Basic registries and powershift in administrations
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Title
Maintaining data-integrity in the back office registries of cities; a survey on organizational barriers and ways to address those.
Definition/short description
Cities and regional authorities require consistent data on items like Persons, Addresses, Locations and Buildings as the fundament for service delivery, fraud-prevention and -detection, permit enforcement, and the effective execution of day to day operations. The concept of Basic Registries in the Netherlands is introduced to improve data integrity and the single entry for the citizen. Evidence shows that the change that comes with the implementation of Basic Registries could be more demanding for government organizations than earlier adaptations to the new ICT, like world wide web or email. Change triggered by Basic Registries seems to follow the same path as EDI did for business. Political forces do not realize the impact of this change on daily operations sufficiently. This results in a narrow focus on implementation issues, in which real basic eGovernment design issues are often neglected . Zenc implemented an action research (participative research method) oriented survey on the implementation of data integrity operations for Basic Registries in Belgium and The Netherlands. The research unveils a range of methods that government agencies apply to deal with organizational, legal and technical barriers. Early results show a number of patterns in organizational barriers towards the change that accompanies the implementation of Basic Registries. The research question is if those patterns related to the resistance to introduce Basic Registries are an indication of core changes in the organization of the public domain rather than ‘simple’ adoptions of new technologies. The paper describes the findings and seeks to identify key-areas for improvement and in depth research on road maps for data integrity in the back office of Government.
In depth
1. Introduction: it is not all about the data
The Dutch Government introduced the notion of Basic Registries in 2003 as part of a major eGovernment offensive. It is one of the showcases of the governments enthusiasm to serve the citizen with more than paperwork. The new government introduced the concept of single entry- multiple usage of a number of basic data sets. Government organizations should not ask citizens for basic data if the data was already known. The basic data must be stored in Basic Registries, registries administered by a designated government agency and accessible to all government agencies that need the basic data sets for their activities. The Basic Registries are meant to enhance the effectiveness of rule enforcement, the quality of service delivery and the efficiency of daily operations. The Basic Registries Programme in 2006 covers a range of 6 sets of data, like Persons, Addresses, Locations, Buildings, Land registry and Businesses that would have to be maintained according to a strict set of rules. Those rules (focussing on the data as well as the usage of the data) would ensure the single entry – multiple usages principle. The rules were considered so important that it was decided to elevate them to the level of 6 new laws. The concept of a Basic Registry is not very far fetched or innovative from a technical perspective. Get an agreement on the fields in the records of the data set, create the relevant metadata, ensure access for all clients and avoid double entries, and the job is done. Everyone would benefit from increased efficiency and effectiveness, better data integrity and less administrative burden. The claim of this research is that the introduction of Basic Registries is more than a quality improvement process or increased collaboration. While using relatively “old” or existing technology, the implementation of a Basic Registry in government has a major impact in the world of the average civil servant. And the organizational change explosion addresses an issue that’s not that common within the government : standardisation. Civil servants in the Netherlands are experienced when it comes to reorganizations under different labels, like “efficiency”, “quality improvement”, “client centred services” and “centralisation/decentralisation waves”. But the change that accompanies the implementation of Basic Registries is much more quiet and subtle and perhaps much more dangerous for their survival than suspected. This article covers a sample of “difficulties” and solutions that occurred in real life of public administration as was investigated over the last two years by Zenc and the Universities of Amsterdam and Tilburg. They participated in different roles in the change processes of Basic Registries at Ministerial, Regional and at City level. Sometimes they were hired to manage that change, sometimes they measured the progress and sometimes they were the key motors of the change process itself. The article lists a number of reasons why Basic Registries trigger all kinds of defensive behaviour to make a case for the significance of the impact. It further describes some of the techniques used by government and consultants to support the change process at a more basic level, like new benefit models, benchmarking efforts and service re-design. The article starts with a short discussion on the methodology.
2. Methodology
In the introduction it was argued that Basic Registries are no complex technological innovation, nor a superficial quality improvement operation. The article argues that the intended aim for Basic Registries probably and perhaps unknowingly triggers the most far reaching change process in Government due to ICT until now and that it surpasses the e-change effect even of the world wide web and email. The Basic Registries cause value chain shifts that puts whole ministries and even whole layers of government on the list of extinct animals. The re-arranging of positions cannot be explained sufficiently by network theories and actors [1], policy communities and issue networks [2], let alone by uncertainty about information and outcomes [3]. Marsh and Rhodes argued that policy networks existed to prevent innovations in public policy and formed a threat to the effectiveness, efficiency and democratic legitimisation of the public sector [4]. The implementation of Basic Registries shows this phenomenon, but it showed us more. The issue is that the Basic Registries were meant or perceived as an operation to increase quality of service delivery for citizens and not as a shift in roles and positions of agencies. It was only when those government agencies started to try to keep on top of core information related activities, that network behaviour proved insufficient to address the change. The networks did not have time to resist the change and other survival related mechanisms kicked in. These survival mechanisms were not at the individual level, following Lipsky’s theory of the street level bureaucrat. The change is more institutional [5]. Van Duivenboden, Twist and In ’t Veld define the difference between public networks and public chains by the focus on social relationships versus functional relationships [6]. They see empirical value in following the sequential events in a service chain over network models while explaining organisational patterns. Basic registries enforce a functional view. They also enforce new and strict SLA’s between the chain partners as with Just In Time production in Japanese car industries. Unlike the traditional role of ICT in public changes, the information systems are more than only the ICT enabled glue between the agencies; in this case the data integrity is the cause for change. Duivenboden et al argue that power in a chain is often in unexpected places. Eventually the citizen would even be the chain manager. The action oriented method (participative research method) implies deep involvement of the researcher in the process. The cases are not investigated by questionnaires and interviews, but by daily participation in the change processes. The early results are indications of the issues that arise when the abstract concept of Basic Registries is faced with the practical implementation among institutes with established positions in a service chain. The researchers observed organisational survival behaviour, tactical manoeuvring and resistance to change which are known from the core business and value chain discussions in the corporate world in the late eighties and the early nineties due to internalisation, labour costs and Electronic Data Interchange [7] [8].The observations were shared among the team to validate the observations as part of repeating patterns. The team developed a quick-scan based on Institute for Dutch Quality (INK) and EFQM methodologies to identify the required adaptations against the current position and goals of the governmental agency. The Quick Scan has been implemented in over 50 municipalities at the moment of the publication of this article. The key question supporting the claim of the article is if the behaviour could be identified as more manoeuvring in an existing network versus quick re-positioning in a value chain (or resistance against being moved by others). Patterns on different levels. The impact of the implementation of Basic Registries caused patterns on a number of different levels. In this paragraph, the main debates and patterns are discussed. To discover the organizational mechanics of smart Basic Registry implementation we focus most of the attention to the regional and municipality level. At the National level we describe a case illustrating positioning towards the highest added value in the perception of Ministries themselves: who makes policy close to the parliament level and who has to execute what others have decided. At the local level the concrete implementation ánd use of Basic Registries takes place and this is the level at which barriers become practical issues. We will describe the intervention and the problems it raised for each case in order to identify area’s for improvement and future research on Basic Registries implementation.
3. The ministerial level case describing the positioning for future core businesses
The Ministry of Internal Affairs is technically the boss of all civil servants. Officially they are in charge of the whole Dutch eGovernment programme , including basic registries. But they do not own the data. The Ministry of Housing and Spatial Affairs suddenly finds itself as data owner in the centre of four Basic Registries: Locations, Buildings, Land registry and Addresses. They have little experience with power shifts and tend to redefine themselves as data monopolists for other government agencies. The Ministry of Tax and Finance traditionally has the most efficient transaction and billing machine, but can they cater for all other Ministries fast enough? The Ministry of Economic affairs runs the Business Registry, but delegate all contact with their customers to the chamber for commerce. All four Ministries, as “back offices”, have to re-mobilise their “local front offices” and information assets. Issues like ownership of data, allocation of costs and benefits regarding data-integrity and data exchange and dependencies (trust) between organizations play an important role. Who is more important in a chain; the manager, the data collector or the one sending the bill? During the last two years we found evidence that a quiet struggle is going on between at least three Ministries that govern some part of the value chain around Basic Registries data sets. The struggle surfaces in a number of places: the choice for the technical platform used for transactions, the availability of National Maps to plot data onto, the discussion about which agency is about “policy making” and which one is about “policy execution”. The involved agencies and organizations are quite aware what competences are crucial for future survival and they do not pass the crown jewels of their Ministry on a silver plate when politely asked. This probably the most visible change for the outside world, since each new “policy making” or policy implementing” organisation requires explanation, new logo’s , new websites, etc. The Dutch municipalities have seen the creation of ICTU (ict-implementation institute run by Internal affairs, then they saw ICTAL emerging; ict and administrative costs, run by Finance and recently they witnessed the birth of something called GBO, Common sourcing agency. And there is a lot of complaining about the lack of coordination, of course [9]. The text on the homepage of the last one (GBO) is illustrative: it says : “On basic provisions and infrastructure one does not compete, they should be used in common”. The problem is that these “commons” are not made common by declaring them so.
4. The data user : how to correlate information to prevent information overload
Traditionally the banks have access to the best anti-fraud technology money can buy. They have international agreements on fraud detection, pattern recognition and credit card emergency procedures. Banks deal with transactions and their focus is on strange changes in numbers between accounts. They have highly trained experts to enter pattern recognition procedures deeply hidden in the transaction servers. The day to day fraud municipalities and regions have to deal with is perhaps harder to detect. One has to correlate data fields of addresses with citizens receiving benefits with tax- or car registry systems to discover unwarranted benefit gain, for example. At the regional level it may take careful measurement of sound, particle or pollution levels to identify illegal activities. Our research indicates a need for easier detection mechanisms and better interfaces to facilitate data comparison, public “business intelligence” and detection of problems. The point is that Basic Registries may lead to the same problem as eCRM applications in business: too much data and nobody capable of filtering it all. Shorter cycle times and more demand on results require better data analyses. The centralisation of Basic Registries following the “one entry-many usage” creates more dependability among all partners in the chain. This increased dependability has to be re-negotiated into SLA’s.
5. Case research at the Local level: in depth research of organizational mechanisms
We observed six types of interventions at local and regional level:
- Top down shock therapy (Citizen records, Fraud disclosure)
- Vertical improvement teams and costbenefit distribution (Fraud prevention)
- Horizontal improvement teams (Citizen records, crime prevention)
- Technical and semantic standardisation discussions (regional authorities and cities)
- Benchmarking (regional authorities and cities)
- Culture change from cure towards prevention
These interventions were used in the cases described, but in different combinations. The interventions could be seen as thermometers that unveil the significance of Basic Registry implementation and the organizational stir that follows in its wake. Shock therapy versus interdependencies: who has to act when transparency is increased? The City of Rotterdam, with approximately 600.000 citizens and 18.000 civil servants is introducing two basic registrations (Persons and Addresses) in its organization. It contains a number of data sets, which are used by many municipal departments, and can be extended to other (government or nongovernment) organizations. The political decision to implement those registries was made after the disclosure of the amount of citizens registered as deceased still receiving benefits. This public error could not be tolerated and a program was launched. It involved five departments: Social affairs, civil services, housing, tax and education. Two of the departments were officially responsible for the Basic Registries: Civil affairs and Housing, involving a group of 45-50 civil servants involved in the registering process at the front desk of the town hall. Enforcement and administrative checking involved another 80 persons. Meanwhile the civil service department and Housing went trough a major reorganization to combine front office activities in one public service department. The following research observations were made during programme implementation: Organizational consequences of the technical solution:
- Business processes become interdependent; organizations depend on the registration processes of other organizations. A person cannot be inscribed in the base registration of persons when the address of his new apartment has not been entered into the base registration addresses by the responsible organization. The feed back loop from one agency to the other will not happen by itself. Business processes have to be redesigned. Organizations cannot register basic data on their own, they have to use data of others. They have to send a message to the organization responsible for a basic registry when they find some data to be incorrect. Organizations have to start organising the feed-back loop to bring the administrative reality closer to the actual reality.
- Differences in service chain-dynamics become an obstacle. Some organizations have a natural short cyclic working cycle, e.g. the inscribing of persons is a matter of minutes. On the other hand, some organizations have traditionally, a very long cyclic working cycle, e.g. the realisation of housing from design to assigning an address to it. With the interdependence of business processes, chain-dynamics alignment becomes a new field of expertise. People have to start thinking about their place in the chain of actions. Focus on their own activities is not enough anymore. In consequence, the department managers will do on a small scale what National Ministries did on a larger scale Our research showed that they realised that the costs and benefits of an interdependent system are not necessary on the same place and seek fair play in the town hall.
- Basic Registries enforce chain thinking. Leadership is necessary at the level of the chain. Steering on the different organizations is not enough, the organizations, the processes and the people are interdependent. By suboptimising the independent organizations, the whole chain of organizations might be negatively influenced.
- Technical matters have to be resolved; e.g. the implementation of a system of data distribution and interfaces to the different applications of the organizations.
The observations mentioned above are not particularly strange for any BPR-like change process. A Chain simulation game that simulates chain processes with the people involved in roles of others was used to let the players see that they form a service together and that their actions trigger other actions, was used. This is the same approach as used for business during the introduction of EDI and EDIFACT and Just in Time production 10 years ago. For public authorities the need for more internal calculation among the players in the chain still requires some getting used to and unlike in the market; they cannot as easily go looking for another business partner when the current one fails to deliver.
Our research showed that the hard end-ofthe- line responsibility of acting on what the Basic Registry clean data now unmercifully showed was consistently moved to the periphery of the project. The data revealed illegal use of public means and citizens consequently had to be moved out of their homes. Public agencies go at length to avoid this nasty job and keeping feed back loops on faulty data going in long ellipses was standard practice to avoid too much transparency. Basic Registries threatened their high and safe position far away from nasty “customers” out there.
The usual solution for public agencies is then to engage in yet more complex Service level agreements (SLA’s) than before, in search of certainty, accountability and control. This will seldom help. The Belgian Cross Road bank in social security also had to use shock therapy. This was necessary because of what they called the “selling Christmas to the Turkey”-problem; No public agency will help you deleting their own jobs, normally. Cost benefit distribution issues: who harvests the benefits in the value chain The local municipality level forms a natural front office for citizens (and businesses) in the Netherlands. They together are assigned to be the “owner” of the Basic Registries sets ‘Persons’ and ‘Addresses’. These Registries play an important role in the processes in which interaction with citizens (and businesses) take place. Therefore these Registries are considered crucial for the majority of government organizations. The Basic Registries were introduced partly as a an operation to increase efficiency. The question raised by other government agencies was who would gain the most from this increased efficiency. The government is one entity from the perspective of the citizen, but certainly not from the perspective of each individual government organization. The local municipality level in the Netherlands traditionally guards itself against central directives. The national level has learned to be very careful with top-down manoeuvres that fail to reach the daily practices. The notion of shifts in benefits in service chains is an important issue regarding the Basic Registries which municipalities will be responsible for. The benefits will arise for a large share in other organizations than municipalities. The fact that benefits are generated at other places than where they are created is a known effect in value chains.
Another solution is to create vertical emergency response teams that are mentally and otherwise equipped for the tough end-of-the-line job and let them follow the service chain vertically in contrast with the horizontal departments executing a normal front office routine. The two different types of civil servants will interface at the data integrity level and the vertical team has to make sure the horizontal work floor is also gaining from the action. The Rotterdam safety and security team involved a total of 30 people was well equipped to handle the “nasty customers” but they were in desperate need of correct data, so they create their own private registry to become very successful; “the buildings with problems registry”. The shock therapy described above failed without hands and feet, but became effective when combined with vertical teams of “Bureau Veilig”.
Horizontal improvement teams creating a joined registry against crime: who owns the problem of the collective? A group of cities in the Netherlands joined together to solve the problem of a group of problematic and criminal youngsters from an ethnic minority. These youngsters rank high in the criminal and problem-statistics with having no jobs, no solid family-situation, no education and being more than average sensitive for criminal activities. It was a shared problem between the cities because when one city introduced a firm approach against this group, the youngsters moved easily to other cities. One of the problems was that these youngsters dealt with a variety of public agencies (i.e housing, police, social welfare, social benefits, justice, schools, addiction treatment organizations, psychiatric/psychological treatment organizations ) in a variety of cities. These organizations didn’t know that “client” was entered in a database by other organizations and in other cities. The youngsters used this against the public authorities. When a youngster had a large debt with a housing corporation in city A he or she could easily sign up for a house in city B. The fact that the youngsters often used multiple identities made the problem even worse. The mobility was high and therefore it was no solution to solve this problem isolated by the cities individually, they required a Basic Registry for all. The first step was to built a central referral index which would only inform an organization that a person was known by other organizations (and by which names). The system was not even supposed to exchange actual information about the client. One city took the lead and started with investigating and designing the system. The variety of organizations (in the leading city alone there were about 15 organizations with different backgrounds and priorities involved) made it complex and representative for this type of registry design. The result was a functional requirements discussion that never stopped. The researcher observed that this bottom-up approach lacked a real problem owner with the required helicopter view. The technical perspective did not solve the lack of collaboration to create one service chain together. The required trust between the organizations (about investing time in the project, but also in the correct use of each others information) failed to materialize. The motivation to participate varied among the organizations and decreased as the project progressed. This led to the situation in which organizations waited for each other to take the first steps in time and money. This criminal registry project dealt with a sensitive privacy topic: private information about ethnic youngsters. The privacy-aspect was important and difficult and the fact that people were actually selected on ethnic background made the project even more delicate and difficult;
The difference between organizations’ priorities led to almost unsolvable problems. An example is the fact that psychiatric and addiction treating organizations didn’t want to exchange information (not even a referral) with justice and police. They feared losing their patients when they would know that these organizations referred them to the police. The case illustrates some of the problems that occur when introducing a far reaching operation like Basic Registries in Crime prevention with well meant bottom up initiatives. The research indicates the need for clear problem ownership and increased common identity of the different public agencies delivering the service without which no collaboration is getting generated. Some wicked problems our no-ones problem [10] Technical standards and record-field discussions among Regional experts: miracles by accident?
As change manager for the Basic Registries for the twelve so called “provinces” the researchers happened to witness a profound surprise at the National level. The Regional level first stated they would be happy to follow the lead of the Municipality level who had signed a contract to deliver in 2007; the provinces would be satisfied aiming for 2010. Not a week later the Ministries got a letter stating that the twelve provinces had decided together that they would not want to be seen lacking behind. The Regional public management used to be a logical “mid office” in the physical world between small towns and the National level in the physical society of the 16th and 17th and 18th century. It is not a logical mid-office for a digitised service architecture in the information age. The Regional level has shifted from being in charge of the region towards being the expert on domain related knowledge over the last 60 years. They have a supporting role for the small municipalities and leave the larger cities alone. We observed that a number of attempts were made to create so called shared service centres at the provincial level, but failed to materialise. A number of persons involved claimed the regional authorities to be too rich still to see a need. A recent report on the impact of eGovernment on municipalities [11] states the need for shared service centres, but they allocate this role to the society of municipalities (VNG) instead of the regional authorities. This is again supporting the claim that service chains follow function and value migration and not regional boundaries or other design logic. The regional level did put their expert knowledge to use in other surprising ways, though. The Dutch Government, in casu the Ministry of Housing and spatial issues (VROM) has introduced Digital exchangeable Zoning plans (DURP) as a notion about 6 years ago. It created a revolution in Dutch spatial management and should perhaps be seen as a fore runner of new governmental design based on service chains and basic registries. The change process was managed as a full scale operation, attacking the whole field of zoning experts, lawyers, standardisation experts, software developers, software suppliers, municipality councils, ICT maintenance, etc, etc and it took six years to take off. While interviewing 20 municipalities and seven provinces at different moments in time, a number of observations could be made:
- The launch of the programme as a service exchange programme was ahead of time and focussed the whole operation exactly on the chain management issues.
- The cost-benefit distribution was an issue raised constantly and it is still used by municipalities to keep them from actually doing the work. In the meantime the “train is moving” and most municipalities define it as accepted part of the next upgrade of plans. The legal bases was used as a threat by National government for the whole six years and will be implemented when the train can’t be stopped anymore.
- The semantic discussion about zoning and record fields continues. The new XML schema and Geographic Markup language standards might render parts of the discussion obsolete, since XML technology leaves content open as long as format is maintained meticulously.
- The service chain model used for Zoning plans is now used for Dutch water management (!), Dutch architecture control and Dutch Historical object management.
- The legal zoning standard created on top of the land registry system enables maintenance of the entire building-related
permit infrastructure of the Netherlands. In other words, once the National level decides to update a legal regulation on houses or industrial area’s or sound restricted area’s, in principle, all zones in all municipalities can be updated automatically. The Geographic orientation of zoning plans created a new area of development between law and GIS
- Users through the entire town hall suddenly became aware of the power of GIS systems with layers of data represented as a picture in relation with each other. Correlation of different data sets became much more easy than with text oriented systems.
Our research indicates that the domain experts at the regional level used the marriage of IT expertise and domain expertise to created a legalsemantic addition for future public eGovernment which justifies further investigation. Innovation addressing the tough bridge between ICT and Law is difficult [12]. The regional level expert developed legal procedures as object oriented rules, which helps to redesign organisations around information about de backbone of government: the Law. Learning Benchmark versus accountability benchmark in making public bodies move Benchmarking the difference in progress between municipalities in adoption of new standards, inspection procedures of availability of on line services is used as change inducing tool all over Europe and certainly in the Netherlands. In this situation it was used to measure the enforcement of building regulation compliance among municipalities and our research team had to set up the system. The effect of the benchmark as incentive for adoption did work among 30 towns if it was used as a means for towns and cities to exchange experience with each other: the learning benchmark. When the benchmark was used as an instrument to push those organization forward under threat of financial sanctions a whole range of defensive and offensive mechanisms were put into play. We call this the accountability benchmark.
We observed that the agencies being benchmarked started to dig in the trenches by denying the metrics or stating the uniqueness of their own situation. They invariably complained about the current lack of a legal fundament under the change process which would help the to make it all happen. As a consequence, the national level had to reconsider the metrics and make it much more objective which turned it into a bureaucratic game. The legal fundament was dependent on agreement by the domain experts and these experts did not like to agree on less core data attributes than absolutely necessary. Turning it into a law at the early stage would shift all responsibility to the national level. Municipalities would immediately complain about the costs. And this National level would have to pay the bill of the extra personnel required by the municipal level if they turned the change into a legal obligation, of course. The Ministry of Spatial Affairs and Housing was very careful with the tactics when to apply pressure on municipalities and when not. This made them less threatening for municipalities when thy required the municipalities for the acceptance of standards for Basic Registries. Our research indicates that careful usage of the learning benchmark could be more successful in supporting change towards Basic Registries than the more risky accountability benchmark that could blow up in the face of the National level. The effects represent a trade-off between costs, scope and time, however. In case of a large scale operation with the need for fast results the accountability approach could be more appropriate. The front-end safety agency: a culture change required from cure to prevention Basic Registries can play a fundamental role in the prevention of fraud, increasing safety and data integrity. The reason is that solid data enables comparison between databases and queries that proactively signals potential problem area’s. The people who actually gather the data are not often seen as an important part of the organizations they work for. Our research clearly indicates a strong resistance against preventive activities like inspection rounds and reporting in favour of good old criminal thieve busting and hot macho fire fighting. While teaching classes to over 50 Fire Fighters to deal with ICT in their organization it became clear that the culture of preventive inspections and data reporting is not yet in high regards within the agencies that have to utilise that date to control fire and crime. There is little respect for data integrity in a culture aimed at heroic deeds. This takes time to change. The costs of the entire ICT infrastructure is one of the main drivers to a new wave of centralisation within the police force in The Netherlands. Some of that driver is probably triggered by the need to overcome some of the same culture shifts like the fire fighters within the police force: One cannot track international crime without very good data.
6. Conclusion: Consequences for the National policy level: a design issue that has to be made explicit.
Our research indicates the need for new cost benefit allocation models among public bodies that collaboratively invest in service chains based on Basic Registries. A solid internal calculation system, combined with the sense that effort and result are not always on the same place, but might strengthen the whole system, but it has to take into account that the exit option is hardly a real one in administrations. This is perhaps the real design challenge for national ministries: how to organise vertical teams that can achieve the appropriate deals with the front offices that maintain data integrity . Venrooy argues that a new approach combining Business Process Re-engineering and Network process management is required to re-design new service chain SLA’s and structures for Public Governance [13]. We argue that the notion of renegotiating such service chain structures should be based on his theory AND simpler added value chain models and architectures from the information exchange and competitive advantage paradigms of Porter, Davenport and Ramirez in EDI [14]. We think the public sector has arrived at this stage for the first time since the introduction of IT.
Figure 1: eGovernment redesign issue:sharing cost & benefits between vertical service teams and front office floor
The paper has addressed a number of issues that indicate that Basic Registries are more threatening to eGovernment structures than superficial Data gathering, Feed back loops, updates FronT Office Local: 480 municipalities New SLA’s with Horizontal floor generating data Vertical service teams supporting data integrity Fraud Crime Fire safety Environ ment 13 Ministries rethinking allocation mechanisms investigations may reveal. The consequence of this underestimation is that political forces that have sold the idea to the public as only a quality improvement process fail to see the existential problems they have handed to their administration. The civil servants involved at all layers are hardly enthusiastic about Basic Registries and the whole operations seems slow and unpopular. From the value chain perspective this is not a surprise. A lot more is happening than the policy makers had intended originally, with the possible exception of the Ministry of Housing. The research indicates logic survival behaviour of agencies in a service chain and suggests some of the underlying mechanisms. A suggestion is made for the design of more subtle cost benefit distribution systems between horizontal teams and the front office of towns. Given the vast increase of available data that has to be correlated, support is required from interfaces that enable filtering of data sets in easier ways.
References
- ↑ Roger, D.L. and Whetten, D.A.; “Interorganizational coordination: theory, research and implementation”1982
- ↑ Lindblom C.E and Cohen D.K.; “Usable Knowledge, Social science and Scial problem solving” 1979
- ↑ Lindblom C.E and Cohen D.K.; “Usable Knowledge, Social science and Scial problem solving” 1979
- ↑ Marsh, D and Rhodes, RAW Policy networks in British government, 1992, p181-205
- ↑ Lipsky, M Street level bureaucracy; dilemma’s of the individual in public services, 1980
- ↑ Duiveboden, Twist,Veldhuizen and in ’T Veld, ; “Ketenmanagement in de Publieke sector” , 2000, p 45
- ↑ Porter, “Competing advantage” Creating and sustaining superior performance, 1985
- ↑ Slywotsky, A.Value Migation, Harvard Business School Press, 1996
- ↑ Duivenbode en Beckers, “Puzzelen met prioriteit”, report on impact of eGovernment plans on municipalities, 2006
- ↑ Lips, M.Beckers, V, .Zuurmond, A.”ICT and Public Administration” 2005, p 21
- ↑ Duivenbode en Beckers, “Puzzelen met prioriteit”, report on impact of eGovernment plans on municipalities, 2006
- ↑ Peters, R. and T. v Engers, T. “The Legal Atlas": Map-based navigation and accessibility of legal knowledge sources, Knowledge management in eGov2004, Vienna
- ↑ Arjan van Venrooy, Nieuwe vormen van interorganizationele publieke dienstverlening, 2002
- ↑ Davenport, T. with R. Eccles and L. Prusak, "Information Politics," Sloan Management Review, Fall 1992, 53-65.
