Measuring Impacts of ICT on the Process Landscape of Public Administrations

Efficiency, effectiveness and transparency are key objectives of eGovernment. Modern information and communication technologies (ICT) provide means to improve quality of service rendition in public administrations and availability of information across organizational boundaries. The required investments to realize these potential benefits, e.g. for license, implementation, training, operation or maintenance of ICT, can be calculated quite accurately prior to purchase. Significantly more difficult is an assessment of attainable quality improvements, cost savings and utility potentials of newly introduced ICT, which is however a prerequisite for sound investment decisions.The European Commission-funded research project PICTURE addresses this challenge by developing a methodology and a tool for measuring qualitative and quantitative impacts of ICT on the process landscape of public administrations. The methodology is based on predefined and semantically standardized Process Building Blocks (PBB) that represent typical domain-specific activities as well as dynamic attributes designed for each PBB in order to define required information to be provided by modelers. The resulting consistent process models built with PBBs enable an administration-wide analysis regarding e.g. media breaks or organizational inefficiencies as well as a usage potential analysis of ICT functionalities (such as ePayment or eSignature) across process boundaries. This paper describes the fundamental methodology of PICTURE and demonstrates a real-world example.