CITADEL action is focused on transforming the public sector to make more efficient, inclusive and citizen-centric digital public services. For years, the public sector has invested a large amount of money in digitizing the public services. Yet, they remain unused or are used very little. Why? How can this situation be improved? The CITADEL project aims at providing some answers to these questions. The CITADEL approach revolves around two strands: “Understand to transform” and “Co-create to transform”, supported by ICT tools and methodologies.
“Understand to transform” has a twofold goal. Firstly, it seeks to comprehend what is the reason that is keeping citizens from not using digital public services (e.g. lack of skills, fear of making a mistake, …) and also to analyse what is the opinion of the citizens about the digital services that they have used. For this, three ICT tools have been developed: 1) the Intelligent Service Discovery that seeks to personalize the portal of the public administration (PA) for that citizen while ensuring its privacy, and complying with the GDPR, 2) the User Assessment that allows a citizen to evaluate a digital public service through a simple star-rated system and through comments that are later on analysed by means of sentiment analysis, and 3) a KPI report generator that provides insights on how certain indicators are behaving. Secondly, it seeks to understand the willingness of civil servants to take part in participatory processes with citizens, the level of trust of citizens in the public institutions, and what is the eGovernment maturity of the public administration in various dimensions: technology, people, organization & legal. The result of this maturity model is a set of recommendations.
Once the diagnosis has been performed with the previous tools, “Co-create to transform” starts. To this end, CITADEL has developed a customizable methodology taking into consideration aspects such as the complexity of the service, time available, budget and so on. This customization is supported by a tool. For the generation of ideas, the Innovation platform has been developed.
These results have been validated in:
a) VARAM: Latvian ministry in charge of e-services. The use case had a threefold goal: 1) to improve the service delivery channels, which has allowed them to understand better the gaps, bottlenecks and misconceptions, as well as their users, and get in direct contact with their users to get insights about more aspects rather than just usability, such as strategy, 2) to change VARAM Public Service Department processes and mindset in what respects citizen engagement, resulting in a better understanding of what user involvement means, and 3) to improve other institutions’ knowledge and toolsets.
b) Regione di Puglia: focused on three topics: 1) civil servant awareness and their willingness to collaborate with citizens, 2) capacity building by analysing the current gaps in the civil servants and 3) public servants and citizen involvement through co-creation and e-participation, and by listening to the stakeholders.
c) City of Antwerp: 1) civil servant awareness to collaborate with citizens and 2) co-creation activities to change their e-service ‘life event’. In this case, what it was initially as a re-design of their e-desk service, resulted in a complete redefinition of the content structure of antwerpen.be and required a sustained user-oriented content strategy.
d) DUCs: The Urban districts of commerce in Italy are a special level of PAs with the objective to enhance the commercial, touristic and cultural attractiveness of cities. In this case, 5 DUCs used the innovation platform for the design of their executive plans.
e) Smart Working: the security toolkit, based on encryption and blockchain, was validated to ensure the smart working hours of public servants in the city of Bari.
