eGovernment in the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia (eA_CARM)

With the main goal of moving forward a “digital administration”, the Regional Government of Murcia has implemented a modern eGovernment platform, which is flexible, focused on service quality, on the improvement of the internal management, and on interoperability with internal back-office systems and with other public administrations or organizations. To achieve this goal, and according to an integration model based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the elements necessary for online processing have been developed (authentication with public key certificates, digital signature, official online registry for applications, online payment,…). Furthermore, an Online Services Directory has been created in order to show a complete and unified view of the services offered to the citizens, companies and employees. This Directory is also established as the access point for the online processing. Finally, in order to make online services easier to use for the citizens, a web application has been developed, a Front-Office of the eGovernment services, with the aim of standardizing the presentation layer and helping the citizens with the use of these services. All these elements have made possible to offer the citizens a set of online processing services, in the fields of education, employment, health, taxes, environment, agriculture and others.

Policy Context

The Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia is a small region located in the South East of Spain. As all the Spanish Autonomous Communities – self-governing regions – it has undergone a process of transfer of powers from the General Administration of the State in which some know-how has been lost but some good opportunities of reform have arisen. In a few years, Public Administrations have seen as Internet created a new social and economical order to which we should all adjust, its origin meant a revolution in the functioning and behaviour of governments, companies, institutions and citizens: the arrival and extension of the Internet started a new world of communication possibilities which quickly transformed the ways of working, relations, buying and leisure of all our society. We are currently assisting to a transformation process in order to be able to cope with all the new possibilities arisen due to the new technologies. That is the reason why from the “Ministry of Economy and Treasury” an Master Plan for the Improvement of the Public Services of the Autonomous Community of Murcia has been undertaken. One of the strategic objectives of this master plan is the use of the Information and Communications Technologies in the Administration; that is to say, using these technologies as the main ground for the development of the proposals of improvement of the services and their standardization, being available for all those administrative units which may need them. One of the main guidelines of this objective is the implementation of an eGovernment platform allowing to give support to the services offered by the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia to the citizens and also to the interoperability among Administrations. This platform facilitates an accessible and citizen-centred Public Administration, available and full-functioning any time and anywhere.

Description of target users and groups

As the eGovernment platform is used by all the Ministries and Autonomous Institutions of the Autonomous Community, there are many different target groups in this project depending on the online public service that each department is gradually undertaking. A good number of the already available online processing services are developed keeping in mind general public as a target group. For example, in the public health field we can find: applications for vaccination data, registration in an organ donor registry and so on. There are also some services whose main target groups are professionals and companies, in the areas of taxes, industry, employment and environment. Then we have a third target group composed of civil servants which also have some specific Intranet services such as social aid applications or transfer selection processes. The last target group is formed by the Local Councils with which we interchange data by online processing.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

To set up the platform we decided to opt for a main partner, which was HP, award of the public contract. HP was the responsible for the initial implementation, following the guidelines decided by the eGovernment group of the Directorate General for Computing. For the next phase of service management and development of end-user services we opted for a hybrid model, being the team made of own workers and partner workers. In both phases some other companies took part, helping with modular solutions to specific problems (digital signature, online registry,…) which have been gradually incorporated to the common platform. The main contributions of each partner may be summed up this way: • Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.es): implementation of the platform, development of basic services, some functional services (external authentication, notifications, certifications), and applications. • Software AG (www.softwareag.com/es; www.bahiait.com): development and implementation of “eSatellites”, functional services (tramitador, consult of slips), end-user services. • Sinergia Tecnológica (www.sinergiatec.com): tax services, interchange of information with notary’s offices. • Tecsidel (www.tecsidel.es): interchange of information with town councils. • T-Systems (www.t-systems.es), collaborating with TB-Solutions (www.tb-solutions.com: internal signature tray. • CYUM (www.cyum.es): digital signature and digital signature checking. • IECISA (www.ieci.es): online registry, consult of dossiers and proceedings. Multi-channel issues: There are five access channels to our services: • Web: this is the main channel for online processing services and consults. Furthermore, it is the base of the telephonic and window office channels. • Window office: You can have access to some of the processing services supplied by this platform with the same interface directly in the window office. The most complex case is the payment and delivery of the Patrimonial transfer tax to a civil servant. • Telephonic: It allows carrying out some processing services, even though it is clearly limited by its own nature. For instance, it does not allow using the digital signature. • SMS Messages: It is currently just a channel for notifications. • Online notifications: via e-mail you can access to notifications, with acknowledgement of receipt digitally signed. As a general rule, we could establish that the online processing services and consults are mainly via web, whereas the notification services are asynchronous, via SMS or e-mail.

Main results, benefits and impacts

After the first ten months of functioning of all the system, there are already 50 online public services available in our web belonging to 10 different Ministries or Autonomous Institutions and, until now, it sums up around 3,000 applications from citizens and companies. We could also add up to this sum the application for public competitive exams, totalling 14,000 applications for teaching positions and 30,000 for the rest of positions during the last year. The fact of having an Online Service Directory published on the web has allowed the citizens and companies to consult in an agile and centralized manner all the procedures and services facilitated by the Regional Government. There are currently almost 900 procedures gathered together on that Service Directory. Afterwards, the necessary elements to facilitate the electronic processing were developed. As a result, an eGovernment platform was created providing the following services: • Authentication with public key certificates • Digital signature and digital signature checking • Official online registry for applications and documents • Electronic applications • Online payment • Notifications and communications. The following step and result obtained has been the definition of a shared online processing model for all these procedures, which might be summed up in the following use case: • The citizen access to a procedure through the Service Directory on the web: www.carm.es • The citizen is authenticated and fills in the necessary form in HTML format, being required in some occasions to attach some documents. • If the procedure must be notified the necessary notifying directions appear on the screen. • In this sending process, the citizen has to use his/her public key certificates in order to sign digitally and then his application gets to the eGovernment platform. • The response of the platform is processed, digitally signed (digital signature + online registry stamp) and sent back to the citizen in a printable format - similar to the corresponding paper form - and storable by the user (in a PDF format). • The data of the form are taken and sent, via Web Service, to the Ministry responsible of the management of the procedure to start with the processing. Apart from the many different back-office systems, all the Ministries and Autonomous Institutions of the regional government have its own intermediate exchange system between their back-offices and the eGovernment platform to facilitate the use of the eGovernment platform services and to implement online services. Following the politics of collaboration with other Administrations, interoperability net with the main town councils of the region has been developed in order to interchange data such as the address certificate and the Spanish large family certificate. It is also important the data interchange with the Notary Agency of Certification (ANCERT), mainly about property deeds, with the aim of facilitating the corresponding tax payments. Around 7,000 deeds per month have been received online since undertaking this system. Some of the main procedures following the before mentioned model which the citizen may already use on the web www.carm.es are: • Delivery of the Patrimonial Transfer Tax • Delivery of the Storage or Deposit of Waste Materials Tax. • Registration in an organ donor register. • Application for vaccination data. • Application for a disability certificate. • Information and Complaints of the Consumer Affairs Department. • Communication of Opening or Resumption of business activities. • Application for periodic revisions of different tools and industrial machinery. • Application of job vacancy to the Employment and Training Department (SEF). • Public competitive exams for Primary and Secondary Education. • Public competitive exams for Regional Administration or Government. Innovation: First of all, the relative technologic immaturity of our organisation at the beginning of the process allowed us to adopt radically a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and to spread it to all the departments, so that their different strategies related to the public services and to other departments could be reoriented. Coming from a model with different processing manners and different systems, we moved towards a model of common services in a single platform with simple interfaces based on web services for the information interchange with all the departments. SOA, Web Services and XML have been in the centre of our strategy, they have facilitated us the decoupling between the technology and the business process enabling us to be more agile when facing changes in business process requirements. Secondly, maybe the most relevant aspect in the success of the project has been the implementation of an “eSatellite” in each Ministry of the Regional Administration. This has enabled to channel the communications between the eGovernment platform and the different back-offices in a unified way. In each “eSatellite” we can find: • A set of general interfaces between the “eSatellite” and the platform. • A set of specific interfaces towards the Back-Office, developed and maintained for each Ministry. Thirdly, what we call the “tramitador”, a unified online processing software which enables to offer window office services to the public quickly and safely, as the developments are simplified and replaced by parameterization to a great extent. The time needed for developing a basic application with signature, register, and attached documents may be reduced to a single week in some cases.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

We have followed a politics of spreading and sharing our experiences in this project with other Administrations and also with companies of our sector taking part in different forums and publishing articles in specific magazines, namely: Computing November 2006, Computing January 2007, www.eGovBarriers.org Issue No 11. April 2007. We also have taken part in the eGovernment Conferences (Gijón, January 2006) with the speech "Electronic Government: the point of view of the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia”, in the BEA forum “Technology in the Public Administration” (Madrid, April 2006) with the speech “eGovernment platform of the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia”, in TECNIMAP 2006 (Seville, May-June 2006) with papers on the Tax System Portal and the Electronic Government, in the “I Summit European on Interoperability in the iGovernment” (ESIIG) (Valencia, November 2006) and also in the round table “Technological Interoperability Level between Public Administrations” from the “7th Meeting TIC in the Public Administrations” (IDC) (Madrid, November 2006). We have also had some information meetings with equivalent departments in other Administrations (for example, with the Generalitat of Catalonia) Another relevant aspect in this section is the special mention which the Directorate General for Computing of the Regional Government of Murcia (DGI) received in the TECNIMAP Prizes 2006 in the category “Services for the citizens” (subcategory Autonomous Communities) with the project “Provision of Services of eGovernment in the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia”. We have also received the first prize from the weekly magazine COMPUTING Spain, from the publishing house VNU Business Publications España, S.A., in the category “Electronic Administration” (January 2007) in the 7th edition of its prestigious prizes.

Lessons learnt

• Our bet for the use of public key certificates for authentication and signature was an obstacle at the beginning, because it was not widespread in the citizenship. However, this problem is currently being solved with the progressive introduction of the electronic ID. • The choice of a SOA system and the use of web services not only have had technological but also organizational consequences. In the CARM (Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia) there have always been many specific Ministry programs clearly focused on the solution of a concrete problem, being as a result difficult to interoperate and collaborate with other applications. But this SOA architecture has enabled to offer to the different business units a set of services based on scalability and sustainability which may be easily used notwithstanding the diversity of technologies of the different back-offices applications. • The adoption of a unified and identifiable look & feel of the services and procedures (centralized service of electronic applications and a unified online processing application) has enabled the quick development of the services. The responsible units of each procedure are not worried about the outlook any more, but only of the information to interchange. And the procedures are also standardized for the citizens. Scope: International, Local (city or municipality), National, Regional (sub-national)