Knowledge Management for Public Administrations: Technical Realizations of an Enterprise Attention Management System

The improvement of governments’ efficiency has gained great importance and validity especially in the current times of economic downturn. E-Government constitutes the most contemporary techno-managerial proposition in the track of possible interventions. The paper addresses, more specifically, empowerments necessitated by Public Administration (PA) organizations. Anchored on the needs of three real-life cases, the paper describes the conception and the realization of an IT artefact together with its methodological appeals aiming at improving information access and delivery and thus PAs’ decision making capacity. Our proposition constitutes a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organizations which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules with ontologies. The technical realizations described in the paper constitute the underlying infrastructure of an Enterprise Attention Management System

Business Process Management in Public Administrations – The PICTRUE Approach

Due to the changes in the structures of public administrations within the European Union, business process management has moved into the focus of public decision makers. Several projects with established modelling and reorganisation approaches from the private sector show (Fraser et al. 2003; Seltsikas and Palkovits 2006), that the specific legal, personnel, and political conditions rule out a careless adoption of these approaches for the public sector. Especially, the high amount of public services requires an efficient representation of the entire process landscape in order to measure the overall reorganisation potential. Focusing on isolated processes only leads to small local improvements (Raster 1994). In this paper the PICTURE-approach for an integrated business process management in public administrations is presented. The PICTURE-method allows for an efficient documentation of the entire process landscape in a public administration and a detailed analysis of the resulting process descriptions

Business Process Assessment and Evaluation in Public Administrations using Activity Based Costing

Public administrations in Germany currently face challenges of cost reduction and modernization. Furthermore, Pan-European directives foster process harmonization and introduction of IT-supported and optimized processes. Hereby activity-based costing can be a useful instrument for process assessment and evaluation. Especially through the introduction of New Public Management and double-entry accounting Public Administrations in Germany now get the opportunity to use cost-centered accounting mechanisms to assess process performance and evaluate their activities in a holistic concept. Process Modeling can be a useful instrument to help the public administrations to structure their activities and capture information about them and thereby create a basis for activity-based costing. Therefore, the aim of this article is combining the domain specific process modeling method PICTURE and concept of activity-based costing for supporting Public Administrations in process assessment and evaluation

HOW TO INFORM THE POINT OF SINGLE CONTACT? – A BUSINESS PROCESS BASED APPROACH

The EU-Service-Directive will lead to big challenges for public administrations. The administrations have to offer a point of single contact supporting the customer. This point of single contacts needs an overview of the administrational processes to perform his task. As processes from different organizations and organizational units are relevant for the EU-Service-Directive they can only be captured by using a distributed approach. The contribution of this paper is to present a domain specific distributed modeling method which allows a fast, efficient, and consistent capturing of the information needed for the point of single contact.

Business Process Model-Based Evaluation of ICT Investments in Public Administrations

This paper presents an approach to asses ICT investments in public administrations. The public sector bears great potential for business process optimization through ICT. However, these possibilities remain largely unexploited since the effects of ICT on the processes are not clear to decisions makers. To asses this impact all processes of a public administration, the process landscape, have to be taken into account. The PICTURE modeling method has been proposed as a way to efficiently model the whole process landscape. Based on the knowledge captured with those process models, the impact of certain ICT functionalities on the processes can be analyzed. ICT investment decisions become more transparent towards the political leadership. This paper has two research objectives: First, an architecture for an automated evaluation of ICT investment decisions is introduced. Second, the practical feasibility of the architecture is shown based on an investment decision for a document management system

Model Based Identification and Measurement of Reorganization Potential in Public Administrations – the PICTURE-Approach

Public administrations are faced with a modernization and performance gap. On the one hand citizens and companies have increasing requirements. On the other hand the financial and human resources remain static or even decrease. In recent years public administrations tried to counteract with reengineering their business processes. However, it is observable that reengineering projects in public administrations have a too narrow focus as they concentrate on a small subset of their overall processes. In this paper we claim that significant progress in the identification and measurement of reorganization potential can only be achieved by including the majority of all administrational processes – the process landscape. Therefore, we propose a method architecture which is capable of two things: Firstly, it supports a distributed modeling process across a whole public administration in order to capture the process landscape. Secondly, it is able to estimate the reorganization potential within the process landscape based on an analysis model. A working example derived from a currently funded EU project is supplemented in order to demonstrate our approach and to make it more comprehensible to the reader

Configuration of actors and roles in establishing ICT

Establishing technologies has brought mixed socio-economic impacts across nations and regions. Researchers have studied the relationships between the establishment technologies and its impacts through identifying innovative processes, major actors, and available resources. However, the challenge to this literature is how less resourced countries have achieved greater prosperity than better resourced countries by establishing Information and Communication Technology (ICT). To understand and analyze this phenomenon, we propose a typology of the configuration of roles and actors in establishing ICT based on an innovation framework. The proposed typology can be used not only to explain different socio-economic impacts among countries or regions, but also to suggest a constructive way in establishing ICT through reconfiguring involved actors in the key roles

AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE USEFULNESS OF WEAKNESS PATTERNS IN BUSINESS PROCESS REDESIGN

Business Process Management (BPM) is a topic with growing relevance for businesses as well as public organisations. Until today, the analysis part of a BPM cycle is mostly done manually. Process modelling methods are not designed to allow for automated analysis. Our aim is to show that meaningful weakness patterns that support semi-automatic analysis of business process diagrams (BPD) can be defined when a semantically enhanced modelling method is used. We derive exemplary weakness patterns by analysing literature and interviews from a business process redesign project. These are applied to a set of process models, in which occurrences of these weaknesses are being searched automatically. A comparison of achieved and expected results indicates that our approach helps to identify weaknesses within the processes and therefore supports business process analysis endeavours

Component-based process modelling in health care

Structural changes and increasing market dynamics in the health care sector intensify the hospitals’ need for cost-savings and process optimization. A first step is the documentation of processes in order to clarify the actual needs. As in health care processes are rather complex and often different players with divergent demands are involved, a disciplined approach to effectively and efficiently model processes is required. For this purpose, in this contribution a component-based modelling approach is presented and applied