Complicated rules, multiple contact points, numerous forms and applications and three administrative levels: processes as common as home renovations in Flanders require a lot of manual administrative work. To streamline customer journeys and simplify processes, municipalities and other public organizations would benefit from e-government applications. However, implementing these solutions is challenging, considering the lack of well-structured content and the need to integrate legacy systems. FAST aims to tackle the challenges to e-government adoption by creating an engine to automatically generate customer journeys from existing unstructured content – the ideal collection of digital interaction points between public services, organizations and citizens – for a range of public tasks.
Citizens engaging with government processes encounter many different tools, UI’s, webforms and administrative levels. Customer journeys could be vastly simplified through electronic and automated administrative processes and services. Yet the most municipalities find these tools difficult to implement, causing them to score poorly on European benchmarks such as ‘government transparency’ and ‘service delivery’.
FAST gathers experts in UX, UI, natural language processing and data linking to develop a rapid approach to e-government implementation in municipalities. Together, the consortium will optimize existing customer journeys though data linking and public data, and use them as models for new customer journeys. A flexible library of UI elements will allow for the generation of the customer journeys and usage monitoring. The project will be validated by a user group made up of different municipalities at various levels of e-government adoption.
Three main innovation goals have been set forth by the FAST consortium:
The FAST solution will not only be used by consortium partners to grow their knowledge and enhance competitive advantages. Because many other EU countries rank lower in e-government than Belgium, the potential value of the solution is significant.
“Through data linking, natural language processing and UX and UI innovation, the FAST solution will accelerate the adoption of e-government in municipal contexts and simplify customer journeys for key administrative processes.“
FAST was developed with these people profiles in mind:
The end user who will make use of government provided services.
The application owner who is maintaining FAST solutions.
The policy maker creates and manages government regulations.