e-governance and citizen information - Universitat Oberta de ...

E-governance and Citizen Information 136 Catalonia in the International Context...8.4. Relationship between the Administration and Citizens8.4.1. Prominent Technological Innovation ProjectsThe projects we have highlighted show common elements – above all in the emphasis onthe creation of shared databases and in the orientation towards ordering the back-office. InEmilia-Romagna infrastructure and, training and citizen participation projects carry moreweight. In Scotland the core of the strategy is oriented to the organisation of the back offices,whilst in Quebec and Catalonia there are projects that seek to use stored information in orderto offer the citizen services with added value.8.4.2. Evaluation of the Operation and Use of Citizen Information ChannelsIn Catalonia, despite the fact that the metaphor of customer information has been abandoned,the vision of citizens as users has been strengthened. In this way, we observe anemphasis on evaluating not only the number of users of each information channel, but alsotheir preferences and wishes. Another indicator is that the primacy of websites has beenabandoned in order to strengthen all the Citizen Information channels, with a plan to restructureface-to-face contact, the idea of which – still unfinished and not put into action – is tointegrate offices and give general information to civil servants in order that they can attendto different requests and not exclusively those related to their department, strengthening telephoneservices – which has produced very good results – and trying to improve websiteuse indicators.In parallel with this interest, a tendency has been observed to develop similar processes inthe first years of e-government implementation. Basically, in all the cases analysed the intervieweesmentioned an initial emphasis on the development of websites and on the digitisationof services. This initial stage seems to have been followed by a stage of uncertainty or disenchantmentthat led some to reformulate the strategy which saw the principal aim of technologicalinnovation as saving resources which could then be reoriented to other sectors (toincrease social policies in Scotland, to raise the quality of services in general in Emilia-Romagnaand simply to reduce administrative costs in Quebec).Finally, we can state that some variables that could explain this process are political changeand the type of bureaucracy, and that these operate as explanatory variables when analysingstrategic consistency or change. Thus whilst in Catalonia a change of government hada strong impact on the strategy followed till that point, in Quebec the change of governmentonly increased the emphasis on promoting e-government. In accordance with this, in Emilia-http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic