The Citizen Service Centres are an advanced multi-channel system for the delivery of public services to citizens and businesses in Greece, regardless of their digital capabilities, social orientation or locality. It has proven to be a high profile eGovernment service and its impact on citizens and administration alike has been remarkable, particularly benefiting citizens living in rural and remote areas. Since the opening of the first centre in 2003, the network has grown to more than 1,000 centres nationwide, serving as one-stop-shops where citizens can access a range of government services. The centres provide three access channels: face-to-face, telephone (call centre) and online access. Of the 1,000 or so services offered through CSCs, 35 are available wholly online and some 53 transactions can be completed at least partly online. The focus is on the common transactional elements of eGovernment including services concerning taxation and licensing.

Policy Context

Ministry of Interior (MoI) is responsible for eGovernment and as such has established a network of Citizen Service Centres (CSCs) throughout Greece via national law 3013/2002. Because at the start of the initiative (2002) Internet availability in Greece lagged behind other Member States, face-to-face services were prioritised and a new approach was developed in order to bring eGovernment benefits to large parts of the country and the population. The main concept was to decentralize the delivery of public services, ensure that all citizens are served efficiently and expeditiously and reduce the interaction between citizens and the administration. In this sense, the CSCs have become the single front-gate through which citizens enter the realm of public administration. The CSC system sets down clear national standards, backed by the authority of the state, so that there is now little scope for flexible local interpretation in terms of what certificates and other proofs are required to secure a licence or other service. This has the positive effect of reducing heterogeneity of practice between different parts of the country, reinforcing transparency and promoting fairness (by reducing the power of "gatekeepers"). One of the issues emerging in terms of the use of electronic identity (eID) and personal electronic data to facilitate better service delivery is people's concerns (and legal protections) around the period of time data is retained by government. Currently eID for citizens is at design stage in Greece and one possible way forward concerning personal data protection is secure people's informed consent to keep data for a specific purpose connected with future service provision.

Description of target users and groups

Every citizen who needs to interact with the public sector is a potential user of the CSC network. Therefore, the target group practically includes everyone living in Greece or abroad and needs information or documents from a Greek public domain organization.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

MoI supervises the CSC network centrally and defines all the required standards for implementation, which also provides high-level supervision, operational and logistical support and strategic planning. In Greece, there are about 1,000 municipalities which are responsible for the bulk of CSCs and given the number of centres this means that each municipality has a minimum of one CSC and larger ones have two or three. To implement a particular service through a CSC a municipality must obtain certification by ministerial decree, which is only provided contingent upon any necessary streamlining and re-engineering. Once a CSC is authorized, the local administration assumes the responsibility of building and running it. All CSCs are standardized in that they all must provide the same features, with limited scope for "localisation".

Technology solution

The underlying power of the CSC network is a specially-built web-based IT platform. The solution is focused on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach, thus enabling flexible future development. Citizens and government officials alike obtain access to certain service layers through LDAP-authenticated Single Sign On (SSO). Government personnel have been supplied with digital certificates (PKI) and therefore citizens can opt to receive the requested documents digitally signed in electronic format. In order to ensure interoperability, the MoI requires adherence to the e-GIF (Government Interoperability Framework) protocol. Information Technology (IT) personnel from various government organizations can tap on IT specialists both of the MoI as well as of the vendor that developed the platform. Besides the informational use of the CSC platform, a powerful workflow engine supports citizen requests. The workflow engine interacts with the internal Decision Support System (DSS) or other third party systems through push events and through web services (Web Service Definition Language - WSDL). When their case is completed, an SMS server informs citizens through a short text message. The content management module allows government officials to enter, handle and ultimately authorize and push content to the CSC platform. Technology choice: Standards-based technology

Main results, benefits and impacts

The extensive geographic distribution of the CSCs has significantly narrowed the gap between citizens and administrative centres. Certain segments of the population, especially islanders and inhabitants of remote and mountainous areas, became the immediate recipients of these benefits since they could avoid unnecessary visits to distant outlets of public administration. Public Administration acquired a recognizable face and could be found literally next door just by visiting one of the more than 1000 branches country-wide. The back-office systems for the CSCs log a wealth of data which is used to monitor and assess productivity (based on numbers of cases, transactions etc.) This also provides analysis of which services are used most and which are less popular. Action is taken in cases where uptake is less than expected (either raising awareness of the benefits to boost uptake, or deleting the service and shifting resources elsewhere). Citizen surveys on levels of awareness and satisfaction have generally shown positive results but citizens only use a small proportion of the (mostly offline) services available. The extensive network of CSC branches operates hand-in-hand with a 24x7 call centre which responds to citizen information inquiries pertaining to public administration and receives by phone citizen request for any of the 1000-odd certified government processes. Usage data shows that the drop rate (unanswered calls) is around 1.5%, and of the answered calls, 98% are answered within 20 seconds. Skilled customer service agents who serve citizens at the CSCs and fulfil all the related tasks on the citizens’ behalf, in essence fight the digital and social divide by offering the eGovernment benefits to all population groups, including immigrants as well as digitally illiterate individuals.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

The web-based platform that powers the CSC network has tempted a number of public domain agencies and organizations to evaluate the new status and start considering of ways to benefit from it. Public organizations that physically interface with a large number of individuals on a regular basis joined the system first by complying with the CSC interoperability guidelines. These organizations include, but are not limited to, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Transportation, Social Security Funds and the National Tourism Organization. The extend and the speed of change varied across different organizations; however those who completed all the requirements and linked up their systems to the CSC platform, instantly gained access to a 1000-plus-branch homogeneous network. Each of these organization-to-CSC links brought significant benefits to all of the parties involved, but most of all to the citizens. All public domain ICT projects which are currently in various stages of the design or implementation phase have incorporated such features that enable uncomplicated linking to the CSC platform. Apart from achieving technical coordination, the organization that owns each of these projects is expected to adapt its legal framework of operation in order to cooperate transparently with the CSC network.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - The improvements facilitated by eGovernment developments have raised the general level of provision and established the infrastructure and framework without which any improvements resulting in more specific future impacts on disadvantaged groups will not be possible. The current situation is therefore seen as a transitional phase between the old ways of delivering public services in Greece and the future. The multi-channel approach helps some groups, but it has to be recognised that the state of play was relatively undeveloped when the process of implementing an eGovernment approach was started. Building on the centres (and importantly the back-office systems) now in place, there is significant potential to move towards inclusive eGovernment Lesson 2 - CSC staff are in effect intermediaries and are largely new, young and enthusiastic, which has helped generate positive public reaction. The emphasis in the CSCs is on efficiency and staff have to decide what they can help visitors with and what they cannot. Lesson 3 - In terms of a development trajectory, while self-access is not currently available in CSCs, this would be a powerful way to provide visitors with the opportunity to conduct transactions online themselves, boosting digital literacy and uptake of online transactions. Scope: National