Forms are essential artifacts of government service delivery to transmit information between the customer and the government. However, customers perceive forms as too complex. Since the complexity of a system is influenced by the diversity of its components, this paper's main contribution is the identification of characteristics of forms and their components that drive the diversity of different forms. For this purpose, we evaluate a set of 69 forms of 27 German municipalities according to various criteria. The results reveal that different partitions of forms in subparts, varying sets of presented and requested data, different element types and varying captions for equal elements drive the complexity of current government forms. On the contrary, orders of elements are similar across the forms at hand.
Nowadays, public organizations become proactive in their service delivery such that they approach their clients and not vice versa. In the most advanced case, the no-stop shop, clients do not have to do anything to receive a public service. Public organizations offer many services and several of them could potentially be delivered through a no-stop shop. Therefore, public organizations need assistance in the decision which services they realize in a no-stop shop first. To address this issue, we present a method for the prioritization of public services for the implementation in a no-stop shop. The rationale of our method is that public organizations should prefer those services that are expected to provide the highest public value. We followed a design-oriented research approach and combined seminal works on no-stop shop and public value. The method was evaluated through the application in a workshop at a municipality.
PurposeThe ten principles of good business process management (BPM) support organizations in planning and scoping the organizations' BPM approach. Derived from literature and expert panels, the principles received much attention both in research and practice. This article develops a measurement instrument to operationalize the principles and to support organizations in measuring the degree to which they incorporate the principles in their BPM approach, that way advancing their BPM capabilities.Design/methodology/approachThe authors applied the scale-development methodology, because this methodology is an established approach consisting of various techniques to develop measurement instruments. First, the authors used established techniques to develop such an instrument. Then, the authors assessed the validity and reliability of the developed instrument through a field survey with 345 participants.FindingsThe authors developed a valid and reliable measurement instrument for the ten principles of good BPM. The field survey's results reveal that the measurement instrument meets all required methodological standards. The instrument, thus, can be applied to help process owners and managers to evaluate their BPM approach and plan future actions based on potential shortcomings. Future research can both use and further develop the instrument, which serves as a conceptualization of the principles.Originality/valueThis study is the first to provide a measurement instrument for assessing an organizations' BPM practice against the ten principles of good BPM, which have become established as a much-considered and widely-used source of reference both in academia and practice. The authors also discuss how the instrument compares to and distinguishes from existing approaches to qualify BPM approaches, thus communicating the significance of the instrument.
Federalism and e-government are important to many countries across the globe but come up with two contradicting characteristics that are especially existent in Germany. First, citizens and businesses want to receive e-government services easily but the identification of government entities that are responsible for service delivery in federal states is difficult. Second, e-government has to react to fast developments but decision-making is distributed and rather slow in federal states. To address the area of tension between federalism and e-government, we suggest seven polices that raise internal efficiency and external simplicity of federalism in Germany. We transfer existing policies of e-government literature and practice to our research problem in the course of discussions in a research group of five people. The policies are evaluated in semi-structured interviews with eleven leaders from the German government. The evaluation reveals the appropriateness of the policies to address the issues of federalism in e-government.
Purpose Governmental institutions must cooperate with other organizations across institutional boundaries to achieve high-quality service offerings. The required cooperation may lead to complex networks, including several of the thousands of public administrations in the many federal layers of a single country. This paper aims to address the key challenge of the proper management of the information exchange between networked actors, which is generally conducted by means of forms.
Design/methodology/approach Following the design science research paradigm, this research develops a method that assists in the design and maintenance of forms in public administrations.
Findings Discussions in the project's focus groups add evidence to the researchers' expectation that the method developed in this study improves the quality of forms while reducing the effort required for their design and maintenance.
Research limitations/implications This paper includes an evaluation of the approach based on qualitative feedback from the project's stakeholders, although the implementation of the workflows and procedures is subject to future work that evaluates the approach in a variety of practical settings.
Practical implications The method developed in this paper allows public administrations and legislative authorities to design and manage forms in a cooperative way. Software developers can assume the existence of information structures. The approach extends the BOMOS standardization framework to the operational level.
Originality/value The main contribution of this paper is the development of a novel method that will change how information exchange is managed in public administrations.
Ausgehend von der erfolgten Einführung des EESSI-Verfahrens ist es Aufgabe dieser Kurzstudie, weitere Digitalisierungspotentiale im Bereich der sozialen Sicherheit in Deutschland zu identifizieren. Dabei wurde eine mittel- bis langfristige Perspektive eingenommen, um Potentiale der Digitalisierung in Form von aktuellen und innovativen Konzepten und Technologien aufzuzeigen. Die Identifizierung dieser Potentiale erfolgte auf Basis von semi-strukturierten Interviews mit Experten aus der Praxis, die sowohl mit dem EESSI-Verfahren als auch generell mit den Themen der Digitalisierung im Bereich der Systeme der sozialen Sicherheit vertraut sind. Dabei konnten im Verlauf der Studie sowohl regionale, überregionale und bundesweite Organisationen konsultiert werden, um ein breites Bild der aktuellen Entwicklungen und Herausforderungen im Bereich der Digitalisierung abzuleiten. Neben dem EESSI-Verfahren wurde allgemein über die aktuellen Potentiale im Zuge der Digitalisierung diskutiert. Zur Adressierung der Herausforderungen wurden Digitalisierungspotentiale identifiziert, die aus einer Nutzenperspektive sowohl für die Bürgerinnen und Bürger als auch für die Anwender beim Sozialversicherungsträger betrachtet wurden. Zusätzlich wurde, sofern es möglich war, diskutiert, inwiefern die aufgezeigten Digitalisierungswege Betrug und Missbrauch in den Systemen der sozialen Sicherheit eindämmen oder ganz verhindern können. Die insgesamt acht aus den diskutierten Herausforderungen abgeleiteten Digitalisierungspotentiale wurden durch dedizierte Handlungsempfehlungen operationalisiert. Diese Digitalisierungspotentiale zeigen erste Wege auf, die im Rahmen einer zukünftig fortschreitenden Digitalisierung im Bereich der sozialen Sicherheit und der Sozialversicherungen bedacht werden sollten.
