Policy Context and Legal Framework

The C3Cat model has been framed by the decision of Generalitat de Catalunya of considering the interaction with citizens at the key axis from where to develop their strategy for eGovernment.

The challenge was about building a constituency paradigm well suited to cope with a number of concurrent objectives. On one side the need to increase the interactivity between the users and the administration, thus increasing the value perceived by the citizens generating at the same time trust and conditions for transparency and participation. On the other side to evolve a citizen-care-centric vision of e-Government into an operational model and its related platforms, designed and transferred into operations in a way that allowed for a significant broadening of the number, complexity and typology of services. And finally, the need was to provide a cross-institutional approach able to support the needs of a complex organisation (composed of 15 Departments, 28 Autonomous Bodies, 70 Public Companies, almost 200.000 civil servants and employees and participation in 53 Consortia).

Overall, the broadening of the public services offering in support of increasing and consolidating the interactions with citizens implied the need to reinforce the internal capacities for service development and operations, securing up to the highest level the efficiency and effectiveness of the related backoffices and complex information and transactional systems.

This effort has been reflected in the development of a number of advanced projects. As one one exemple it could be cited the embedding into an ambitious new portal for transactional services (tramits) of a "citizen folder" concept composed of all administrative, education and even health information and services (patient's medical record in digital format, EHR), opening up the way to incorporate further dimensions. Securing access of the citizens to their overall personal data was seen as one of the best strategies to increase trust in public services, showing up transparency and opening up space for participation.

The policy of facilitating access of the citizens to their personal information data and related services is complemented with the guarantee that the provided information is exactly the same that is used by civil servants and professionals, thus allowing for an equal and balanced involvement of all intervenients including the citizens themselves (co-responsibility). Covering sensitive areas like online access to health data or education is of paramount importance, as they are associated with the highest possible value as far as citizen's quality perception is concerned.

The mandate from the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya was to articulate this approach supported by a methodological vision supported by all required design, development and operational platforms, dimensioned in a way that allows for a substantial increase in number of interactions among citizens and the public administration, but reducing significantly at the same time time-to-market dimensions, development and operation costs.

Implementation and Management Approach

The C3Cat model has been implemented in way which specifically distinguishes the typology of the delivered services. Information and transactional services are treated in a way that guarantees the highest possible achievement of transparency and accountability, thus affecting and creating conditions for all stakeholders participation. Social networks are embedded into the model having been given specific instruments and methodological support (under the so called e-Catalunya project). This typology of services are transferred into operations as service deployment and operation projects, being all of them fine tuned in terms of their interactivity dimensions (needs for multichannel and multimodality, priorities to be given to concrete channels or delivery specificities to be taken into account, and even their need for communication and dissemination actions).

The model is composed in operational terms of a number of organisational structures. A Center of Competence on Citizen Care has been made operational under the concept of Shared Service Centre. As such, it is a functional and technological group responsible to identify, define, develop and deploy all eGovernment projects targeted to the citizenship, under the conditions established by C3Cat.

The adoption of a number of highly customized technological suites has allowed C3Cat to spectacularly increase a rapid adoption of the envisaged approach under a significant reduction of cost development (one order de magnitude lower). A pluridisciplinary team (well backed at the political level) composed of civil servants, content managers, functional analysts, service designers and technology experts has taken over a centralized responsibility to provide support, guidance and instruments suited to face a significant boost of citizen-care-centric kind of eGovernment services.

Consensus is reached among all the constituents involved in service design and delivery, securing in such way the existence of realistic and achievable expectations, this resulting in significantly high final evaluation of the provided results.

The C3Cat model is a networked exercise, embedding the knowledge and involvement of all innovation agents of the organisation. This has been supported by an innovative project based on the adoption of Communities of Practice supported by advanced Internet social networks and web 2.0 technologies (e-Catalunya project). One of the most active Communities of Practice in e-Catalunya is composed of all the civil servants and professionals of the Citizen Care group (430 persons) who have been using this instrumental support to share and generate knowledge, experience and joint advice, thus enhancing their strengths as innovation and change agents.

The C3Cat model is backed by the existence of an accurate system of metrics, designed to monitor the operations and evolution of all available channels and services (012 citizen care telephone, web portals embedded into gencat.cat, presence offices and publications). The sustained measurement by Webtrends and Google Analytics of the use of Internet service delivery is complemented by an accurate surveillance of relevant parameters of the Contact Centre, including periodic quality and market analysis and valuation of the provided services by the citizens.

The effectivenes and efficiency of the involved processes is enhanced by the existence of a number of supporting systems, like "Gecopedia" (an internal knowledge, experience and information repository allowing access to hints and solutions related with the internal techological suites) or "Gecodesk" (an instrumental tool allowing for an effective project management of all service development projects under the technological suites).

The most strategic and executive management aspects of the C3Cat aret the responsibility of a team specifically allocated for this purpose by the Directorate General of Citizen Care of the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya.

Technology solution

The technology solution has been adopted taking into consideration aspects of technical viability, flexibility and scalability, heavily needed to guarantee its future evolution and the capacity to cope with extremely demanding and challenging coming projects for new or improved services and functionalities.

The technology solution can be described in terms of Front Office, Middle Office and Back Office.

The Front Office approach is composed of a hardware layer (application servers, database servers, communication systems) and of a software layer, designed and implemented to support participative applications, content management, transactional and information portals and platforms for presence and telephone citizen care. In conceptual terms, the Front Office s composed of:

• Collaborative tools: Blogs, forums, social networks, tag clouds, wiki, participative processes, distribution lists, file storage, photo albums, RSS and alarms
• Multimedia content management: CMS, multimedia database, forms generator, blog, RSS, newsletters, territorial resource database
• Communication channel platform:Internet channel, telephone channel 012, SMS channel 5012, presence channel (450 offices)
• Citizen care databases: tramit informations, services and public bodies, search engines motors de cerca (keywords, taxonomies, natural language interpreter
• Transactional module: electronic identification and authentication, electronic forms, payment systems, general register
• Additional citizen care functionalities module: CRM with citizen profile and service follow-up, appointment management, electronic notifications, suggestions, incidences and complains

The Middle Office layer is responsible for the integration of the components of messaging, common modules and communication systems connecting to external systems. The layer is composed of:

Corporate Content Manager (GECO)

Content Manager: Vignette Content Management v7.5

Portal Manager: Vignette Application Portal v7.4

Web Server: Apache

Application Server: Tomcat (Delivery) , BEA WebLogic 8 (Management)

Operating System: Linux Red Hat

Database: Oracle

Search Engine

Indexing and search engine: Google Search Appliance 1001

Web Server: Apache

Application Server: OC4J

Institutional Iconografic Bank (BIG)

Digital Asset Management Repository: FotoStation (Fotoware)

Intranet: Fotoweb  (Fotoware)

Web Galeries Clicat: Flash / html

Web Server: IIS

Operating System: Windows Server

Database: SQLServer

Blogs

Blog Server: Wordpress mu

Application Server: Apache + php

Database: MySQL

Forms

Form Manager: J2EE Aplication

Application Server: BEA WebLogic 8

Database: Oracle

Newsletters

Forms Manager: J2EE Aplication

Web Server: Apache

Applications Server: BEA WebLogic 8

Database: Oracle

e-Catalunya

SSO: JOSSO

Infrastructure portal:  Exo platform

Forums: PHPBB

Distribution lists: Sympa

Wikis & Weblogs: XWiki

Presence and instant messaging: eJabberd

Sync with mobiles and PDA: Sync4j

Email: Postfix

Web Server: Apache

Application Server: Tomcat

Database: MySql

Analytics

WebTrends 8 OnDemand

Tramits and services

HTTPServer: Apache Web Server

Application Server J2EE: Bea Weblogic Server 8.1

Portal Manager: Vignette WAP

Content Manager: Vignette WCM 7

Database Server: Oracle 9i

Keyword search engine: Google

Natural language interpreter. Q-go

ETL Platform:   Power Center

Middleware Platforrm: Bea WLI

J2EE Development Framework: Canigó (corporate)

Forms Server: Adobe Forms

Contact Center (012)

ACD: AVaya COmmunications Manager 3.1

CTI: Altitude uCI 7.5

IVR: Dialogic cards, voice libraries and IVR solution suport from EstraVOX

CRM: Siebel v6 (Contact Manager CAT365), Siebel 7 (Taxes) and several adhoc Client/Server developments.

Connectivity: 180 channels (6 PRI) plus 2 Metrolan links

Impact

The main results of de C3Cat model can be summarized according to four important outcomes:

• The interactions among citizens and public administration have been increased by one order of magnitude (considering that the current amount of citizen interactions is of 142,8 million interactions per year, this amounts for a comparative increase of 350% since 2005)
• The unitary cost of building and deploying new services as been reduced by 50%.
• The operational costs of running the services have been reduced by more than 50%.
• Service's time-to-market has been reduced by more than 50%

Other additional indicators are as follows:

• Visits to the web portal have increased by 70% last year, having reached 136 million visits/year (2008) to a web galaxy composed of 289 integrated webs, 1,2 million of available documents (the 5^th most visited website of Catalonia, the 36^th most visited website at National level)
• Contact Center (012): 3 millions calls (2008) with a high evaluation of 8 out of 10.
• Automated telephone attention, having been able to deal with the need to suppot specific campaigns (summer activities: 60.000 persons/year, family subventions: 200.000 persons/year, traffic conditions: 20.000 SMS/year)
• Massive use of communication channels: 4,6 milions of served RSS, 4,5 milions newsletters, primetime audience at the Catalan TV (18% share ) obtained for the 012/gencat services campaign, InfoCatalunya Magazine (which includes a multimedia version) sent to all families 
• Exponential growth of Communities of Practice at e-Catalunya project: from 5.000 users and 250 CoP (2007) to 15.000 users and 1.100 CoP (2009).
• Number of user incorporated into the Gencat Services ad Tràmits Portal: 145.000 citizens 15.000 companies.
• Increase of the number of executed transactional services: more than 5 million/year online tramits.   

 The last two years, the most relevant multichannel services having been implemented are as follows:     

Information and transparency  

• Online validation (web and 012) of the montly unemployed subsidy targeted to the more than 505.000 affected citizens, from whom 30,50% opted for the web channel, whilst 14,30% opted for the use of the Contact Center options (012)
• Centralized territory resources information system: data on more than 30.000 geocoded resources (multimedia access from web, 012 and mobiles).
• Infografic system: 5.000 online media files (audio, pictures, vídeos)
• Estatistical data: ellaborated and made accesible from the responsaible Catalan agency (Idescat).
• New support portal for immigrants (web and 012): available in 10 languages.  
• Reuse of contents protected by Intellectual Property under Creative Commons licenses
• Traffic conditions on mobile devices (5012 with IVR functionalities)
• Labour acidents, family subsidies, permits and licenses, access to education resources

Transactional

• Personal Health Folder (the early implementation of the Electronic Health Record - EHR); reaching 80% of primary care and 20% of hospital care. These services are being deployed addressing the targeted 8 milion citizens
• Tramit folder: transparent access throughout the institutional CRM to all available information for transactional services

Social networks, 2.0 administration

• E-Catalunya: a Communities of Practice portal involving 15.000 users, 1100 CoPs (2009) and 53 websites.

Track record of sharing

The significant effort devoted to conceptualize, design, develop and implement the C3Cat model has already resulted in having attracted the interest of a significant number of Public Administrations from all over Europe and overseas.

The case has also been partially analyzed by a number of relevant academic and research institutions at the European and international level, to whom the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya has always been devoting the maximum support.

The experience developed by the Regional Government of Generalitat de Catalunya has been studied by some of the research groups of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Further options are now being discussed with Oxford Institute, who has expressed their interest in exploring building an academic case out of the experience and knowledge generated from the C3Cat model.

The current situation allows for a more ambitious scope and extent of collaboration with any interested Public Administration and Public body, as the C3Cat model has already been exposed to some of the most demanding and challenging dimensions (like, for instance, the operational implementation of Electronic Health Records) having resulted in a notorious success both in terms of a rigour in developing and deploying services but also in robustness, scalability and business sustainability of the model vision.

Lessons learnt

The three most outstanding lessons learnt from the design and operational implementation of the C3Cat model are as follows:

• The model has demonstrated a credible way of reaching a spectacular increase of the number of interactions between citizens and public administration (one order of magnitude, at a very high scale of delivered services) whilst at the same time coping with significant reductions in time-to-market, development cost and cost of operations
• Communication and dissemination activities and efforts are critical. Doesn't matter how effective or efficient an eGovernment approach has been developed, it will never reach its full potential without deploying professional (consumer-like) communication campaigns, which cost should be considered and included as part of the deployment resources
• Innovation in the development of eGovernment services is better supported under collaborative networked approaches, as they enable connections among people across formal (and normally hierarchical) structures, thus overcoming substantial organizational issues.