CoS - Case Studies

The former Catalogues of Services Action has helped various administrations and organisations in the past years by providing support to achieve their goals. From our experience, we have identified several case studies listed below and described further in subsequent pages. If you are interested in one particular case study (listed or not), don't hesitate to contact us. The following situations are therefore presented:

Creating a catalogue of services
Improving the access to public services information through new technologies and higher data quality
Making catalogues interoperable

Problem Statement

Public administrations from countries, regions and municipalities promote and offer services to the citizens and businesses through online portals. However, within the same country or region, two administrations can describe the same service in very different ways. For example, how to obtain a visa can be described in one manner at national level and in many different manners at municipal or regional levels. This creates situations in which citizens and businesses do not know which website to believe, or get wrong expectations.

For civil servants, this makes the provision of services more challenging as soon as they need to exchange information between administrations. When you add different languages in the situation of cross border exchanges, you quickly end up with complex situations where people don’t understand each other or extra manual actions are required to provide simple services.

Finally, duplicating the ways the same service is described amongst administrations also leads to additional development and management costs. For example, each administration needs to create and maintain its own website and information behind it. It may sound simple but it means that each administration must understand the legal frameworks of the services, be able to translate the service in one or more languages, put in place the IT systems answering their needs with the right level of security, etc.

Goal

As an administration, I want to build a catalogue of services in order to make it accessible to all citizens and businesses, allowing them to easily find harmonised information from national, regional or local levels.

Therefore, I want to harmonise and gather all information coming from different sources) and in different formats (e.g. from a municipality webpage, from a regional database in SQL, from a spreadsheet, etc.).

Approach and Support

The Catalogue of Services Action can help your build your catalogue and/or advise you from different perspectives throughout your journey:

Problem Statement

Even when public service descriptions are harmonised, citizens and businesses still have trouble finding and accessing the right information.

This can be due to the quality of the information in the descriptions or the technologies used on top of the data descriptions.

Goal

want to improve the findability and accessibility of my public services descriptions by adopting taxonomies or integrating technologies such as chatbots or APIs to provide a search assistant or connect various data sources.

I want to assess if a technology is suitable to improve these points by conducting a pilot or study.

Approach and Support

The Catalogue of Services Action can pilot certain technologies or benchmark how such technologies are being used by public administrations and share guidelines and best practices of the study.

Problem statement

Every region and municipality has its own way of describing public services and maintaining or publishing those descriptions. This can lead to one public service being described completely differently by public administrations.

This flexibility can make the reconciliation of descriptions simply impossible: hindering regions, countries or the EU to exchange the right information, for example required by the SDGR, or to build advanced functionalities such as automated service discovery based on structured information.

Goal

As a public administration, I want to create, edit and exchange harmonised and structured public service descriptions according to European specifications or requirements.