Gentofte Kommune – a municipality situated close to Copenhagen - has developed an online service called Genvej. Genvej gives citizens direct access to self service solutions and personal information that Gentofte Kommune and other public instances possesses. Thus citizens have electronic access to service solutions 24 hours a day via Genvej on www.gentofte.dk.

The vision of Genvej is that the citizens only have to log on to one system and then they can access all relevant information and services in the public sector. Therefore Genvej is integrated to a number of regional, national and private partners such as the tax authorities and the healthcare sector.

Gentofte Kommune is keenly focused on utilising the possibilities of providing optimal digital services. Genvej makes it as easy as possible to be a citizen in a digital world. By launching Genvej Gentofte Kommune wants to: 

• provide optimal digital service to the citizens
• encourage the citizens to use self service solutions on the internet
• brand Gentofte Kommune as a frontrunner as regards service solutions on the internet
• enhance the IT skills of the employees and citizens in Gentofte Kommune.

What can the citizens do in Genvej?

Here is a list over the most important things the citizens can see and do in Genvej: 

• See their name, social security number, age, address, name of their parents, wife/husband and children.
• Use real estate services as to renovation, pests, water supply, photos, municipality plans, and registration tests.
• See information, photos, etc. from their children’s school and day care institution.
• Give and read information to/from day care institutions e.g. about sickness, who´s picking up the child, permissions to drive in bus or car and signing up for excursions and meetings.
• Use union services – board members can maintain union information and book resources
• Enrol their children to a school
• Use library services
• Order a Danish Health Security card and change their house doctor
• Order a passport
• Subscribe to dentist services – get a sms with a reminder of the children’s appointment

We have made a movie that presents Genvej, which we kindly ask you to see by following this link: http://www.gentoftekommune.dk/index.php?id=4669 (you need to have Flash installed to see the movie.

OCES Digital Signature ensures security and relevance

Log on to Genvej requires an OCES Digital Signature – a personal log-on key all Danish citizens can require for free. An OCES Digital Signature is a highly secure digital log-on key that gives the citizens access to various personal data and services on the internet.

Thus the citizens only have access to their own personal data in Genvej, and only get presented to relevant services. E.g. only parents with children that are to be enrolled into school can see the school-enrolment tab etc. 

A digital frontrunner

Several public studies have proven that there is a great demand for personalized self service solutions in Denmark. Gentofte Kommune is a frontrunner with the development of Genvej, and thus Gentofte Kommune plays an important role in developing public self service solutions.

The lessons learnt are that Rome was not built in a day - it takes a long time to change citizens and employees way of thinking services as a digital feature. However, so far the impacts of Genvej have been

-         an increasing number of citizens using self service solutions on the internet
-         development of the employees’ and citizens´ IT-skills
-         improved administration
-         sharing of experiences with the rest of the public sector

There is not enough room here to explain all about the content Genvej, so again we will ask you to see our film about Genvej by following this link: http://www.gentoftekommune.dk/index.php?id=4669 (you need to have Flash installed to see the movie.

Policy Context

Genvej is Gentofte Kommune´s online service. Gentofte Kommune is one of 98 municipalities in Denmark and has approximately 70.000 citizens. The municipalities have a wide selection of responsibilities – day care of children, maintenance of the environment, service of the elderly, schools and much more. Through Genvej the citizens can access a lot of services and information regarding their own person online at any time and from any place they want. In this way Genvej contributes to equal possibilities and access to Gentofte Kommune and other public instances for all citizens independent of time and place.

The public Denmark as a whole has a very strong ambition about digitalization of public services. The association “Local Government Denmark”, in danish, Kommunernes Landsforening has decided on a common public digital strategy called “e2012”. The vision is expressed as: “The municipalities take responsibility for the citizens to experience an efficient digital service, starting from the citizens needs”. 

The case of Genvej fits very well into the ambitions of e2012, and Genvej is known in the Danish public sector to be a frontrunner in the area of digital development.

Next, we off course fit into our own digital strategy 2006-2010, which explicits as follow: 

“The digital Citizen Centered Programme (see question 18) must offer citizens a personalized, digital, secure entrance to all services, information and communication with Gentofte Kommune via Genvej.”

Description of target users and groups

The target users of Genvej are in fact all citizens over 18 years of age in Gentofte Kommune. All in all the municipality has approximately  70.000 citizens. Out of these there are 52,536 persons over the age of 18 with the following age composition:

• 18-24 years: 4,338 persons
• 25-39 years: 11,163 persons
• 40-54 years: 15,942 persons
• 55-64 years: 9,521 persons
• 65-74 years: 5,663 persons
• 75 years and older: 6,328 persons

The needs of this broad target user group is to have access to a well functioning personalized service on the internet that gathers relevant information and services from the public sector and especially their municipality.  The service should be clearly promoted to the public, easy to use and give quick service 24 hours a day.

So far we have mostly been focusing on a broad selection of information and services in Genvej that could serve and satisfy the general population of the municipality. Second to this we have specifically focused on households with children under 18 years. We have approximately 8,000 households of these kinds with 1 or 2 adults.

The needs of the households with children under 18 years are – in addition to the needs of the broad target group – a secure way to manage and follow the part of the lives of their children that takes place in day care institutions, schools and other public instances.

In total Gentofte Kommune has 31,706 households. Currently 4600 households are using Genvej, so until now (June 2009) 14,5 % of our households are using Genvej. Our target for 2009 is to reach 25% of the households in the end of 2009 because we expect a huge interest for the part of Genvej regarding the day care institutions that will be further implemented in the institutions of the municipality during 2009.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

To govern the development and implementation of Genvej, Gentofte Kommune uses an overall programme management method called MSP (Managing Succesfull Programmes). A programme consists of many projects and to manage each project we use PRINCE2 as project management method. 

MSP and PRINCE2

MSP´s primary target is to ensure that the projects in a programme is coherent and strives towards the same final strategic vision. The end target does not have to be clearly described in details but often has the form of a vision. MSP also ensures that the benefits of the end product of each project are getting realized and all strives towards the final strategic vision of the programme. MSP contains the overall responsibility for the change management efforts of the projects and also focuses on the areas of overlap between the different projects.

Where MSP programmes´ time horizon is relatively long and undefined, the time horizon of PRINCE2 projects is relatively shorter and always has a defined end date. The projects are clearly defined regarding end products, boundaries and time schedules. 

The MSP programme including Genvej in Gentofte Kommune is called The Citizen Centered Programme. The main part of this program consists of projects regarding further development and implementation of Genvej. Right now we are e.g. working on following projects: Digital Visitation of Daycare, Distribution of Subsidy to Unions, Continuously Communication about Genvej and Further Implementation of Day Care Tabs.

User centered development

The development of Genvej is user centered. We use experts to help us get the good and innovative ideas and then we use our users/citizens to test our service products. We use following methods: 

• Focus group sessions
• Screen tests
• Questionnaires

On top of this we have contact with users on daily basis and therefore continuously adjust the services in Genvej to their needs.

Technology solution

Since its inception, the design and implementation of Genvej, has followed healthy enterprise architecture (EA) principles. The solutions is build around a multi layered architecture, in which access to data, business services and presentation of services to the citizen (on the web) is kept in separate solution components. 

Between components, services are exposed through open and reusable web services (SOAP) interfaces. The signature and semantics (look and feel) of these services has wherever possible, been designed so called contract-first in collaboration between the Gentofte Kommune, the Genvej vendor (ASP) and the companies providing the services in question. Contract first means, that services have been designed from the perspective of what should be achieved from a business point of view, rather than how it should be implemented.

Gentofte Kommune has formally approved several of these technical contracts – in order to ensure that no two parties in an interoperability scenario, should be to closely connected. 

An important reason to select this kind of architecture has been to handle the complexity of exposing a large number (30+) of services to the citizens from multiple systems and vendors. The technological maturity of these backend system/vendors is mixed, raging from rather poor to fairly modern. Common to most of the systems, however, are that they were never designed to engage in a Genvej like scenario.

Also, some vendors were rather reluctant to deliver services solutions in the preferred services oriented way (or at all), due to business or political concerns. 

So in fairness, Genvej also contain architecture constructs, which are less service oriented, than we want them to be. However where this is the case, the decision to favour a tactical but faster time to market solution in place of a technical more correct one, has been taken an conscious decision.

To sum up, while the different components in the Genvej complex, is for the most part build on proprietary technology from many vendors, the interface between the different components is largely accomplished using open and documented services. 

This insures that we may replace components in the future, in response to changed/new service requirements, including components which support central government standardisation initiatives. One example of this, includes the replacement of Genvej´s proprietary Single Sign On (SSO) component last year, with a public standardized version, when it became available in October 2008.

The result was access to further public services, almost without adjustments to Genvej itself.

The citizens don´t have to set up or found their Genvej in any way. Every citizen already has a Genvej, they only have to provide an OCES Digital Signature to access it. Also citizens outside Gentofte Kommune have a Genvej. They just have lesser content and options. For instance they cant access the health insurance services or their children’s day care institutions. But they can still order a new passport, access the tax-files, use the library services and access a lot more information and services that is not restricted to the municipality.

Technology choice: Proprietary technology, Mainly (or only) open standards

Main results, benefits and impacts

Our overall results are mainly qualitative, as a consequence of seeing Genvej as a strategic project. Therefore our measurement methodology is to watch the use of Genvej daily, and listen to feedback from the citizens, colleagues, and surroundings in general.

In the future we will make business cases for every new component in Genvej, according to the principles in Prince2. Saying in another way, we want to see an economic benefit before developing new components.

We define stakeholders as, citizens, the organization Gentofte Kommune, other Danish municipalities and the society in general.

For our citizens, we wanted to provide digital, new, easy access to the municipality 24 hours a day – all year long. That goal we have achieved. Our citizens can find information about themselves and can contact us whenever they need. They know more about the data we keep in our systems, and can connect themselves to a lot of other public sites, and it means more transparency and knowledge about the whole public sector. In a way we empower the citizens to be better customers in the public sector.

As mentioned Genvej is a strategic project, with focus on innovation, digital developing, digital knowledge and better service to the citizens. We have achieved a reputation in the Danish society as a first mover/digital front-runner, by being the first municipality with a secure, internet personalized service.

Another big impact concerns our employees. By offering our citizens digital service, our employees are enforced to learn and use the digital services as well. An employee is more or less in the same situation as a citizen – not everyone is familiar with the digital universe, and therefore scepticism can be an obstacle. By teaching and sharing knowledge with our employees, we have increased knowledge about the digital universe and achieved the employees´ inclination to refer to our services.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

There is great potential for others to learn from Genvej. Gentofte Kommune´s perspective on digital self-service is pioneering in its field. The idea of giving individual, personalized entrance to own data and public services is now starting to spread to other municipalities as well.

Three other municipalities (Syddjurs, Rudersdal and Hørsholm municipalities) have started to implement services like Genvej, with the same software and vendor as Gentofte Kommune. Together with these three municipalities, we have formed an experience-exchange club.

Gentofte Kommune is very conscious about telling about our work with Genvej. We tell about it in the press – primarily in professional and local medias and on www.gentofte.dk. We take active part in common public initiatives and development and always answer positive to wishes about interviews to rapports and analysis.

Genvej has generated a lot of coverage in the press and interest from other public instances from Denmark and other Nordic countries. Represents from Gentofte Kommune has presented Genvej on different conferences and meetings, and a lot of municipalities, councils and so on has visited us to learn more about Genvej and our experience with digital self-service.

List of exchanges about Genvej and Gentofte Kommune´s digitalization strategy:

Exchanges that enhances cooperation in the Danish public sector:

• 23.05.2007: Presentation for the Danish Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation.
• 20.11.2007: Presentation by our chief of digitalization on the conference ”Bedst pÃ¥ Nettet” (Best on the Internet) where many Danish municipalities, ministries and other public institutions took part. (See attached documentation: ”Program BedstpaaNettetProgram 201107”).
• Cooperation with KL (association of all Danish Municipalities): Communication of strategy, ideas and initiatives through participation in several workgroups and committees through the years 2007 till now.
• 29.05.2008: Presentation for a delegation from Ukraine (Minister and the Digital Task Force and the Ambassador in Denmark).
• 12.03.2009: Presentation by our IT-manager for leaders in the Region of Nothern- and Middle Jutland at a seminar hosted by the vendor KMD.
• 11.05.2009: Visit from Økonomistyrelsen (The Danish Agency for Governmental Management).
• In addition to this we have presented Genvej and out digitalization strategy at numerous conferences and courses since the opening of Genvej.

Exchanges with other Danish municipalities:

• Several times in 2008 and 2009: Visits from Copenhagen, Aarhus, Gladsaxe and Lyngby-Taarbæk Kommune.
• 30.09.2008: Presentation in Favrskov Kommune.
• 9.12.2008: Visit from Vallensbæk Kommune.
• 17.03.2009: Visit from Elsinore Kommune.
• 20.05.2009: Experience-exchange meeting with other municipalities that has started to implement services like Genvej: Rudersdal Kommune, Hørsholm Kommune and Syddjurs Kommune
• August 2009: We expect a visit from the board of directors in Aalborg Kommune, Denmark.

Exchanges with private collaborators:

• 19.09.2007: Presentation by our IT-manager and chief IT-architect for Odense Kommune and a selection of vendors; IBM, KMD, Convergens and more. Part of a séance about user centered innovation.
• 22.04.2009: Presentation by our chief of digitalization for The Danish Communication Association.
• 02.04.2009: Presentation by our IT-manager on a conference about IT-architecture in Aarhus.

Exchanges with foreign collaborators:

• 27.11.2007: Presentation by our IT-manager and chief IT-architect for a Norwegian Fylkes-delegation.
• 24.4.2008: Visit from Stavanger Kommune, Norway.
• 22.-25.04.2008: Visit in Estonia with the Danish vendor, KMD, with the target to exchange experiences with the Estonian Parliament among others.
• 30.8.08: Presentation for our friendship municipalities: Stord Kommune (Norway), Halmstad Kommune (Sweden) and Hamö (Finland). (See attached documentation: ”Program friendship municipalities 300808”.)
• 17.06.2009: Visit from Thorshavn Kommune, Faroe Islands.

Lessons learnt

A strategic digital project as Genvej demands a dedicated organization. In Gentofte Kommune we have organized the Digital Team with three fulltime employees. These three people use all their time to work with the further development of Genvej, user/citizen support and teaching the rest of the organization all about the digital universe.

Digital projects need structured work frames and MSP/Prince2 has provided us with overview, control and energy.

Digital projects also need time. Often you have to collaborate with several partners/vendors using different language-codes etc. Even in the public sector, it can be difficult to develop together because of the diversity in the IT-systems, data and workflows.

Private vendors also need to be explained about the concept (components using webservices) that can be easily used in different services.

Providing new innovative internet services, does not mean that the service is being used automatically. Promotion, talking, advertising, an over-all PR strategy including citizens and staff is necessary.

In return we feel that we have got so much attention from the rest of the Danish society – many has contacted us for talking, visiting and sharing knowledge with us, because of our reputation as a digital frontrunner. We are often invited to participate in seminars, hearings etc. and that is equal to influence.

 

Scope: Local (city or municipality)