| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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The most important and successful aspect in the project strategy has been the choice to implement the project as an internal initiative, directly owned and managed by the Administration personnel.
This choice has been made both for economic reasons and (mostly) to involve all the Administration staff on the project objectives, aiming to generate a common and shared awareness among all the participants, promoting a cultural change inside the Institution, investing on internal resources and their professional growth.
The implementation phases were: (1) analysis of the existing procedures, (2) preparation of new document templates and (3) creation of the “Digital Platform of Shared Knowledge”.
All these steps have been managed by an internal "analysis group", whose members were first of all trained on the initiative objectives, and were chosen among employees coming from all the involved municipal services.
The analysis group was then extended to include all the persons that were identified as the new Front Office operators. The members of this group were selected by volunteering, keeping in mind their interpersonal skills and personal attitudes.
The whole project, which lasted about 3 years, was promoted as a cross-sectorial target for all the Institution: the allocation of the compensation incentives for all the staff was based on the initiative objectives, to encourage and promote the contribution, direct or indirect, by all the Administration personnel.
Another important element in the project strategy was to focus on the Front Office “physical desk”: it was designed on the basis of accessibility and acceptance criteria (choice of the location, use of clear and simple furnishings, structure of the front desk, choice of the instrumentation, etc.).
Last but not least, particular attention was dedicated to the IT infrastructure (proprietary fiber optic network, hardware and software – through a document and process management platform).
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| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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Many inputs came from users: citizens, professionals and enterprises, as well as those organizations which represent them on the territory (trade associations, citizens associations, social welfare services, non-profit organizations, etc.).
The analysis of their needs and their feedbacks on the actual experience allowed the Institution to clearly identify the most important objectives: optimize procedures, reduce time and costs, digitalize document management, reduce disservices and inefficiencies due to fragmentation in information and in service management, avoid citizens wandering back and forth from an office to another.
Another important request was to reduce/eliminate the cases that require to go to the physical desk, through the adoption of innovative and easy tools that could allow citizens to communicate with the Administration via electronic channels. Citizens wanted to find online:
- an archive to get information about all provided services
- a way to submit requests for new proceedings
- a tool to get information about the status of open proceedings
The “analysis group” then had to translate all these requirements to build the solution, through a continuous involvement of all the Administration offices and personnel.
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| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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The project was funded using financial resources entirely allocated by the Administration.
The costs on hardware, software, and professional services directly related to the implementation of the online citizen desk amounted to about € 150,000.
The costs related to the preparation of the “physical multifunctional desk” (rooms, furnishings, equipment,..) amounted to about € 200,000.
The involved staff performed most of the project activities during normal working hours, with an estimate overall cost of about 2 man-years FTE. The available budget to cover overtime costs was set at € 10,000.
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| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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1) All the procedures are handled by the Back Office through standardized work flows and document templates; thus everything is easily traceable and provides transparency to the users, both with respect of the expected times and of the impartiality in the proceedings management.
The use of the same work flow for all the proceedings allows great savings:
*) cost savings, because it’s not required to implement very specific workflows, one for each procedure: since there’re more than 250 procedures, it’s clear how huge are the benefits.
*) time savings: having one single workflow allows to minimize the resources needed to keep it updated (on the contrary: using customized workflows, one for each procedure, brings to a “never ending project”, since it’s highly likely to have to periodically reengineer all of them).
2) The projects helps the cultural and professional growth of the entire staff, which is more focused on simplification and transparency, shaping services to meet the needs and preferences of the final users (citizens, professionals, associations, enterprises, etc.).
3) The initiative provides a new way to interact with users, through both a “unified multifunctional physical desk” (open 6 days a week thanks to the interchangeability of operators), and a complete “online citizen desk” which allows users to submit new requests and access the “electronic folder” of their proceeding (that includes all the documents involved in the process), ensuring high transparency on the acts released by the Institution.
4) The digital management of proceedings and documents facilitates information sharing and retrieval, offers a better organization of the archive, and allows digital long term preservation. It’s also essential to manage the “Digital Platform of Shared Knowledge”, all the document templates, the proceedings instructions. The underlying document management platform, based on Siav’s Archiflow (an ECM application included in the Gartner’s ECM Magic Quadrant since 2010, developed by an Italian software house) makes all these contents available to both internal operators and external users through the Institution web portal.
5) The intensive and extensive use of IT tools brought by this project allows the entire Institution to conform to the existing Italian regulations about “digital administration”, which is working to push all the public services to “go digital”. From this point of view the entire “incontr@ciriè” project is extremely relevant, since the transition to digital is still very limited in the Italian public administration, even for larger Organizations.
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| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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Activities related to the project lasted three years (2008 - 2010), and ended with the opening of the new multifunctional citizen desk called “incontr@ciriè”. The launch took place March 1, 2011, with the inauguration of the new Front Office: that day the “citizen desk” went online on the Administration’s web portal, the new unified multifunctional physical desk opened in a dedicated location, while all the other municipal offices became accessible to public only by appointment.
All the phases of the project were carefully planned, step by step for each activity, and placed in a detailed time schedule. The coordinators of the "analysis group" continuously tracked the progress of project activities to monitor the respect of planned timing, and organized periodical meetings (every six months) to inform all the Administration staff on the work progress. To underline the strong commitment on the project objectives of the Institution top managers and political leaders, all the top administrative managers participated to each meeting.
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| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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The main problems the Institution met were:
*) Internal resistance to change. To solve this problem the Administration decided to involve the whole staff in the development of the initiative since “day one”, sharing project objectives with all the personnel, through a continuous flow of internal communication on the activities progress. This involvement was also supported by the commitment of the cross-sectorial “analysis group”.
*) Human resources: the project was for the most part implemented during normal working hours, which implied subtracting people from their ordinary activities. To address this need each Administration office had to optimize its internal organization and processes, to free up the resources required to work on the project. This need encouraged the development of attitudes such as flexibility, interchangeability, the and the capability to optimize human resources activities with no change on the quality of services provided.
*) Financial resources. To deal with this problem the Administration opened a bank loan and spread the costs over several years.
*) Complexity of the Italian legislation, often unclear and restrictive. (eg. lacks in the national regulations, that didn’t allow to pay "stamp duty" through online services; lack of official solutions for online user identification, etc.). This has resulted in a number of obstacles in the accomplishment of the project, and leaves room for further improvements in the future (see question n.12).
*) Lack of similar experiences to refer to. The initiative was really innovative in the Italian panorama, so the Administration had to deal with some issues that no other public organization had faced before.
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