METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION APPLIED TO PUBLIC SERVICES

Abstract

The article covers outputs of the research on development of methodological aspects   applied under digital transformation of public services and based on the procedures suggested for formalizing the reengineering process used for related service provision administrative processes in accordance with the capacity delivered by advanced information technologies.

The Introduction outlines the issue in general, which is mostly related to the fact that the most of the general population enjoy no public services at all despite the implementation of the e-governance concept. It also analyzes the reasons resulting in a problematic situation described above which, among others, include complicated procedures used to both provide and access public (administrative services); lack of related information; lengthy terms of service provision caused by unavailability of information systems capable of ensuring proper data exchange between state electronic information resources and administrative bodies or agencies; lack of state standardization efforts in public service provision, etc. The analysis used to study recent research and publications confirmed that only general aspects of administrative processes used prior to public service provision in the electronic format has been more or less fully processed so far. As for the formalization of public service digitalization implemented through methodological approaches deemed as compatible for use, the matter at hand remains open and requires further research. With the above in mind, the paper states the purpose of related research formulated as the development of methodological support to digital transformation of public services while objectives of the above are focused on the formalization of the reengineering process for public services and development of related procedures fit for practical use.

The outputs of the research describe the general methodological approach to digital transformation of public services based on “as is” and “to be” models. The paper proposes to consider the Administrative Service Register as the information basis used to develop an “as is” model. A register as such contains unified service names, documents, standardized administrative process descriptions as well as results of an audit covering state electronic information resources. The developed “as is” model should be used as a frame to define service information links, to implement audit and streamlining (reengineering) of public service provision procedures (administrative processes) as well as to integrate real life services. As a result, there will be designed the vision of public service provision (a “to be” model) to be implemented further on. The vision is defined as a technical option used to provide public services as a synthesis of service provision administrative processes and information processing tools. At the same time, the objective implying the vision development for a set of public services involves the selection of a specific option used to implement a set of related administrative processes while ensuring ultimate performance in terms of provision of a public service set concerned. The idea of the formalized objective is to select a set of administrative processes used for public service provision at service providers and data exchange between them with the use of related technologies ensuring minimum costs for the whole service set. According to the objective defined and aggregative–decomposition method applied, a respective solution is brought down to two stages: building a graph-based structure for administrative process options used under a certain set of public services (the “as is” model) in accordance with their links; afterwards, the above graph-based structure allows tracking the shortest route to define the appropriate option for administrative processes to be applied under the whole set of public services with the use of respective information technologies (the “to be” model, vision).

The Conclusion describes the major research outputs and further explorative prospects.