Knowledge Management in Electronic Government

The free movement of persons is a concept that has been settled on a European strategic level. In reality there are still a lot of steps to be followed in order to achieve this ambitious goal of mobility. Both the complexity of and the problems encountered in pan-European administrative processes interfere this aim. Interferences can be Knowledge Management (KM) specific (decentralization, implicitness, non-reusability, creation of process knowledge) as well as KM non-specific problems (linguistic, legal, document handling, cultural problems). To solve these problems both administrative processes have to be made transparent to the citizen and the knowledge about these processes has to be managed. Thus, public administrations must interact seamlessly vertically (Europe, nation, region, municipality) as well as horizontally (between countries) with each other. This implies not only the use of standards but also the interoperability of process systems. Coping with the above mentioned problems a solution requires Knowledge Management. As public administrations are in strongly heterogeneous legal environments a centralised and harmonised solution is not feasible. In this article a possible solution is described that has been developed in the European research project “InfoCitizen”. Within InfoCitizen a Distributed Knowledge Repository and an intelligent agent-based Architecture is identified as an appropriated approach. InfoCitizen is a “proof-of-concept” project in which a Distributed Knowledge Repository and an agent platform are core concepts. The experiences and intermediary results of the successfully ongoing project are presented. 1 Citizens’ Mobility in Theory and Practice In 1985 free movement of persons was decided in the Schengen Agreement. Being integrated into the EU Treaty with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993 it aims at increasing the mobility of work forces inside the European Union (EU). [1] This enhanced mobility should improve the flexibility of the employment market inside the EU. The lack of mobility of work forces causes significant macroeconomic damages on the employment market and the current situation should therefore be improved. [2] © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003 The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-44836-5 33 _ 2 O. Adam, D. Werth, and F. Zangl Hence, an effort must be done to reduce those barriers hindering the mobility of persons within the European Union. One of these barriers is the high variety of procedures and responsibilities for similar services, e.g. the delivering of a birth certificate. As everyone has already experienced, it can be quite difficult to receive such services within one country. A certain amount of documents has to be submitted to the administration and the result of the service obtained might have to be forwarded to other administrations. As such chains of processes can be difficult to follow in the own country, it often becomes almost impossible to do so across borders. The consequence is an impediment to international mobility of persons and “imprisons” people in there own country in terms of employment. Furthermore, the current proceeding allows errors in the process since the citizen is also bound to transport documents from one administration to another and to know about his/her duties involved in submitting such documents to an administration. [3] In order to overcome this problem public services and processes have to be integrated. The knowledge about these processes is dispersed over several administrations, if available at all. Budgetary funds of public administrations are getting shortened every year and yet there is still a problem of public finances. Reducing costs of administrative processes therefore becomes a necessity. An efficient Knowledge Management [4] of administrative processes can not only help to make cross-border mobility easier. It also helps to reduce the costs of these processes. 2 Process Knowledge as an Enabler for Pan-European Interoperability 2.1 Basic Considerations Knowledge Management is the creation of value or respectively reduction of costs by an organization (here public administrations) from their knowledge-based assets. The value adding or costs reduction can be as much on a microeconomic level as on a macroeconomic level. On a microeconomic level travel costs can be reduced because the citizen can obtain the same service without transporting paper documents from one administration to the other. Furthermore prices for public services could be lowered, if the internal operating expenses are cut off. On the same level costs can be reduced for public administrations by more time and resource efficient processes. On a macroeconomic level the costs are reduced by a higher efficiency in the working population’s mobility and a more balanced budgetary structure concerning the costs of public administrations. Concretely Knowledge Management means the creation, dissemination and utilization of that knowledge. [5] How the creation, dissemination and utilization of Knowledge can be achieved in Public administrations will be shown in the third section of this paper. Knowledge Management is often assimilated to the use of Information Technology. That is not necessarily true. Nevertheless, Information Technology can be helpful as a supportive tool for Knowledge Management. It will also be shown in this paper how Knowledge Management can be achieved on a strategic business level. Only after this analysis has been done, the possibilities of the support from Information Technology to Knowledge Management in the creation, dissemination and utilization will be covered in detail. Distributed Knowledge Repositories for Pan-European Public Services 3 2.2 Scope of Problem For a successful use of Knowledge Management in cross-border interaction between public administrations several problems have to be solved. A major problem is the fact that process knowledge is distributed, tacit and only shortly gathered with the citizen. Hence it is not accessible and reusable for the process executing administration. The knowledge required to execute is held decentralized, redundant and unstructured on various types of systems. Even within a country the process knowledge is not necessarily available in a structured manner. Figure 1 shows the AsIs-situation and its resulting problems described above. Currently the citizen goes to the employee of a Public Administration (PA) and asks for a service. The PA employee implicitly knows about the partial service (process segment) he has to execute, the input(s) he needs to execute the service (e.g. a certificate of birth) and the outputs that the service provides (e.g. a marriage notification). It is yet the task of the citizen to know where to get the required input and where to bring the output produced by the service that he requires. Furthermore the input and output providers will again implicitly know about the process segments that they have to execute. Summed up, on one hand it is the citizen who knows for the duration of the service provision what process segments have to be executed and who can execute them. On the other hand it is the Public Administrations as well as the input and output providers who know how to execute the process segments. After the service has been provided the knowledge of process segments sequence and its executor is kept by the citizen and therefore is not reusable. This shows that knowledge is decentralized and implicit. Fig. 1. As-Is-situation in public administration’s procedures Figure 1 shows the present situation where the citizen has to start every single public service himself. The citizen gets information from the public administration employee on the documents required to fulfil the initial service. The citizen then gets these documents from other second level public services that again might need some additional documents to be accomplished. The knowledge on required documents for the initial service is distributed between the concerned public administrations and the citizen is in charge of the transport of the documents as well as the process order, i.e. the public service to start in order to get the documents. 4 O. Adam, D. Werth, and F. Zangl Apart from the Knowledge Management specific problems in public administrations a citizen can encounter further problems when executing an international process. The language in which the required documents (inputs) or out coming documents (outputs) are written is most likely to differ between one country and another. To resolve that difficulty the citizen has to have the documents translated and the translated documents certified. More over following international processes also implies for the citizen to pull information from many different sources to gather knowledge on how to “build” the process. A further problem can occur when the citizen brings paper-based documents to a public administration and the administration has to enter data manually into its system. Some required information might also be missing on a document from a foreign administration requesting the citizen to bring even more documents. Finally, there also might be legal differences between two or more countries which can make international administrative processes more difficult.