UNIVERSITY OF CAMERINO

SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMPUTER SCIENCE DIVISION

QUALITY OF (DIGITAL) SERVICES IN E-GOVERNMENT

Barbara Re (Phd) barbara.re@unicam.it Final Conference

OUTLINE OF THE TALK

Introduction and Motivation Quality in e-Government Formal Methods for Quality Assessment in e-Government Quality Aggregation Conclusions and Future Work

INTRODUCTION
e-Government is the use of information and communication technologies in Public Administrations combined with organizational change and new skills in order to improve public services and democratic processes and strengthen support to public policies Commission of the European Communities (2003) e-Government contributes to the public service delivery where a collection of business activities and informative resources become available through the usage of ICT Public Administrations deliver many electronic services that are seldom used

SOME REFERENCES
e-Government Benchmarking Report published in November 2009 shows that 83% of basic services are available on-line [*] and the number of services drastically increased with respect to the results of a similar survey conducted in 2007 (76%) [**] and 2006 (60%) [***]
*. Colclough, G. & Tinholt, D. Smarter, faster, better e-Government - 8th Benchmarking Measurement Prepared by: Capgemini, RAND Europe, IDC, SOGETI and DTi. For: European Commission Directorate General for Information Society and Media, 2009 **. Colclough, G.: The user challenge benchmarking the supply of online public services - 7th measurement. Technical report, Prepared by: Capgemini For: European Commission Directorate General for Information Society and Media (2007) ***. Wauters, P., Colclough, G.: Online availability of public services: How is Europe progressing? web based survey on electronic public services report of the 6th measurement June 2006. Technical report, Prepared by: Capgemini For: European Commission Directorate General for Information Society and Media (2006)

Eurostat investigation shows that e-government usage by individuals percentage of individuals aged 16 to 74 using the Internet for interaction with public authorities - in EU members in 2008 is 32% and it is decreased with respect to the result of 2007

E-GOVERNMENT

E-GOVERNMENT

USAGE

ON-LINE AVAILABILITY
Percentage of online availability of 20 basic public services The indicator shows the percentage of the 20 basic services which are fully available online i.e. for which it is possible to carry out full electronic case handling

BY INDIVIDUALS
e-Government usage by individuals by gender Percentage of individuals aged 16 to 74 who have used the Internet, in the last 3 months, for interaction with public authorities

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/information_society/introduction

STARTING POINT
Practical experiences and researches confirm that users acceptance is not guaranteed per se. Public approval is quite often below what developers expected in other words citizens do not use e-government services just because they are available [*]
[*] Bavec, C.: On stimulus for citizens use of e-government services. In: International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology. (2008)

Many different reasons can contribute to the highlighted situation

The digital divide phenomenon has to be considered one of the possible causes [**]
[**] Pippa Norris. Digital Divide Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Most of the European Countries e-government projects are predominantly politically and not economically, socially or organizational driven [***]
[***] Kunstelj, M., Jukic, T., Vintar, M.: Analysing the demand side of e-government: What can we learn from slovenian users? In Wimmer, M., Scholl, H.J., Gronlund, A., eds.: EGOV. Volume 4656 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science., Springer (2007) 305317

Hence, quality of e-government digital services strongly affects real access to services by citizens

OUR QUALITY VIEW IN E-GOVERNMENT

All the features of digital services in Public Administrations that influence their capability to satisfy declared or implied citizens and firms needs

Substitutive Service Quality

Citizens Satisfaction Technology Infrastructure Quality

Service Quality
Organization Quality

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND CONTRIBUTION

What are the services related quality requirements, within the e-government domain, that impact on the use of services by citizens? Find out domain dependent characteristics that strongly impact on the quality and then on the use of e-government digital services by the citizens How to check quality requirements for e-government services? Provide suitable approaches to represent, assess and continuously improve the quality of services How to aggregate quality requirements? Provide an aggregation model enabling homogenization, interaction and grouping

A SYSTEMATIC VIEW ON QUALITY

Citizens Satisfaction
y

e-Government Subjective Parameters

Attractiveness, Trust, Usability,

Technology Infrastructure Quality

y y y

Technology Related Parameters

Front-end related parameters

Accessibility, Adaptability, Completeness, Interoperability, Integrity, Applicative Security, Availability, Performance, Time Data Processing,

Back-end related parameters

Infrastructure related parameters

Service Quality

Service Quality Parameters Organization Quality Parameters

Organization Quality
y

Learning and growth aspects, financial aspects,

A FOCUS ON SERVICE QUALITY

Coordination is a four level requirement concerning the capability of two or more Public Administrations to work together to accomplish common goals, through the delivery of a service to a citizen and using ICT technologies Control is a four level requirement concerning the activation policies suitable to drive the digital service delivery from its start to the final fulfillment Sharing is a two level requirement that refers to the way in which the PA handles and shares citizen data with other PAs in order to participate in the delivery of a specific e-government digital service Transparency is a three level requirement able to drive the administration to make citizens aware of the delivery process, improving citizen trust Inclusion is a three level requirement that considers the ability of the administration to provide service to the citizens considering the diversity

COORDINATION LEVELS
Lack of Coordination is the lowest possible level of coordination that is observable within a PA y Direct interactions between administrations are not precisely established and the citizen drives the process fiscally moving back and forth from one administration to the other y Interactions activities could results in blocking conditions Communication is the case in which the organization has introduced ICT technologies but has not fully integrated its electronic systems y It is implemented when an administrative process enters the participating PA through messages carried on through ICT technologies Collaboration enables PA participates to the service delivery with a fully automated process y In such case the request from other participating PAs enter the organization using ICT technologies and are handled in a completely automated manner without requiring the intervention of a civil servant Semantic Integration implements the highest capability of coordination implementing collaboration mechanisms enriched with semantic support y Explicit formal specification of the reality related to the delivery process is shared among the participants to guarantee the understandability of the communications

CONTROL LEVELS
Reactive control is implemented by PAs that wait for citizens requests before they start the service delivery y Citizens awareness on to do list (in line with law specification) is the only driver for the service activation and delivery Proactive control enables that in the provision of the service the administration may work as a proactive participant y In such case the service announces its availability through direct communications to interested citizens also providing precise references to the access point of the service itself y Certainly proactive control does not make sense for all different kinds of services Creative is the capability of a service with reference to activation policies y This characteristic refers to the presence of activities related to the promotion of related services y In such case the PA implements services that informs the citizens of all the other services in which he/she may be interested in

SHARING LEVELS
No Sharing is the lower level of the service sharing and it is observable when the administrations take trace of all citizen data and does not try to retrieve it from the right sources y Among the various issues that this way of organizing a service brings we should certainly mention data redundancy and possible misalignment among PA data storages

Data Sharing this level the business process applied by the PA to fulfil a request never includes requests for authorization to store data y Instead each citizen related data are retrieved interacting with the specific PA that is in charge of maintaining the needed information

TRANSPARENCY LEVELS
No Transparency is observable when the activities of a given service are not visible outside of the administration y Therefore a PA implementing this level of transparency makes the citizens completely unaware of the service execution Activity Aware is observed when the administration implements services tracking mechanisms y It is highly desirable to make the citizen aware of the activities that have been already carried on and of the activities that need to be completed y The granularity of visible activities can be variable and a right balance should be found in order to not submerge the citizen with not so relevant information Role Aware at this level activity aware transparency is implemented and enriched by the specification of an activity responsible y This is a civil servant that is in charge of monitoring and controlling the valid execution of the service

INCLUSION LEVELS
Channel Inclusion refers to different ways to access the service y Users may interact with service via many and heterogeneous devices, such as PC, wap phone, PDA, . . . y We points out service capabilities to support multiple service delivery channels within the delivery process (Web, mobile computing, ...) Profile Inclusion refers to the service capabilities to support citizens physical diversities y It is very relevant for disadvantaged people that are often excluded and marginalized by the introduction of Information Society Language Inclusion refers to the ability of the service to be used by people with different nationality and switch among languages during the service delivery y This is particularly interesting toward the trans-national service delivery and enabling a fruitful provision on the European e-government pan y This is a proof the interoperability issues has to considered at different level

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND CONTRIBUTION

What are the services related quality requirements, within the e-government domain, that impact on the use of services by citizens? Find out domain dependent characteristics that strongly impact on the quality and then on the use of e-government digital services by the citizens

How to check quality requirements for e-government services? Provide suitable approaches to represent, assess and continuously improve the quality of services

How to aggregate quality requirements? Provide an aggregation model enabling homogenization, interaction and grouping

FORMAL METHODS IN E-GOVERNMENT

We propose binding usable business environment and formal verification techniques

y

On one hand we provide to e-government business analysts, without so many competencies in the ICT areas, a well understandable environment On the other hand we systematically assess consistency between service and requested quality requirements using model checking techniques

We provide a suitable approach to represent, assess and continuously improve applied processes related e-government digital services, according to service quality requirements

PROPOSED APPROACH (I)

The approach relies on the following three main steps (i) Business Process specification related to service and quality requirements selection via a user-friendly notation (ii) Mapping of a process specification and of a set of quality requirements to CSP processes and to a set of goals, respectively (iii) Formal verification of defined processes with respect to specified set of requirements (goals)

We implement a user-friendly tool based on formal verification

PROPOSED APPROACH (II)

SPECIFICATION BPMN MODEL

BUSINESS PROCESS SPECIFICATION

e-Government digital services are specified using notation and tool based on business process concepts Business Process as a collection of related and structured activities undertaken by one or more organizations in order to pursue some particular goals
Ann Lindsay, Denise Downs, and Ken Lunn. Business processesattempts to find a definition. Information and Software Technology, 45(15):1015 1019, 2003. Special Issue on Modelling Organisational Processes.

Different classes of languages to express BPs have been investigated and defined some of them are general purpose and standardized languages
y y y

Business Process Modeling Notation Event-Driven Process Chain UML Activity Diagrams

SPECIFICATION CHECKLIST

CHECKLIST IMPLEMENTS SERVICE QUALITY

Coordination Transparency Inclusion

Control

Sharing

MAPPING

FROM USER FRIENDLY TO FORMAL APPROACH

Our approach requires the definition of a mapping from business abstraction to formal languages From BPMN to CSP Process Algebra From quality requirements to Goals The process related mapping supports a correct abstraction of the case taking in input a BPMN specification and returning the corresponding CSP model The quality requirements are formally specified using templates of properties

FROM BPMN TO CSP - OVERVIEW

Each BPMN graphical object included within a pool is formally represented by a CSP process or a parallel execution of generated CSP processes - we will name such process Element CSP Each pool is mapped to a parallel composition of Element CSP processes with barrier synchronization. In this case no message exchange will be observable - we will name such process Private CSP The whole process results from the parallel execution of the Private CSP processes including their interactions implemented via messages exchange - we will name such processes Abstract CSP

FROM BPMN TO CSP START EVENT

FROM BPMN TO CSP FLOW

FROM BPMN TO CSP - TASK

FROM QUALITY REQUIREMENTS TO GOALS

The derived checklist hides a set of assertions that can be assessed thanks to the addition of global variables within the mapping rules Each mapping rule influences the verification of a property redefining a global variable that is successively combined with other global variables to check the whole assertion

var collaboration = 0; #define goaliscommunication collaboration==1; #define goaliscollaboration ccollaboration==2; #define goalissemintegration collaboration==3; #assert moving_service() reaches goaliscommunication; #assert moving_service() reachesiscollaboration ; #assert moving_service() reaches goalissemintegration;

VERIFICATION

FORMAL VERIFICATION
Model checking consists in a systematic exhaustive exploration of an operational model representing the system to verify, to check if the given model satisfies a set of given properties
Clarke, E.M., Grumberg, O., Peled, D.A.: Model Checking. Hardcover (2000)

The verification phase is based on model checking techniques

Reachability analysis is applied in order to assert whether the goals that are generated from the properties specification are fulfilled or not The model checker applies a search algorithm to repeatedly explore unvisited states until a state at which the condition is true is found or all the states will have been visited For the BPs that can be typically found in the e-government domain the approach does not suffer from the state explosion phenomenon

Many tools have been proposed and developed: CWB-NC, FDR2, PAT,

PROTOTYPE (I)
The approach has been implemented as a plug-in of the Eclipse Framework This results in a fully integrated and user friendly environment that supports the analyst both on the specification and on the verification of a specified process Our plug-in is integrated with third party Eclipse extensions such as the BPMN editor and the PAT model checker

http://bp4pa.sourceforge.net/index.html

PROTOTYPE (II)
The user will specify the BP using the BPMN editor extension and will select the properties he/she desires to be checked using the BP4PA framework extension Then these specification will be translated via the mappings we have defined using the Eclipse Modelling Framework The resulting specifications will be provided to the PAT Model Checker that will return successfully, in case the property is not violated, or will return a counterexample showing an execution violating the quality level

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Experiments conducted using a desktop PC equipped with a Core 2 Duo 2,20GHz and 4GB RAM

Formal verification is mature enough to be introduced in applied field of study such as e-government

OBSERVED QUALITY LEVEL IN E-GOVERNMENT

The conducted analysis shows that the most of the service implement communication policies for what concern coordination requirement For what concern control reactive way of service invocation is the common practice use by the citizens to enable PA workload The Sharing level is supported in all the BP process thanks to the introduction of a national law that impose the use of the INA/SAIA infrastructure For what concern the transparency the overall verification shows the lack of administrative effort toward the introduction of a systematic approach for activity and role aware transparency The general lack of process specification hold lack of administrative effort toward the introduction of systematic approach to support profile, channel and language diversity

Delivery processes, defined for the services under study, reach low quality marks with respect to the defined framework

IMPROVING MOVING SERVICE (I)

IMPROVING MOVING SERVICE (II)

IMPROVING MOVING SERVICE (III)

IMPROVING MOVING SERVICE (IV)

The proposed approach can be a useful mean to improve the quality of BP related to service delivery

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND CONTRIBUTION

What are the services related quality requirements, within the e-government domain, that impact on the use of services by citizens? Find out domain dependent characteristics that strongly impact on the quality and then on the use of e-government digital services by the citizens

How to check quality requirements for e-government services? Provide suitable approaches to represent, assess and continuously improve the quality of services

How to aggregate quality requirements? Provide an aggregation model enabling homogenization, interaction and grouping

QUALITY AGGREGATION
It introduces a mathematical model to define a quality function and assess a quality value starting from the sets of parameters The model relies on parameters homogenization, interaction and grouping
y

Homogenization of the input is useful to reason over different metrics Interaction between different parameters is also considered by the mathematical model The proposed model groups parameters and manages them with different importance

CONCLUSION
We discuss the definition of a systematic view on quality in e-government services in order to improve their use We propose a user friendly approach and tool toward continuous business process improvement respecting to e-government quality requirements taking advantages of theoretical results established in the formal verification domain
Our work is in line with the recommendations discussed by Davies et al. [*] strongly supporting the application of formal methods to e-government scenarios
*. Davies, J., Janowski, T., Ojo, A.K., Shukla, A.: Technological foundations of electronic governance. In Janowski, T., Pardo, T.A., eds.: ICEGOV. Volume 232 of ACM International Conference Proceeding Series., ACM (2007) 511

We define an aggregation model suitable to have an unique view on quality

FUTURE WORK
According to domain dependent characteristics
y

We intend to introduce more quality parameters according to quantitative and qualitative evaluation of e-government domain

According to the measurement approaches

y

Given the organization and the resources availability in a specific public office other PA dimensions concerning process in place can be verified We will work to support the analysis of other PAs related processes We will consider the influences that in the next future will have the upcoming release of the BPMN 2.0 specification and we will certainly have to adapt our approach to that notation version

y y

FURTHER APPLICATIONS

In line with what is recommended in [*] our proposal can be a first tool for practical benchmarking of PA services delivery process facing some important issues still unexplored by the current benchmarking studies [**]
*. Salem, F.: Benchmarking the e-government bulldozer: beyond measuring the treadmarks. Measuring Business Excellence 11(4) (2007) 922 **. Berntzen, L., Olsen, M.G.: Benchmarking e-government - a comparative review of three international benchmarking studies. In: ICDS. (2009) 7782

Due to limited staff and budget project out-sourcing is often the adopted solution within Public Administrations; our approach represents a suitable way to enrich contracts with explicit, clear and strict specifications that have to be guaranteed by software producers

TH@NKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION!

Barbara Re
University of Camerino Computer Science Division barbara.re@unicam.it