eGovernment research: the making of a success story E -Learning on the rescue

1. eGovernment research: the making of a success storyE-Learning on the rescue Research Programmes Division ALTEC S.A., Greece

2. What is common wisdom (elsewhere?...) • The Biggest Successes are Often Bred from Failures! • What distinguishes a research project is not its successes, but the way in which it deals with failures.   • The central issue is about experimentation, innovation, and taking new risks. • Only projects that can deal with failure and still make money can exist in this environment.   • What is usual is to face many, many failures and a few extraordinary successes.

3. Reality check • we are not facing a lack on enabling technologies but • we are indeed facing a lack on paradigms to successfully deploy them • In this context we turned to capacity building, in order to provide the means for public organizations to develop a set of relevant capacities that will help them adopt our solutions

4. Capacity building… • What is different from e-Learning? • Or: Is it different from e-Learning? • Let’s look at our (ALTEC’s) experiences…

5. ALTEC’s capacity building portal • We used moodle • Why? No cost, much experience out there, good support • We selected material from all e-Gov projects that ALTEC participated and organised it in sessions in order to facilitate learning processes • Till this point, everything runs like in a conventional e-Learning project!

6. http://research.altec.gr/cp

7. From e-Learning to Capacity Building: The case of the IST OneStopGov project (1/2) • What the project is about? • Introduction of a life-event model and the corresponding IT solution to address e-Government service needs in the enlarged Europe

8. From e-Learning to Capacity Building: The case of the IST OneStopGov project (2/2) • Situation as is: • A small team from each Public Administration participates in the project activities • Either high-rank officers or temporary employed for the needs of the project • Result: after the project ends, no – or limited - intellectual capital remains at the PA side

9. Structure for capacity building on OneStopGov service development 12 – 15 working hours per week1 Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) per week Teaching professionals 1 8 ca. 8 months coaching and training Start: OneStopGov readinessassessment OneStopGov and e-Gov service Coaching 30 – 40 Standard Operating Procedures 1st F2F*(3 days) 2nd F2F (3 days) 3rd F2F (3 days) Management and CEOs ** 5 – 8 working hours per weekca. 1 Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) per month Online Reporting & Coaching on Organisational Development 3 – 6 Standard Operating Procedures 1st F2F(1-2 days) 2nd F2F (1-2 days) 3rd F2F (1-2 days)

10. Experiences… • It is difficult to impose this process on a voluntary base • Example: in one project, none of the involved PAs exhibited any interest in communicating the existence of the portal to its employees. The case is typical. • Capacity building efforts should be tightly coupled with the dissemination and exploitation activities of all consortium members • Reluctance to access and use the portal from the PA sides can unveil much about the real value they get from the research projects • We are fully committed in continuing our investments in this direction – it is a one-way for increasing the value of our research within the end users’ communities

11. Pathway to future projects • Users should be encouraged to organise themselves into Communities • The Communities should be helped to express their needs • Technology should be naturally implemented and not part of a head-fake exercise (I have the solution – show me the problem!) • The importance of helping the users build their own capacities should become a natural part of all e-Gov projects

12. Two ideas for future projects • Our effort is repository-based (like a repository of best practices for e-Gov etc.) • One idea is to research the area of networks of best practice for e-Gov • A second idea is for setting up a laboratory for e-democracy that would help organisations (local or regional or central government) to converge into practices that are optimal for application and use in different contexts

13. Follow-up • Idea nr 1: Network of e-Gov best practices • Mail_to: Adamantios Koumpis (akou@altec.gr) and Garyfallos Fragidis (garyf@uom.gr) • Idea nr 2: De-Lab (e-Democracy Laboratory) • Mail_to: Apostolos Vontas (avo@altec.gr) and Francesco Molinari (fmol@altec.gr)