Freedom of choice in the City of Stockholm, and how to support it

The goal is to provide Stockholmers with a tool to personally select the services that suit them best on the basis of their specific requirements and wishes.

The web application named Compare Services Services is aimed at being an efficient and effective tool for both administrators and Stockholmers in selecting services offered by the City of Stockholm.

The tool can be used to compare quality on the basis of various key data, check where a service unit (such as a compulsory school) is located geographically and compare the service offered by the unit. In addition, the tool incorporates contact information for the City's various units.

For some time now, Stockholmers have been able to select freely among after-school recreation centres, compulsory schools and adult education facilities and Compare Services encompasses the entire service range of the City of Stockholm. You can search for services ranging from libraries and sports facilities to pre-school and facilities for the elderly among our more than 4,000 units.

We have compiled contact information for the units and specific value assessments for comparative purposes, as well as descriptions and photo material to make it easy to find what the City has to offer. In addition, quality guarantees and user surveys are readily available on the presentation page for each unit.

• Ahead of any application for a pre-school place, for instance, the parent/guardians can simply visit Compare Services and - via a straightforward interface - access pre-schools that they find interesting. They can then search for pre-schools in the city districts of their choice in Stockholm, or on the basis of various pedagogic methods (such as Waldorf, etc.) and the activities offered.

• They can then compare the size of children's groups, the number of teachers and how many qualified teachers work at a particular pre-school. They can also see on a map where the facilities are located. After finding the pre-school that best suits their child, they can move on to the e-service to make an application to the pre-school, or contact the city district administration to seek a place.

• Those interested in swimming after work can find city swimming facilities with just a few keyboard clicks and - via the interactive map function and a pedagogic interface - they see the facility closest at hand, or what suits their needs. Having compared the opening hours of the facilities and what they offer, they can tell their friends about the latest activities there.

• Based on the same principle, there is information on the City's sports facilities, waste recycling centres and a great deal more.

Since Compare services was launched last year it has become widely appreciated. The monthly amount of visitors are about 100 000 to 150 000 and more in times of application for schools etc. The system both helps the administration with the processing of applications, and the citizens when applying online.

Policy Context

The City of Stockholm

Sweden has 290 municipalities throughout the country. Every municipality has a popularly elected council which collects income tax and operates such public services as pre-schools and schools, elder care, utilities, housing, and cultural and leisure activities. The municipalities are bound by law and regulations to offer a number of basic services.

Stockholm, with its more than 810,000 inhabitants, is the largest municipality in Sweden as well as the capital. The City Council is the supreme decision-making body of the City of Stockholm. The City provides Stockholm's inhabitants with a multitude of different municipal services by the city’s staff or procured that are carried out in administrative or corporate form.

Decentralised decision-making

In order for the City to develop in tune with its residents, a decentralized working model is used. Decisions on for example parking or childcare, can therefore be made closer to the resident, in the district council. The residents can, in many cases, give their opinions, via their district council's office, and online.

Stockholm is divided into 14 district councils with the same responsibility and authority as the City's other committees and boards. The difference is that the district councils work within their respective geographic areas and have the overall responsibility for their activities. The City of Stockholm's leadership still has the comprehensive responsibility for issues concerning the entire municipality, e.g. municipal tax and the City's common budget. The major part of the City's resources - three-quarters - is passed on to the district councils.

Freedom of choice

As a citizen of the City of Stockholm you have the right to a large number of services. Since the 1 july 2008 there is complete freedom of choice regarding:

• pre-school facilities
• home-help services
• nursing and care accommodation
• after-school recreation centres,
• compulsory schools
• high school education
• adult education facilities.

Compare Services is designed to be a useful and efficient tool for the citizens in their choice of contractor.

Description of target users and groups

Compare Services has two primary target groups: Stockholmers and City administrators. These can be divided into the following sub-groups.

Stockholmers

• Relatives of Stockholmers or people who themselves need, for example, nursing and care accommodation and assistance in their homes.
• Parents looking for pre-school facilities, summer camps, afterschool recreation centres, compulsory school or upper secondary schools for their children.
• Stockholmers looking for adult education courses.
• Stockholmers looking for an overview of other services such as swimming and sport facilities, libraries, and waste collection points, etc.

Administrators in the City of Stockholm

• Administrators in the City of Stockholm's contact centres, who are contacted for information about services for the elderly and so forth. The contact centres provide information on the alternatives available, quality measures, and which service is closest, etc.
• Back-up administrators in city districts who assist in the selection process.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

Keywords

• Cooperation with private contractos regarding information sharing

• Customer focus within the organisation

• Centralised governing - local responsibility

• A common goal - ICT effiency to make life easy in Stockholm

• The challenge - a large organisation with many different types of services

Technology solution

Compare Services is divided into presentation, logic, and data access and data layers.

In addition, there is a cross-layer framework consisting of general services used by several layers in the system, such as logging or configuration and fault management.

Compare Services is based on Microsoft .NET 3.0 and thus capitalises on the advantages of built-in and system architectural key aspects such as security, scalability, reliability and dynamic memory management, flexibility and an extensive component library.

The components in the data layer consist of relational databases with accompanying tables and stored procedures in Microsoft SQL-Server.

Stockholm City's CM-service, EPiServer CMS 5, is used for the presentation of content on the stockholm.se website. EPiServer is based on Microsoft's .NET technology.

Content management

For the administration of the service units and comparative values, there is a separate administration interface for the registration of information regarding various service units. An editor has complete potential to build up a proprietary service unit type with specific comparative values, thereby offering considerable flexibility.

External consumers

Since all service units and comparative values are in separate layers, it is also possible to expose all content via a single API, such as web service. Thus, external players may utilise the information from Compare Services on an external website.

Map

The map in Compare Services is a generic solution capable of presenting the geographic location of service units. The user can freely navigate around the map and personally control the zooming level and centring point. The map function in Compare Services is based on a map platform with a number of products and API from Swedish company Starcus.

Search engine optimisation

Website maps are implemented in Compare Services (Sitemaps is joint venture between Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft for search engine optimisation). Search robots usually find pages through links on the particular website and other websites. Website maps are a complement to the search engines' normal search mode and enhance search optimisation. The website maps permit search robots handling the website maps to fetch all web addresses in the website map and secure information on web addresses via the ancillary metadata.

Accessibility

Compare Services Services has been built using a standardised HTML for structure, CSS for presentation and JavaScript for enhancing interaction. However, the entire service also functions for those without access to JavaScript. The service also complies with the Swedish guidelines for accessibility. The background to access requirements is that Sweden and all other EU countries support the goal that all public service websites are to be available to all by 2010 and the goal of making Stockholm the most accessible capital in the world by 2010.

During the spring, the City is also carrying out adjustments to WCAG 2.0 - the new standard from W3C. In addition to the obvious benefits (that the website and e-services are available for as many citizens as possible) access adjustments also offer superior traffic in search engines and the potential to use the website in, for example, mobile units. For the development/code, it is possible to validate Compare Services, otherwise what is involved are various forms of manual assessment.

Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Accessibility-compliant (minimum WAI AA)

Main results, benefits and impacts

Making an individual choice

CS gives the citizen an efficient tool when choosing a service provided by the municipality. It gives the citizen a good over view of which services are available and what the content of each offer is. At the same time CS gives the administration and all the competing units a good verview of which services are available and the results of user tests so that they can provide better services through the contact centre etc. A secondary gain is an improvement in general quality of the data available for comparisons.

Easy to adopt

CS is easy to update for the administration and the tool as such can easily be adapted to changing needs of citizens as well as when new decisions about which services that should be available, are taken in the City Council. New services can easily be added into CS.

Data can be shared and integrated

The database and the content can be shared with private companies as well as other municipalities and public units for mash ups to suit the needs of users in different situations.

The better the integration between the information databases, the easier it is to provide correct, accurate and well timed data from CS.

Saves time for all

With CS the efficiency improves, both for the City's administration and for the citizen who uses the device. Both save time, can get a better overview. The citizen can make the decisions at home, whenever it suits his or her needs and in a comfortable pace. The administration can be of aid to the citizen in narrowing down the search for a service that suit the individual and then to provide relevant information.

Effectiveness

If there is an e-service with a transaction connected to CS the whole process of making a choice and making the transaction is clearly made more effective by CS.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

• The choice of freedom has been considered and decided by 170 of Swedens 290 municipalities by 2009 and there has been a large interest from other municipalities in Stockholm’s web solution and how to support it.

• The City of Stockholm is offering the code for the Compare Services solution to other municipalities according to a decision this spring.

• There is also a number of private companies who are interested in getting access to the information contained in Compare Services and the City of Stockholm will develop proper API:s to support this in different ways during 2009.

Lessons learnt

• How far is far? When citizens are looking for public services they especially want to know how far, or how close it is to their homes a service is located. A good and useful map is therefore a necessity to provide the geographic information.

• Twice the benefit. Beside the fact that the citizens get more and better information to make a sound choice, we also gain an efficiency enhancement in analytical work. Schools, for instance, have made superior efforts in improving operational quality when compared to each other./li>

• Administrative gains. Compare Services provides support for administrators when parents call or send e-mails to get assistance or more information about the schools available. The administrator can then promptly access information and statistics - which were previously produced manually and kept in the district. (This was a side effect, not a primary goal for the project to begin with.)

• When the data goes public everyone cares. Before Compare Servies was launched the information about our services wasn’t always up to date. The recent comparison and awareness by the public, forces the administrators to always have updated information. If not, our citizens complain.

• Customer care. Manage your municipality website as an online-sales company and treat your citizens as customers. They pay for the services by taxes and they deserve a good treatment and to be satisfied. When managing the service-offer as a product you can help your citizens to be aware of the differences and to make a better choice, the same way they are used to when they shop online.

Scope: Local (city or municipality), Regional (sub-national)