PCS is a generic application that allows civil servants without programming skills to model their knowledge so that civilians can be guided in a question-answer format to the answer that applies to their specific situation. In that way, specific answers can be given without the expert having to be present to provide the answers -hence the name personal civil servant. PCS also enables civil servants to implement digital application forms so that besides being capable of telling civilians what procedure they have to follow, PCS provides its users with the correct application form to start the procedure.

Policy Context

According to the policy letter of the Flemish Minister of Housing Accomodation, citizens, agencies and institutions which are involved in housing accomodation should be informed quickly and clearly on all the existing aid measures. Government support like premiums and allowances can only be succesful if the target group of people that want to rent, buy, build or renovate a house is informed and knows of their existence. This is exactly what GPZ aims at: delivering the latest, up to date information to all institutions involved and providing the customer with a comprehensive and clear answer to the question "What am I entitled to?".

Description of target users and groups

PCS is a generic application that allows non-programmers to build applications. As such, all civilians, intermediaries and civil servants belong to its target group.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

We started off with a decentralised approach but had to finetune it: we invited all the government layers to participate in GPZ. A small team representing vertically all layers of government gave feedback on the GPZ- prototype so that the requirements of the first release of the final product could be defined. After completion of the first release, we trained around 120 actors to use the back-office application to keep the information used by the application concerning their support measures up to date. This decentralised approach was not sufficient to ensure the level of quality we envisioned: as we wanted to provide a holistic service concerning all support measures of all actors and not all housing actors had the resources to cooperate, we founded an editorial staff. The task of this editorial staff is to support the different housing actors to ensure that all data is complete, in a standardised format and kept up to date.

Main results, benefits and impacts

PCS is unique because it enables civil servants without programming skills to model their expert knowledge so that it becomes available to civilians 24 hours/day. By having the knowledge experts implement the decision trees used by the system, the government's dependency on software providers for every application or every application form is reduced considerably. www.premiezoeker.be, the interactive GPZ-website, offers civilians a detailed and up to date overview of the support measures they are entitled to with their specific family situation and their income. Besides filling out the different screens online, customers/civilians can still call their municipality to find out what support measures they are entitled to but instead of a partial (often no longer up to date) list of premiums the municipality edited themselves, the municipality now often uses GPZ to provide the caller with a correct answer. www.bouwenenwonen.be/robotambtenaar, one of the interactive applications built with PCS, tells civilians whether they need a building permit or not. This application simply relieves municipal civil servants of a lot of phone calls but that doesn’t mean civilians can no longer call. For the municipal civil servant, PCS is very practical because it contains the legislation in an easy to use up to date decision tree that can be used while answering the phone. The "Dienst Wetsmatiging" that has as its task the simplification of government legislation and procedures in Flanders, calculated the administrative savings that GPZ generated around 3 million euros for the period january 2006 - september 2006. (This administrative saving can be sustained as every time GPZ is used a civil servant does not get a telephone call.) The implementation cost of the application was at that stage less than 50 000 euros. On top of the implementation cost two man years were spent to generate a comprehensive list of all the support measures provided by the different actors and to translate the regulation of every support measure in the system into a for the system necessary decision tree. GPZ contains at this stage 1,930 support measures of 360 different actors. In the past, every actor tried to provide their customers with an overview of what was available for them. Now, every actor cooperates by maintaining the information concerning their own support measures to keep the information up to date. In this way, the service to the customer was improved while the cost to provide it was reduced considerably. (This administrative saving is on top of the 3 million calculated by the “Dienst Wetsmatiging”)

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

Because of GPZ that offers every user a tailored answer of what is available for them, the need for an application that did the same for building permits arose. PCS allowed the building of such an application so it was built by a civil servant specialised in building permit legislation. The ability of PCS to implement digital application forms for premiums also triggered the start to use the system for building a digital building permit application form.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - Provide a holistic customer-oriented approach. > In the past, many government agencies were focused on their own tasks. Instead of telling civilians what you do for them (e.g.:“What kind of support measures do we offer?”) communicate what they need to know (e.g.:“What kind of support measures are available to you?”) By collaborating both vertically and horizontally we were capable to introduce a complete customer-oriented service for far less. Lesson 2 - Allow other organisations to take the credit. > Civilians do not have to visit www.premiezoeker.be to find the GPZ-application. All the actors who cooperate can easily incorporate the application into their own website so that it looks to their customers that they came up with it. (e.g.: The city of Mechelen incorporated the GPZ service in www.stadmechelen.be/eloket/premiezoeker.php) Lesson 3 - Implement your innovative ideas bottom-up. > By building prototypes of the products we wanted ourselves as customers of our organisation, we were capable of creating a lot of high-level support necessary to get the funding for the implementation of our ideas. By taking small implementation cycles with visible results, we were able to keep the flow of financial support going.

Scope: Regional (sub-national)