As a citizen I can see why it sometimes becomes difficult to communicate digitally with municipalities and other public bodies in a simple way. The current implementations of public websites in Denmark (e.g. http://www.blogger.com/www.rudersdal.dk) seems to be very focused at exposing information to the readers (and the thesis seems to be the more the better) as opposed to letting the users get in touch with the various public bodies in a simple way.Coming from a world of software development another approach would be to look at user scenarios and then start by designing the websites with possibilities for handling the most commonly (volume based) scenarios right from the frontpage.
The article mentions scenarios like applying for new medicare card, passport, moving address, tax reporting, pension and change of primary physician. The interesting thing is that many of these scenarios are already supported but in different ways and not easily found. The website http://www.borger.dk/ does a bit better job than municipalities by actually placing four selected links to digital selfservice scenarios right on the frontpage. But if you want to do something else you're out of luck and left to a general search mechanism. Funny enough, on another part of the page there is a column for "what can we help with..". Some of the options here are duplicates and a few additional. I especially like the link to "I am going to be married" - surprisingly the first bullet is NOT instructions on how to "pop the question" :-).
There are probaly a couple of points to make here. First of all - usability (as always) is key to success. My experience shows that when it comes to usabilty, less is definately better. Secondly it's evident that digitalising user scenarios is not a straightforward thing to do. It's clear when trying to get an overview of what is possible, that the public administration consists of many different backend soultions, which is is probably not simple to connect up to a user friend-ly self-service web front-end - and something which is going to take a while.
At ScanJour we are obviouosly responsible for one of these often used backend solutions and we are naturally concerned with how we can play a part in this digital challenge and enable citizens to communicate efficiently with the public administration.
At an interesting meeting last friday at "Økonomistyrelsen" variuos new initiatives around the digital adminstration was discussed and we are eagerly awaiting the new strategy for digital public communication expected soon (Computerworld).
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