Have you noticed any notable changes in the citizen-administration relationship as a result of the implementation of the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)? The Citizen Attention Service has precisely been one of the points on which Sabadell City Council has concentrated in recent years the application of information technologies, creating an integrated system that offers a single face of the whole corporation, identical for all relationship channels (face-to-face, telephone and web), assisted by old systems and oriented to personalization. The result has been the realization of a high level of citizen satisfaction, which has taken on the changes and interpreted them in terms of modernization. Examples are that in the city it is common to call 010 before making any paperwork (700 calls a day), or consult the city's website before initiating contact with the City Council.
But a greater level of access to municipal information is also required, as during the recent process of the ‘city congress’ in which all the information produced by the participants was archived in a single place: the Internet, where both citizens and SAC informants and how the congressional working groups themselves could access.
How do you perceive the approach adopted by the Open Administration Consortium of Catalonia? I have the feeling that it is an extraordinary initiative in terms of the consensus with which it was generated and which it has maintained, both in the field of Parliament and in the different agents of the local world. This opens up enormous possibilities for updating towards e-government for the Catalan administrations, which are certainly quite technically computerized, but which still have a long way to go towards intercommunication (between departments and internal units of each administration and between the different administrations of our country).
As for the City Council, we plan to automate a procedure, from computer science we talk to the corresponding department, which defines it freely and we transfer it to computer logic. When what needs to be done is to computerize a corporate process, to solve organizational, legal, political and even technical difficulties, we must rely on instruments that go beyond the departments involved (organizational service, joint commissions, etc. .). The Administration aims directly at the application of technologies to the relations between different administrations and this field is very complex and there is very little experience. In the Catalan case, I believe that the CAOC aims at the most productive and future line: the system of compensation for inter-administrative processes (such as the platform of the 'register' project) and the country projects that no administration by itself has among the its objectives (digital certification system, e-TRAM, etc.).
The role of the CAOC is not easy, as it has to work 'below' the administrations, responding to sometimes conflicting objectives: promoting and supporting, giving prominence but leading, maintaining good relations with all but achieving results,…
And the difficulties are not small: the definition of technological, communications and functional standards, the balance of information in the different databases of administrations (created for different management needs, but part of a process that serves the citizen himself), the possible application of regulations and the orientation to create new ones, the creation and maintenance of trust between institutions, politicians and technicians. The CAOC should address all these difficulties decisively, with political support and strong dialogue, starting from the service to the citizen to guide its leadership and doing what no one does for the common good inter-administrative.
What online services does Sabadell City Council currently offer to the citizens of this town? And what services do you plan to offer in the future? All the digital information used by 010 and the SAC is online, both information on procedures, the city directory and the citizen's agenda. For us, this is the basic telematic service of the City Council.
As for procedures, for many years we have had all the applications for certificates and permits granted by the City Council online, as well as public statements and complaints; of all this, the citizen can consult the state of the procedure.
Gradually, the possibility of making the payment of taxes and fees through a virtual POS has been allowed. It is currently possible to pay online any tax or fee paid by the City Council, at any voluntary or executive stage of its processing.
This year we have launched the self-assessment of capital gains, which can also be done online, and the effective direct debit of one or all taxes.
We are currently launching the citizen folder that gives citizens access, through digital certification (idCAT or any other compatible with the CATCert validation platform), to the information we have about them in the municipal databases, to the request for all the flyers that can be generated and to carry out all the procedures that are currently carried out in person and only require showing the DNI. This is the orientation and the final picture I believe we can have within a year. In parallel, complete management of very voluminous transactions is virtualized, such as all the procedures associated with the management of traffic fines, and it is allowed to make complaints and photo queries, appeals and allegations online.
What inter-administrative services are currently available in Sabadell City Council? The City Council has always maintained very close `digital 'relations with the General Directorate of Cadastre (cadastral agreements) and with the INE (continuous register, electoral coordination). The AGE is currently trying to virtualize these relationships based on communication standards, through projects led by the MAP and which are in line with the CAOC.
Recently we have deepened the inter-administrative `digital 'relationship with the creation of the PIC' cadastral information point- and with the Tax Agency (data exchange agreements). We are currently working on the project that generates the most enthusiasm for us: the change of address of the AOC.
What acceptance is having the online procedures carried out by the citizens of the region? The use of online procedures is still small in the city although growth is continuous. What has most easily been incorporated into citizen normalcy is that of making requests and complaints over the Internet, as well as tax payments. And on the part of companies, the use of the online job market.
How do you assess the experience that Sabadell City Council has joined the project of telematic issuance of census flyers? This project aims to eliminate the census certificates and therefore includes both the other administrations to obtain it electronically from the City Council when required, and that through the City Council the citizen sends these flyers online when going to do the high or to modify its registration.
As this new system, which is being implemented today in Sabadell, is based on the origin of the changes in the main administrative reference element -the person-, it will make it possible to eliminate the vast majority of certificates that the administrations oblige the citizen to bring us.
The role of the town councils that have acted as promoters of the project is not simple, since sometimes we have the feeling that we are defending positions in favor of the inter-administrative common good of which we are more clients than providers (in terms of `process'), with scarce resources that we should dedicate to the urgent needs of our own services. It is at this point that the greatest opportunities for action and leadership open up for the CAOC, since there are many battle fronts: trust between the participating administrations, cross-purification of basic referential data, harmonizing the technology used, forcing the interpretation of applicable legal regulations. And what is most important, defending at all times the real benefit for the citizen, the end of the entire inter-administrative process. Without this essential leadership, it is easy for the interesthose of the administrative machinery than those of the citizen himself.
We hope that both the MAP data exchange initiative discussed above and this project to change the address of the CAOC can be coordinated in the future, for the benefit of municipalities and citizens, as new initiatives have recently emerged such as the agreement which offers directly the Directorate General of Traffic to the municipalities of data exchange, which is very beneficial for the citizen, but which does not take advantage of the benefits of either of the two initiatives mentioned above. Also the inter-administrative intranet that has been operating for years in the general administration of the state and that only reaches the autonomous communities, without giving access to local administrations.
And to the project idCAT? We have been offering the registration service for obtaining the digital certificate for a few months. idCAT, but it is not until now that a promotion will be made so that citizens know and understand it, coinciding with the launch of the citizen folder. That is why we hope to significantly increase the issuance of these digital certificates among the citizens of Sabadell in the coming months, in which the offer of telematic services that require a digital certificate will also increase.
On the other hand, the Salut en Xarxa project led by the Parc Taulí Foundation aims to give citizens access to their clinical results and, in the future, to their clinical history. We have worked with them and with CATCert to ensure that they use theidCAT and that the citizens of Sabadell can use it indiscriminately for their own and our services.
We are now looking forward to knowing how to use the e-DNI in our procedures but we have a lot of confidence in the CATCert validation platform.
What other measures in relation to the promotion of e-government is currently being developed or is it about to be presented by Sabadell City Council? The use of electronic processing by regular Internet users is not possible if they are not aware of this possibility, if they do not have the confidence to use it, and if they have not entered into the routines of digital behavior. These three barrierseres are what is breaking online banking. We believe that first we need to develop and maintain a horizontal city portal and then offer personalized services. Our city portal is sabadell.net and the personalized services we are launching now, and they are called sabadellamida.net. This platform serves notices about the city's agenda, news, procedures and any changes in the portal's contents only on the topics that the citizen has indicated to us once identified with a simple user'password. In parallel, but in a differentiated way, there is the citizen's processing folder with theidCAT which I mentioned before.
As a major impediment to citizens' access to the administration is that the language of the street is very different from the administrative language, we are launching a virtual assistant that offers the right answers to any questions about procedures that the citizen wants. do. If all goes well, then we will extend it to all the contents and services of the city portal.
We are also finalizing the application tests of the telematic registry, which in parallel is undergoing the approval required according to the telematic ordinance that regulates it. It will be applied to any transaction that the citizen can make through the citizen folder. This project is just one of the elements that comprise the new 'Digitalization of Information' system that we have begun to address this year and for which we have obtained an important subsidy from the CAOC. It consists of progressively eliminating paper documentation throughout the organization, through a single registry of files, the scanning of documents from the registry, certifying the còpia digital, as well as the digital signature and storage of all documents, files and signatures.
How do you think the use of the Recognized Electronic Signature can help boost e-government? In the face of the citizen I think the main value will be to increase confidence in the digital face shown by the administration. The digital business environment values this factor very positively, as it also indirectly contributes to greater use of e-commerce systems.
On the other hand, within the administrations the use of the e-signature allows the exclusively digital management of the files, which entails an enormous saving of energy (the natural energy of the unused paper and his transport, l human energy of the decrease of management time, the one involved in the reduction of the risk of errors, the one of the saving of the spaces of physical file,)
Finally, as I am convinced that computers will produce a much higher number of electronic signatures than those produced by humans, the use of the recognized e-signature will allow the existence of an inter-administrative virtual universe of dimensions still unsuspected today.
At what level is the use of new Information and Communication Technologies in the Catalan local administration compared to other communities in the State? I think that there are still no standards of measurement between autonomous communities that allow us to answer this question in a scientific way, so I can only give a personal impression. And my impression is that in Catalonia we start from an advantageous situation derived from the high computerization of our local administration and to have exemplary councils in the use of ICT as well as the gift of having a forty of medium-sized municipalities with investment capacity and flexibility for innovation. But we have not taken sufficient advantage of this advantageous position with the advent of the Internet and there are Spanish regions with a better connected, equipped and innovative local administration, as is the case of the communities of Madrid and the Basque Country and, in to a large extent, Andalusia, Valencia and Galicia.
In relation to the community space, at the beginning of last October 2005, representaRepresentatives from 30 European states met in Amsterdam (Netherlands) to debate the future of Electronic Government beyond 2005. Where should the Administration's efforts in this regard be directed? Both the modernization and the stimulus to innovation that marks the Lisbon strategy, especially through the i2010 strategic framework for the European Information Society and as recommended by the representaEuropean leaders in Amsterdam, must focus on specific, measurable objectives that go beyond the strict framework of technology. In particular, for administrations, they propose developing a common metric for administrative transformation and intensifying cooperation and coordination mechanisms.
The key word in the successful deployment of these policies, I believe, is found in the word standards. Standards in metrics to measure progress towards the Europe of Knowledge, standards for intra and int interoperability.eresstates and regions, standards in the dissemination of knowledge based on good practices, especially those related to organizational transformations of administrations. And, finally, standards in the implementation of innovation, which allow the private sector to enter in a more natural way in the process of transformation of administrations in the member states.
