Business Process Improvement in Organizational Design of E-Government Services.

This paper describes a business process and organizational re-design and implementation project for an e-government service organization. In this project the initial process execution time of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection request has been reduced from some 60 days to 2 days. This has been achieved by the use of a new business process reengineering (BPR) implementation approach that was developed by the Utrecht University. The implementation approach is based on a combination of Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA), Business Process Modeling (BPM), Knowledge Management and Management Control methodologies and techniques. The method has been applied to improve the performance of a Dutch e-government service department (DeGSD). DeGSD is an e-government service department that supports and promotes electronic communication. It can be described as an electronic mail office for consumers that provides the ICT infrastructure to communicate with the government. The goal is to reduce administrative activities for both the government and consumers. Also supporting technology and part of the process is outsourced. In our approach we used EIA as a starting point because it describes all relations and information exchange with all stakeholders. This is different compared to more traditional approaches which (when it comes to automation) tend to have a main focus on the internal processes whereas our approach aligns the processes and systems across different participants, such as suppliers and customers, in the supply chain. Also included in the implementation approach are management control design mechanisms to ensure that the organizations strategy is in sync with its processes and activities that are performed by the employees. Management control is crucial in enabling the continuous measuring and improving of the organizational performance. Although the proposed BPR implementation approach worked in the project at DeGSD, further validation is necessary. Therefore we suggest that more case studies are performed at both government and profit organizations