Multi-channel provisioning of public services - Department of ...

with their case handling, the BIM (Building Information Modelling) files are returned to the developer
for documentation and further work.
By establishing the ByggSøk application, a central control of standards has been established. It is
further the same authority that is responsible for regulations within the domain that is in control of the
control mechanisms of applications. By providing integration with map systems, and through also
being used for automatic checking against zoning rules and regulations, ByggSøk can act as an
interface to various sources of public data. The quality of the industry and government databases is
crucial for the success of this approach, but will on the other hand provide more comprehensible and
accountable services based on an open and transparent public sector.
A full-scale implementation of ByggSøk Building would require changing the organisation of 429
municipalities and approximately 2.000 public offices. In addition, 30.000 private companies in would
have to change they way they work. It must be said that ByggSøk can be used in all municipalities as
long as there is an email address available to send the applications to. But in order to benefit from the
solution beyond receiving valid applications, it is necessary to enable electronic case handling. This
requires the proper IT-infrastructure and processes to transform the entire service organisation and not
only electronic case handling related to building applications.
In 2009, approximately 40% of all building plan applications were created through ByggSøk Building.
Whether there will be 100% take-up by municipalities directly is uncertain. Smaller municipalities
have a just a few cases each year and will have a minimum of benefits through its use. An important
point is however that this service can be provided to the citizens regardless of the usefulness to the
local authorities. It is estimated that over 80% of the population live in a municipality where building
plan applications can be handled electronically. The trend in the latest years has been organisation of
shared service networks (Becker et al., 2009), which should enable building application approvals for
a collection of smaller municipalities.
4.3.2 Process knowledge management and support
The service byggesak.com was an initiated by Oslo municipality prior to the development of ByggSøk.
It enables each municipality to publish documentation of routines, regulations, guidelines, checklists,
templates, examples and general information. This provides increased transparency towards the public
and facilitates unanimous case handling across different municipalities. As of today, 202
municipalities are listed as using byggesak.com, but the amount of information published at each
municipality varies greatly.
In addition to byggesak.com, the National Office of Building Technology and Administration hosts
the forum BE Interactive, as a discussion board for general matters related to case handling and
technical issues for both planning and zoning. It is an active forum having more than 3000 registered
users since 2003.
One of the planned services when establishing ByggSøk, was a separate information portal, providing
the basically the same functionality as byggesak.com. It later turned out to be more appropriate for the
municipalities to publish this information within the context of their own websites rather than using
and external solution. Today, much of the knowledge management and collaboration occur in virtual
organisations of shared service networks.
5 DISCUSSION
Our investigation of the building plan application process is in the perspective of a next generation
government infrastructure. Based on that, our interest is to identify structures and experiences from the
case that can be applied as guidelines for best practice in establishing such an infrastructure.
What we have observed is that the strong central authority, through the role of the National Office of
Building Technology and Administration, has been an important to the success of this part of
8