as their exchange platform. Many of them are fund-less and based only on the work of their members, but other communities have public support. Technical resources ePractice platform is based on a web 2.0 community building approach, open standards and follows accessibility guidelines (W3C AA). ePractice platform is based on: - The server is set up using the LAMP Configuration: Linux 2.6.9, Apache 1.3.4, MySQL 4.1, and PHP 4.4, in combination with Javascript (AJAX technology). - Both the internal content management system and website use several low level free software tools like: Smarty for template management, AdoDB as database abstraction layer, PHP libraries (eg. GD2, Multi-byte functions, etc.) and AJAX and Javascript. - The hardware configuration: server machine equiped with Dual Xeon 3.0 GHz CPU and 4GB RAM and 5 x 180 GB RAID-5 hard disk. Regarding the portal usage, an average of 100.000 visits, 2,4 page views, 500s visit length per month. The ePractice platform is an open source platform including Drupal 6. Epractice is the first web 2.0 international initiative for sharing good practice in the public sector. There is no other successful initiative at this level using state of the art technologies. Human resources The novelty of ePractice.eu lies in blending online and offline service delivery to several convergent communities of practice and in the tie-in of many European Commission contractors and studies who now share a common interface to the outside world. ePractice.eu provides web portal community together with face-to-face workshops. In addition, user on-line communities allow members to work in specific fields

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
ePractice is funded by the European Commission and is continuously sustained by the content and technical contractors, which provide feedback when issues arise but also provide everyday support to make its enhancement possible. Its’ interactive and exchange scheme could empower the professional community globally to discuss and influence open government, policy-making and the way public administrations operate and deliver services, since it has already succeeded in involving practitioners from all 27 Member States, EU-member candidate states and EFTA countries. In addition, the strategy of the portal goes far beyond the provision of an all-inclusive information package in a single space. It could certainly set the example and aspire other portals to support professionals in the same way as epractice has accomplished; publishing content items of quality; offering online and offline activities, including networking through the communities, workshops/events, while enabling discussions face-to-face or blogging opportunities. ePractice is being looked at by several European administrations to be used as their own repository and exchange platform, when at the same time, thematic networks issued by different European Commission calls will use epractice as their exchange website. The ePractice.eu partners are actors who have similar goals: exchange people, content, and ideas.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The novelty of ePractice.eu lies in blending online and offline service delivery to several convergent communities of practice and in the tie-in of many European Commission contractors and studies who now share a common interface to the outside world. The good practice cases featured on ePractice.eu have an average size of €1.3 million and a total implementation cost of altogether €1.1 billion. However, there is still room to grow, as European eGovernment expenditure was measured at €11.9 billion by the EU-funded eGEP study (2004). ePractice.eu has more than 20,000 members from 35 countries, lists more than 1000 cases, issues more than 3000 news items (around 40 per month) and more than 1000 events (average of 30 per month), most of them proposed by portal members, a live blog, and 29 communities in a wide variety of themes facilitated by key experts from the area. In terms of the ePractice workshops, these activities are held face-to-face in central locations in Europe, with more than 600 portal members attending yearly to meet with peer professionals; exchange views and discuss best practices all over Europe. An average of 95% of the participants have expressed being very satisfied or satisfied with the workshop. Added to that, there is a co-branding strategy, yielding to new workshops–the co-branded workshops are almost as frequent as pure epractice workshops. Lessons learnt Lesson 1 - Create leadership buy-in in all concerned domains before launching the project. Lesson 2 - Make sure deadlines are realistic and that the project survives when adjusted to changing circumstances. Lesson 3 - Successful projects require strong, but humble leadership from start-to-end from a party who is respected or can build relations widely.


Institution Name:		European Commission- IDABC Unit
Institution Type:		Public Organization
Contact Person:		emilio castrillejo
Title:		programme manager
Telephone/ Fax:		003222950917
Institution's / Project's Website:
E-mail:		emilio.castrillejo@ec.europa.eu
Address:		rue montoyer 34
Postal Code:
City:		bruxelles
State/Province:
Country:		Belgium

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