Problem Statement

Public administrations from countries, regions and municipalities promote and offer services to the citizens and businesses through online portals. However, within the same country or region, two administrations can describe the same service in very different ways. For example, how to obtain a visa can be described in one manner at national level and in many different manners at municipal or regional levels. This creates situations in which citizens and businesses do not know which website to believe, or get wrong expectations. 

For civil servants, this makes the provision of services more challenging as soon as they need to exchange information between administrations. When you add different languages in the situation of cross border exchanges, you quickly end up with complex situations where people don’t understand each other or extra manual actions are required to provide simple services.

Finally, duplicating the ways the same service is described amongst administrations also leads to additional development and management costs. For example, each administration needs to create and maintain its own website and information behind it. It may sound simple but it means that each administration must understand the legal frameworks of the services, be able to translate the service in one or more languages, put in place the IT systems answering their needs with the right level of security, etc. 
 

Goal

Therefore, I want to harmonise and gather all information coming from different sources) and in different formats (e.g. from a municipality webpage, from a regional database in SQL, from a spreadsheet, etc.). 

Approach and Support

The Catalogue of Services Action can help your build your catalogue and/or advise you from different perspectives throughout your journey: