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

Issues of design and implementation of e-government
4.4 Arrangements for cross-agency service provisioning
This section provides an overview of arrangements for service provisioning based on
the contributions from multiple agencies. The goal is to provide a basis for
understanding the need for supporting technology and governance.
Introduced in the 1990s, the governance paradigm suggests a shift from government to
governance, implying a government as defined by Bekkers and Homburg (2005), as:
- not an entity, but a conglomerate of actors
- not the only actor who tries to influence societal development
- where interventions are interventions in policy networks.
Bekkers (2006) explains this further, and uses policy chains and policy networks to
describe public service provisioning. A policy chain is a multi agency service process
having a sequential dependency between the actors, while in a policy network the
dependencies between the actors have a reciprocal nature (Thompson, 1967). They act
as semi-permanent collaboration arrangements between organisations (public, private,
and semi-public) in order to provide a given service or outcome. The collaboration
arrangements are based on political and administrative agreements, technological
agreements, economic agreements, and legal arrangements.
The term virtual state is used by Fountain (2001) for a government that is organised
increasingly in terms of virtual agencies in public-private networks, and whose structure
and capacity depends on the Internet. A virtual agency is a temporary or semipermanent
arrangement of resources selected independently of the normal
organisational boundaries in order to solve a given task or tasks. A virtual organisation
of resources can be used to bring individuals from different agencies together and a
given individual can be member of several virtual agencies at any given time. Based on
the research objective of establishing a My Processes service portal, virtual agencies is a
possible approach to establishing a public service portal as a virtual one-stop shop.
A one-stop shop is a single point of contact where arrangements for most public
services can be made. It is a service where the citizen can ask questions and be guided
for applicable services based on given needs. Another kind of arrangement providing
convenience to the citizen is related to interoperability and back-office integration. A
possible outcome of such an arrangement is that the citizen would not have to resubmit
information that previously has been provided to another public agency.
Physical reorganisation towards a one-stop shop at a local level includes a consolidation
of service organisations into shared service centres (Janssen and Wagenaar, 2004). In a
shared service centre, different branches of government are available to the public at the
same physical location. A shared facility does however not necessarily mean having an
integrated back-office. An alternative arrangement to the shared service centre of a
decentralised character is a shared service network. Shared service networks (Becker et
al., 2009) are primarily a result of inter-municipal collaboration motivated by cost
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