Case:HamburgGateway - The digital gate to the city (description)
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The city and state of Hamburg (FHH: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg) in the late 90s started one of the most ambitious IT-programs in Germany whose main goal was to modernise the local public administration by developing eGovernment solutions and re-organising administrative processes. Since 2001, the Senate of Hamburg adopts an annual eGovernment Roadmap for the review of accomplished tasks and the presentation of the upcoming work which builds the framework for eGovernment in Hamburg. As a result, it was recognised that a Gateway fits Hamburg's requirements best. Hence, the 'HamburgGateway' portal was developed in 2002 with first services provided in August 2003.
The HamburgGateway is an eGovernment infrastructure which provides a single point of contact for online services to all customers. Online services added to existing legacy applications enable communication and data exchange with the HamburgGateway. All services offered online are accessible with only one account, which means a great benefit for all users.
As a city and state, Hamburg provides a wide range of services for different customers, i.e. citizens, business and administration, and its employees. For most administrative tasks, existing IT-applications are already in place. However, Hamburg's goal was to offer services online to its customers while using the existing legacy applications. With HamburgGateway, an infrastructure has been created that serves as access point for all customers to all online services of the city and the state of Hamburg. With its strong two-level authentication, it ensures privacy and security for the customer and at the same time offers the security required for the application and the network of the Hamburg Government. As there is only one access point for the customer, the specific section of the administration or related institution offering the service does not need to be visible. Moreover, all sites have the same design and user interface.
As in other European countries, the diffusion of qualified digital signatures is very low and their use is very rare among the majority of potential customers since the prescribed cards and directory services are expensive and difficult to use. So a specific objective of the city and state of Hamburg was to allow the implementation of legally binding and secure online transactions at a large scale by offering simple access to their eServices without additional costs as quickly as possible. So for eServices of which the state and the city are in charge and which require authentication of the applicant, the legal act has been amended by the State Parliament. HamburgGateway now allows for legally binding online services based on a one-time registration
- at the portal (for citizen eServices which do not require authentication),
- at the customer centre where a proof of identity has to be submitted to the service personnel,
- or in case of being a company or another administration, a special contract has to be signed.
Actually, the HamburgGateway is the working implementation of a multi-client and scalable infrastructure called GovernmentGateway. Hamburg was the starting point of the development of this GovernmentGateway which is currently also in implementation in Schleswig-Holstein and in development in Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate). There the same infrastructure will be used, only the user interface will be different.
In terms of interoperability, with the HamburgGateway, a centralised infrastructure has been employed which links the different back-offices and their legacy applications of the participating authorities with the user administration system at the top of the Gateway. Hence, the interoperability requirement to overcome was/is to link the different legacy applications with their different formats and structures to a common point of access which in addition serves for the secure transmission of requests and the authentication of the users. By November 2006 more than 60,000 citizens, 7,150 companies and 18,700 employees of public administrations have registered at the HamburgGateway.
