biscaytik: using technology to enhance quality of life in bizkaia...

Microsoft Citizen Service Platform

Even at this stage, the BiscayTIK Project, developed by the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia (Biscay Provincial Authority), in Spain’s Basque Country, is already established as a worldwide benchmark with regard to using Information and Knowledge Technologies for providing citizen service. The Microsoft Citizen Service Platform-based project will provide free e-mail for the entire population of Biscay and will give town halls modern integrated management applications and a web portal where citizens can access services and carry out and fulfill a wide range of tasks and obligations.

This pioneering initiative will assist the overall social development of Biscay and enhance the quality of life of the Basque province’s citizens, as well as helping to bridge the gap between local administration and citizens, leaving town halls and local authorities better-placed to offer better, cheaper and more efficient services.

Situation

For some time now, the Biscay Provincial Authority has needed no convincing of the benefits of Information and Knowledge Technologies (IKTs). That’s why in 2007 officials decided the time had come to embark on an ambitious project –one that was eventually to become an international benchmark– involving the introduction of IKTs at town hall level. This

ground-breaking initiative was intended primarily to bridge the gap between administrators and the administrated, using a previously unused communication channel, Internet, as a means of mutual interaction. BiscayTIK, as the project came to be known, also set out to provide province-wide homogeneous IT tools at town hall level to help local authorities to improve their internal organization and management and to enhance their relations with citizens. Last but not least, the project aimed at turning Biscay into a model for other local administrations all over the world for applying IKTs to municipal administration.

There were a number of signs that indicated that this was the best of all possible times for an initiative of this kind. For a start, almost the entire population of Biscay had broadband access in the home and daily internet use was clearly on the up: halfway through 2007, almost half the citizens over 14 years of age not only had internet access at home, but they were also surfing the ‘net regularly. What’s more, thanks to a number of technological and legal elements that were available at the time, it was possible to verify identity and secure signatures on the ‘net using any one of a range of legally accepted documents, such as Spain’s electronic ID card or the Public Health System electronic card (or ONA, as it is known locally).

BiscayTIK: Using technology to enhance quality of life in Bizkaia (Biscay)When this initiative kicks in it will help bridge the gap between local administration and citizens, leaving town halls and local authorities

better-placed to deliver better, cheaper and more efficient services.

Are your ?

“Ultimately the application of ITs in public administrations seeks to assist social development and to enhance citizens’ lifestyle.”Ibon Oñate Zamalloa, General Manager of the BiscayTIK Foundation. Biscay Provincial Authority.


www.microsoft.com/csp

Facts & Figures

Free e-mail for local citizens


Region & Country. Bizkaia (Biscay), Spain.

Sector. Public Administration.

Client profile. The Provincial Authority is the executive power that exercises government and administration in the historical territory of Bizkaia (Biscay), one of Spain’s most

prosperous provinces. The population currently stands at around 1.2 million.

Situation. The Provincial Authority considered that all of the required technological and social premises existed to embark on an ambitious project involving the application of ICTs in the Biscay administration.

Solution. Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform was selected to develop the BiscayTIK project. The three main axes are as follows: • E-mail for the entire population of Biscay. • IT programmes for the municipalities and a web portal to help citizens carry out tasks and enquiries.

• Create a benchmark technological centre.

Benefits. • Assists social development in Biscay. • Enhances quality of life. • Brings local citizens closer to public administration bodies.

The service offers 5Gb of storage space and serves as a means of direct contact with the Administration.

And there was another beneficial factor too: the prevailing (favorable) technological situation assured long-term success and viability for a project on such a grand scale, establishing just the right degree of centralization and optimizing costs. “For the first time ever, there emerged a scenario that brought together all the factors needed to make it possible for technology to make a positive contribution towards the quality of life for everyone in Biscay”, recalls Ibon Oñate Zamalloa, General Manager of the BiscayTIK Foundation, the body through which the Biscay Provincial Authority runs the BiscayTIK project.

Solution

The BiscayTIK (Biscay IKT) Project came into being to turn the abovementioned goals into reality, along three main axes:

1º) An e-mail service for everyone in Biscay province. The Biscay Provincial Authority will create and activate the bizkaia.eu domain and will provide all local residents who request it with a free 5Gb e-mailbox which can be accessed from any browser and which will serve as a communications channel with local administration. This e-mail service is free

of charge, carries no advertising and users can opt for a euskera (Basque) language version. Shortly, the Biscay Provincial Authority will send local residents a letter to confirm acceptance of his or her e-mail account.

2º) IT programs for town halls and a Citizen’s Web Portal. The BiscayTIK project includes plans to put in place an integrated management system giving town halls a greater choice of IT programs for enhancing electronic communications with the province’s residents, who no longer need to leave the house when it comes to dealing with the local town hall. In that respect, the project will use IT solutions to make it easier for town halls to manage internal areas such as the Register Office, Procurement, Municipal Census, Accounts, Human Resources, Budget, Assets and Inventory, Tax or Disability Services. “They’re all tools that any local authority can use either for internal management or for citizen

services”, points out Oñate Zamalloa, who is convinced that this initiative marks “the modernization of IT in all the local authorities that participate in the project.”

The Web Portal, for its part, will use internet to assist citizens in their dealings with local authorities, allowing a range of one hundred different tasks and enquiries (certificates, permits, applications, inscriptions and so on), improving relations between the man and woman on the street and local officials. “There was no doubt in our minds that citizens had to have the chance to deal with the administration electronically and that town halls, in turn, had to offer a range of at least one hundred tasks and enquiries that could be dealt with in this way, around the clock and in the comfort of the citizen’s own home”, explains Oñate Zamalloa. So the designers drew up a list of the most frequent demands made on town halls by citizens, to ensure that being able to carry them out online would be particularly useful. “Having to take time off work to go to the town hall to get something done –for example, getting a residents’ certificate– makes us less competitive as a society because we are wasting valuable working time”, he adds.

If all goes according to plan, in the third quarter of this year Biscay Provincial

“They’re all tools that any local authority can use either for internal management or for citizen services.”

Ibon Oñate Zamalloa, General Manager of the BiscayTIK Foundation. Biscay Provincial Authority.

Authority will roll out a pilot test for the IT programs and sixteen standard tasks and enquiries in town halls in Abanto Zierbena, Balmaseda, Basauri, Galdakao, Mundaka and Arratia Mancomunidad.

Once the trials are completed, all of the one hundred municipalities that make up Biscay province are welcome to join the project. “It should be emphasized that this project is purely voluntary –town halls are under no obligation at all to participate and if they decide to take part, they are free to choose when, how and in what way they want to do it”, points out Oñate Zamalloa, adding that “the message the provincial authority is sending out to local citizens is perfectly clear: ‘You can do whatever you need, whenever you need and whatever way you need to have it done’.”

3º) Create a technological centre that is an international benchmark.

The third axis involves creating a pioneering and internationally acclaimed centre that will help to generate and spread knowledge of the technologies and citizen services rolled out by the BiscayTIK project. “We are convinced of the need for an organization capable of

generating the knowledge needed for this initiative to be replicated in other countries” assures Oñate Zamalloa.

The centre will be responsible for developing the integrated system for Biscay’s town halls, lending support to technological companies and exporting the knowledge obtained through this project to all interested administrations. “Its mission will be to help Public Administrations to make more and better use of technology, with the benefit of the experience gleaned by the BiscayTIK project”, explains Oñate Zamalloa. The centre, which will be based in Getxo, is scheduled to open in 2011; meanwhile, it is based provisionally in the town of Leioa.

Guided by these three fundamental axes of the BiscayTIK project, halfway through 2007 Biscay’s provincial authority organized a tender –through a local publicly-owned company, Lantik– to select a company to carry out the project. “We looked closely at each of the offers and we finally decided on Microsoft”, recalls Oñate Zamalloa.

Microsoft’s winning offer was based on

its Citizen Service Platform solution, a framework of applications aimed at helping public sector bodies and organizations to meet the challenges involved in delivering key services, by speeding up local governments’ transformation plans aimed at delivering citizen services in a more efficient and profitable way.

Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform gives local administrations a comprehensive framework to help them identify opportunities and successfully meet the challenges posed by the citizens that they administrate, such as (in the case of Biscay province) compliance with Spain’s Law 11/Access to e-Government and the Disability Law, as well as the ability to deliver a broad range of top quality electronic services even when part of the population is located in tiny municipalities that do not have the resources needed to provide those services.


“There was no doubt in our minds that citizens had to have the chance to deal with the administration electronically and that town halls, in turn, had to offer a range of at least one hundred tasks and enquiries that could be dealt with in this way, around the clock and in the comfort of the citizen’s own home.” Ibon Oñate Zamalloa, general Manager of the BiscayTIK Foundation.


The Administration gets closer


BiscayTIK delivers better, cheaper and more efficient services.

The BiscayTIK Project is an initiative based on what is currently the world’s most advanced version of Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform and features a range of Microsoft technologies: Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft Windows Server System, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft BizTalk Server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics AX, among others.

Advantages

• Aids social development in Biscay.

• Enhances the quality of life of the province’s citizens. “Citizens will be able to save a considerable amount of time each year because they won’t need to go to the town hall as often as they did before”, explains Oñate Zamalloa.

• The project bridges the gap between citizens and their local authorities, while town halls will be able to deliver better, cheaper and more efficient services. “Take for example the one hundred tasks and enquiries that citizens will be able to sort out online”, says Oñate Zamalloa, who assures us that “the benefits are as many as they are obvious: a wide range of services available 24/7, the whole year around; one-to-one attention, ID verification of web portal users, fast

turnaround times, time saved by not making the trip to administration offices and not having to wait in line…”

• A boost for the province’s economy and a leading position from a technological point of view for local businesses.

“Citizens will be able to save a considerable amount of time each year because they won’t need to go to the town hall as often as they did before.”Ibon Oñate Zamalloa, general Manager of the BiscayTIK Foundation.


Microsoft CSP (Citizen Service Platform) is a comprehensive solution designed to help local governments worldwide to serve citizens and businesses.

Leveraging the Microsoft product stack and template applications, Microsoft CSP delivers a wide range of business capabilities. Around the world, local governments are today using the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform to meet their needs for:

• Communication applications: Applications to enable an agency’s employees to receive and send e-mail, to manage calendars, to communicate in real-time, and more.

• Search: Functionality for desktops and Internet content search.

• Public Server Portal. Customized intranet with all available services and featuring a leading-edge document management system. Workflow and file follow-up facility.

• Interactive forms. A range of interactive forms that citizens can fill in and submit online. Based on XML standards.

• Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Tools that store mapping data, mapping/spatial enquiries, enable users to view maps. All integrated directly through Microsoft Visual Earth.

• Web space. Customized web pages in which citizens can create and post their own personal content and create their own personal e-mail addresses. Gov 2.0 tools.

• Citizens’ Advice Centre. CRM (Citizen Relationship Management): the ability to offer citizens multichannel access (phone, web, e-mail and instant messaging –Microsoft Messenger–) to the information and services of a public organization, integrated with file management facilities.

• File Management. Allows civil servants to respond to internal and external requests and enquiries, generate workflows for creating schedules; manage, follow-up and assess the results of citizen services. End-to-end management of a file’s complete life-cycle. Programming and configuration of files.

• Document and Register Management. Apps that enable documents and other elements to be grouped in collections, giving them a format or converting them, organizing and maintaining the information they contain, and managing access, privacy and use of rights. Electronic signature.

• And a lot more possibilities thanks to our specialist developers, such as: managing accounts and financial, HR management, CRM for store staff, Messenger robot for use as a 24-hour public server, unified management from cell phone terminals, tourist information portals, paper-free meetings management, multimedia management as local TV –and all unified on the client’s own premises, or via hosting for serving multiple organizations from a single common location, and integrated with existing systems and applications (servers, switchboards, etc).

Relevant Microsoft Technologies



• Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server

• Microsoft Windows Server System

• Microsoft Exchange Server

• Microsoft BizTalk Server

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM

• Microsoft Dynamics AX

• Microsoft Hosted Exchange Services

A solution for local and regional administrations.

This document is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.

© 2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, the Microsoft logo <INSERT PRODUCT NAMES REFERENCED IN TEXT> are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

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