INFLUENCES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ON THE QUALITY OF PUBLIC SERVICES

(NISPAcee Annual Conference, 10. -12.5.2001, Jurmala, Latvia) 

Mateja Kunstelj, Anamarija Leben, Mirko Vintar
University of Ljubljana, School of Public Administration, Gosarjeva 5, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
mateja.kunstelj@vus.uni-lj.si, anamarija.leben@vus.uni-lj.si, mirko.vintar@vus.uni-lj.si

CONTENTS:

1	INTRODUCTION	2
2	QUALITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR	2
2.1	Common Assessment Framework	3
3	INFLUENCES OF IT ON QUALITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR	4
3.1	Enabling technologies	5
3.2	Interactions with customers	6
3.3	Operation inside administrative body	8
3.4	Interactions between administrative bodies and institutions	12
3.5	Influences of information systems on main CAF criteria	12
4	SOME EXAMPLES OF INTRODUCTION OF IT IN SLOVENIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND ITS INFLUENCES ON QUALITY	13
4.1	Central and local government bodies on the Internet	13
4.2	IT support to the legislative procedure	14
4.3	Health insurance card	15
5	CONCLUSIONS	17
REFERENCES	18

1	INTRODUCTION

Practically in all European countries projects aiming to develop and introduce electronic services into public sector i.e. electronic government (e-government) are in progress and Slovenia is of no exception. Main objectives of these projects are to improve efficiency, effectiveness and transparency of work in public sector and to increase quality of governmental services through introduction of information technology (IT). With realization of these objectives, focus of governmental activities is moving from execution of control and regulation to provision of services. Furthermore, quality of services is becoming one of the most important indicators of ‘successful government’.

We are only at the beginning of introduction of e-government concepts in Slovenia. Slovenian state has already developed the basic information infrastructure for electronic government introduction. The suitable legal framework was established by passing Law on Electronic Commerce and Electronic Signature. Unfortunately, concrete projects on operational level are making slower progress. Therefore it is much more important to present opportunities of modern information technology for introduction of e-government services and influences of information technology on service quality.

It is generally perceived that information technology is along with organisational changes one of the key enablers for quality improvement. Introduction of electronic government concept should contribute to better informing of citizens and organisations, accessibility and availability of electronic government services, better communication possibilities, better responsiveness, shorter time of administrative case solving, etc.

However, there was very little thorough empirical research done about influences of information technology on the issue of ‘quality’ in public sector. All that we found was based more or less on the serious reflections and practical experiences. Hence, findings in our paper are results of deliberations and experiences from some local and international projects and comparisons of available literature. More thorough empirical research is indispensable in the future.

The main objectives of this paper are:
•	To define influences of IT on quality in public sector considering criteria defined in the Common Assessment Framework (CAF);
•	To present some examples of introduction of IT in Slovenian public administration and review its influences on quality;
•	To formulate policy recommendations.

2	QUALITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR

Survey of the literature in the field of quality in the public sector (see for example Löffler, 1996; Lewis, 1998; Pollitt et al., 1995) clearly shows that there is no common definition of quality. Quality is a dynamic conception, which understanding is changing over time, but it differs also with regard to particular countries, organisations or even persons. How particular subject understand quality depends on his consciousness, expectations and needs in particular time and environment.

However, three levels of quality can be distinguished (Löffler, 1996):
•	quality in the sense of respect of norms and procedures;
•	quality in the sense of effectiveness;
•	quality in the sense of customer satisfaction (or customer expectations, as TQM defines).

Those phases show also stages of quality development through time. Primary, all efforts were focused on observing the rules and procedures irrespective of wishes, expectations and needs of customers. Later the centre of attention moved to effectiveness and efficiency of work with regard to the purpose of final product or service. In the early eighties, with the emergence of total quality management (TQM) concept, customer satisfaction came to the front. By this, customer orientation does not refer only to external customers (citizens and businesses), but also on internal customers (employees). Accordingly, the overall work process in the organisation can be treated as relationships between customers. But, the right proportion between these two sides should be found with a view to quality assurance.

Different views on quality are probably sources for numerous different concepts and systems of quality assurance, assessment and measurement, which appeared lately (for example TQM, ISO 9000, BEM, EQA, British Charter Mark Award, Speyer Quality Award). Taking into account the fact that those systems define only guiding principles of quality management, users have considerably many difficulties with their concretisation and transfer to their environment. Besides, those systems are also incompatible what causes additional difficulties.

In attempt to solve these problems, The Directors General of the Public Administration of the European Union established a Steering Group under which the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) was developed (Lisbon Commitment, 2001). The CAF is offered as an aid to public administrations in the EU to understand and use quality management techniques in public administration (CAF, 2000b). The main purpose of CAF is to provide a simple, easy-to-use framework, which is suitable for a self-assessment of public sector organisations across Europe. It acts as a "bridge" across the various models and methodologies in use of quality management in public administration in the various EU countries. Therefore, it enables introduction of benchmarking studies between public sector organisations.

2.1	Common Assessment Framework

The CAF is focused on nine main aspects of an organisation (Figure 1), which require consideration in any organisational analysis. For each of these aspects the list of criteria is provided.

Figure 1: Common Assessments Framework - main criteria

Definitions of criteria are as follows (CAF, 2000a):
1.	Leadership: How leaders and managers develop and facilitate the achievement of the mission and vision of a public sector organisation, develop values required for long-term success and implement these via appropriate actions and behaviours, and are personally involved in ensuring that the organisation’s management system is developed and implemented.
2.	Policy and Strategy: How the organisation implements its mission and vision via a clear stakeholder-focused strategy, supported by relevant policies, plans, objectives, targets and processes.
3.	Human Resource Management: How the organisation manages, develops and releases the knowledge and full potential of its people at an individual, team-based and organisation-wide level, and plans these activities in order to support its policy and strategy and the effective operation of its people.
4.	External Partnerships and Resources: How the organisation plans and manages its external partnerships and internal resources in order to support its policy and strategy and the effective operation of its processes
5.	Process and Change Management: How the organisation designs, manages and improves its processes in order to support its policy and strategy and fully satisfy, and generate increasing value for, its customers and other stakeholders.
6.	Customer/Citizen-oriented Results: What results the organisation is achieving in relation to the satisfaction of its external customers.
7.	People (Employees) Results: These are results, which the organisation is achieving in relation to the satisfaction of its people.
8.	Impact on society: What the organisation is achieving in satisfying the needs and the expectations of the local, national and international community at large (as appropriate). This includes the perception of the organisation's approach to quality of life, the environment and the preservation of global resources, and the organisation's own internal measures of effectiveness. It will include its relations with authorities and bodies, which affect and regulate its business.
9.	Key performance results: What the organisation is achieving in relation to its mandate and specified objectives and in satisfying the needs and expectations of everyone with a financial interest or other stake in the organisation.

The first five criteria are enablers - the features of an organisation, which determine how it performs - the last four are results or outputs, which the organisation achieves.

3	INFLUENCES OF IT ON QUALITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR

Information technology offers a wide variety of possibilities for quality improvements in all fields of public sector operation form routine individual office work processes to organisation-wide strategic planning. By these quality refers not only to the quality of services, which are offered to external and internal users by public sector organisations, but also to the quality of operation it selves. In the next paragraphs, we represent how IT can contribute to the quality within particular fields of government’s operation (Figure 1) with regard to key elements of integrated e-government system. These elements are further described in this chapter and are linked to the nine criteria of the CAF.

Figure 2: Key Elements of Integrated System for e-Government

3.1	Enabling technologies

Enabling technologies are infrastructure technologies that enable operation and integration of different information systems and applications within integrated system of electronic government. Since they are enablers, they certainly contribute to all nine CAF criteria in a certain degree. Here we want to expose three types of technologies which are leading to improvements in the field of better communication, information sharing and management the most clearly:
•	Communication technologies help people work together by improved communication and exchange of information in many different forms. They are changing the way organisations operate by making it possible to do many things at a distance that previously required being present in a specific location. At the same time arrangements of time are also much more efficient. Examples of communication technologies are Internet, intranet, teleconferencing systems, e-mail, voice-mail (Alter, 1999), and wireless application protocol (WAP). They represent also different access media to electronic government services, which are end-points or user-interfaces to information systems we describe later. It is also important to indicate, how information systems that are based on communication technologies can improve communication (Alter, 2001):
o	enable paperless operation;
o	communicate more information to more people;
o	make sure different people receive the same communication;
o	achieve more communication with less effort;
o	eliminate undesirable delays in communication;
o	permit communication in many different forms;
o	make sure communications go only to the intended recipients;
o	eliminate unnecessary person-to-person communication (substituting online data access).
•	Databases together with database management systems, which are used to define databases, perform transactions that update databases, retrieve data from databases, and establish database efficiency (Alter, 1999). They care for data accessibility (by providing effective ways to organise data), accuracy (by checking for identifiable errors during data collection and by discouraging data redundancy) and security (by helping control access and change of data and by supporting recovery procedures when problems arise). Furthermore, they enable data access to many people simultaneously. Since documents represent in contrast to databases nothing but another way of structuring data, also documents in union with document management systems fall in this category (see DLM-Forum, 1997; CITU, 2000).
•	Meta-register links together several different databases. It enables easier on-line transfer between databases when such combined data is needed in different administrative procedures. Through linking together databases of different government departments and organisations, efficiency goals can be achieved by users in terms of broad access to information at one single point of location, prevention of duplication in data, and reduction of costs in the collection and creation of data (Lips, 1998). Users in this case might be citizens, business organisations or non-profit organisations on one hand, and civil servants on the other.

3.2	Interactions with customers

Many government organisations are making use of IT to improve the access and availability of government information to customers (citizens, business companies and different non-profit institutions). Especially the Internet, but also telephone call centres and information kiosks, are employed to bring together information streams of different government departments at one virtual service counter (Lips, 1998). In the last few years, employment of IT goes even further towards electronic transactions between government and customers. At the moment, these transactions mainly consists of sending and receiving electronic forms, which could also have been done on paper, but many effort have already been put in different countries (Britain, Austria, Australia, Germany) to develop such electronic transactions, that cover one process as a whole: from its triggering, tracking and closing. However, simply using electronic forms leads to reducing error rates and can lead to processes been carried out more quickly and efficiently.

In the field of public service delivery three different levels can be distinguished (Lips, 1998):
•	A macro level: the relationships between the administrative organisations and houses of representatives (parliament, regional and local councils).
•	A meso level: the relationships between the administrative organisations and organised groups of the general public (political parties, interest groups, business).
•	A micro level: the relationships between the administrative organisation and the citizen(s).

IT applications in public service delivery could generally bring about increased effectiveness and efficiency, an improved customer-orientation, and a reduction of costs. Besides, IT could lead to an improved comprehensiveness of information in the process of public service delivery on a micro level (OECD, 1992). 

Davenport suggests some service performance criteria that customers care about and should be a key focus of service companies and companies that supply service along with products (Davenport, 1993). Since the organisations and institutions within public administration are primarily service-delivery organisations, they should be much aware of these criteria, which are as follows: 
•	tangibles (the appearance of personnel, facilities, and so forth),
•	reliability (performing the service in an dependable manner),
•	responsiveness (providing timely and helpful service),
•	competence (having the necessary skills and expertise), and
•	courtesy (the manner in which customers are treated)

The adequate use of IT can help to achieve the middle three criteria (reliability, responsiveness and competence) in a great manner, the other two are much harder to achieve since they mostly depend on people, who deliver the service.

So far, we mostly discussed interactions between customers and government from the service point of view. However, we must not forget the fundamental right and need to be informed. Publics want to know what their public officials are doing. What policies public offices are pursuing, what laws and regulations they are preparing, what programmes they are running, how they are raising and spending money and what international agreements they are negotiating. Such information helps to curtail arbitrary use of government power, increases accountability of public officials, assists the private sector in economic decision making, and aids citizens in formulating opinions on public policy issues (Édes, 2000).

Among different ways of offering information and electronic services to customer we expose following two:
•	Web pages and web sites
•	Administrative portals

Web pages and web sites are mostly design to provide information and electronic service of one administrative body. They may include paths to other web pages. These pages can help user to find information about organisational structure, employees, administrative procedures and belonging documents, etc. This information are generally related to this particular administrative body and are very important to the user, when he wants to communicate with the government or to start and complete required administrative procedure or task. This kind of information and service offering has a big deficient. Users usually do not know, which is required procedure and to which administrative body they must address (von Lucke, 2000).

Therefore, in the last two years a new way of public service delivery is emerging. These are so-called life-event administrative portals. Administrative portal in generally presents one-entry point on Internet to information and services of different administrative bodies and other public institutions. With the help of searching machines and indexes, user can find requested information or path to particular administrative body. However, much more important is the life-event dimension of such portal. It means, that the access to information and services of different organisations is based on life situations of the user, such as: “getting married”, “moving”, “building the house”, etc. Through active dialog with user, the system leads him to the appropriate information and procedure and so helps him solve his problem.

Expected benefits of using such life-event portals for citizens and organisations are:
•	Unified access to all public data and information, administrative procedures, tasks and related documents regardless to where these data and information are stored, where these procedures are carried out and who is responsible for them.
•	The non-stop access to public service – users can access such a portal 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
•	Time saving – users do not have to go to the public service office, since the transactions can be made by using the computer at home or at the office.
•	Life-event approach to users problems and friendly intelligence guidance through different procedures can lead to higher user friendliness, if they are carefully planed and implemented.

Both ways of public service delivery, contributes to those CAF criteria that are oriented to the customer, in a great deal to the criterion Customer/Citizen-Oriented Results and to Process and Change Management, (especially in the field of management of customer/citizen orientation and involvement - sub criterion 5c). They also can contribute to the first two criteria: Leadership, and Policy and Strategy in the manner of greater involvement of citizens and partners in activities in these areas, and to the criterion Impact on Society in that sub criteria, concerning the perception by society.

3.3	Operation inside administrative body

There are different types of information systems that support different process types within administrative bodies. In this chapter, each type of information systems is briefly described along with its influences on quality.

Systems, which are designed for summarising, aggregating and analysing data about the past and are able to predict what will happen in the future, play an essential role. Such systems, which are usually called management information systems, executive information systems and most times decision support systems, can significantly improve the quality of decisions so that they:
•	provide accurate, pithy, clear and appropriate data on time
•	summarize data from different part of organisation and also from outside
•	provide models and tools for analysing data and simulating different scenarios
•	enable detecting and evaluating problem areas.

On the other side, such system has influence also on the quality of decision-making process itself with enabling:
•	to make better decisions with less effort and therefore less time and costs
•	to make sure repetitive decisions are made in the same way
•	access to all relevant information to all authorised employees
•	to control decision-making process.

Decision support systems have to integrate the following components (Ajlec, 1999):
•	Capture, transformation and transfer of data from different information systems inside organisation (for example data about organisation performance or data about stakeholders’ opinions) and different external sources (for example data from other organisations to provide comparisons).
•	Summarizing, storing and managing of data in the central data warehouse separated from other systems.
•	Tools for data analysis (OLAP – On Line Analytical Processing) and Data Mining.

These types of systems greatly contribute to those CAF criteria that include decision-making process on a higher level. These are all enabling criteria (Leadership, Policy and Strategy, Human Resource Management, External Partnership and Resources, Process and Change Management).

In public administration, many work situations require a great deal of cooperation. There are two marginal cases of cooperative work: highly coordinated activities and highly formalised communication on one hand and on the other hand there is collaboration – cooperation among persons working together as a group, understanding the subtasks of other members and sharing documents and data. Workflow Management Systems support the first type of situations, and Groupware systems support the second one (Lenk, 1998).

Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) support electronic execution of business processes. They allocate work to participants, coordinate the tasks carried out by the participant, determine the next participant, supply necessary data and software and control the workflow. They are tracking systems, which make it possible for every participant to see status information about all activities and dependences of a business process. Basic issues for workflow management systems are the definition of activities and required resources, the capture of processing times and deadlines, the coordination of work results and the structure of organisation (Schmidt, 1996). They are directly involved in processes and as such they contribute to the CAF criterion Process and Change Management, by helping to process improvement and innovation. They also contribute to the criterion People (Employees) Results in respect of people’s satisfaction with the organisation’s working conditions.

Workflow management systems can protocol direct measurable values, such as time information, quantities, resource utilisation, or data use. All other indirect measurable values, i.e. derived values such as cost information, must be calculated from the gathered data. All these data present adequate values for performance measurement systems (Krallman and Derszteller, 1996). In this way, they greatly contribute to Key Performance Results by gathering different performance measurements and by supporting to achieve better results.

Groupware systems start with messaging but go further by facilitating access to documents and controlling team-related workflow (Alter, 1999). Groupware systems support a variety of activities intended to facilitate group work, including (Davenport, 1993):
•	group brainstorming, decision-making, and structured discussion (group decision support system);
•	group communication via teleconferencing, electronic mail and electronic bulletin boards;
•	group preparation of documents;
•	group scheduling of meetings and facilities;
•	retrieving data from shared databases.

These types of groupware functions have many potential benefits, including reducing meeting time and face-to-face meeting frequency, curtailing missed communications, reducing project delays and enabling increased flow of information and faster decision making. In this way, they contribute to those CAF criteria, where communicating and decision making are crucial, especially Leadership, Policy and Strategy, Process and Change Management, and People (Employees) Results in relation to active involvement in the organisation. 

The term performance measurement covers the systematic monitoring of performance over time using both quantitative and qualitative data (Boyle, 2000).  However, a distinction should be made between performance measures, which are precise quantitative data, and performance indicators, which act as signals to alert managers to issues which may need to be examined further. Given the nature of public service work, performance indicators tend to be much more common than performance measures. What managers increasingly need is a performance measurement capability that supports a long term, forward-thinking strategic view across the entire organisation. They need a performance measurement framework that provides a view across a range of measures that encompass all of the key issues for continued financial success. Such framework should not focuse only on financial indicators but should ensure that different perspectives on performance - service user, employee, process and financial - are assessed, and that performance is measured at appropriate levels: strategic, programme and team/individual. Combining all these perspectives may lead to better understanding of the many inter-relationships. This understanding can help to overcome traditional functional barriers and ultimately lead to improved quality of decision making and problem solving.

Performance measurement system, which supports such a framework, should incorporate the folowing features (INPHASE Software, 2001):
•	At-a-glance exception alerting 
•	Rapid access to summarised data 
•	Drill down to successive levels of detail 
•	Easy to follow dependency paths to identify the causes of performance other than drill-down 
•	Reporting of initiative, objective and process information including responsible owner, team members, and definitions as well as current status 
•	Reporting of impacts of underlying objectives upon scorecard measures 
•	Reporting of the impacts of objectives upon each other 
•	Graphical creation and modification of objectives, measures and relationships 
•	Support for dynamic re-planning for change 
•	Integration with office tools 
•	Inclusion of rich text information 
•	Graphical trending and tabular representation of data 
•	End user configuration and analysis options 
•	Integration with existing corporate data sources - with support for additional direct entry of values and annotations

Such system covers all aspects of effective performance management system and thereby contributes to all CAF criteria to certain degree, especialy to those reffering as results, and to Process and Change Management. 

For public administration, knowledge management is a basic requirement in order to maintain the quality of services at a high level with the same or less means, or even to extend it, and to do away with the deficits in carrying out complex tasks (Hill, 1998). It is important to make existing knowledge transparent and to get an overview of how and where new knowledge can be procured and set up. Distributing this knowledge within the organization, guaranteeing its use, storing past knowledge, recycling former ideas and also updating, i.e., deprogramming outdated knowledge, are further steps toward an effective knowledge management.

One shorthand way of summarising the knowledge movement is to say that it is to get the right knowledge at the right place, at the right time. If this is done expeditiously, customer service can be improved through solving problems better, new products brought to market quicker, business processes continually improved, and innovative new ideas brought to commercialisation. The flow of knowledge is what is important. This is where networked computer and communications technology plays an important role (Skyrme, 1997).

One of the most widespread ways in that technology supports knowledge processes, is not through simple point solutions, such as expert systems or group decision support systems, but through enterprise wide information and knowledge sharing infrastructures.

Knowledge management systems thereby facilitate sharing of knowledge rather than just information (Alter, 1999). Functions supported by these systems include codifying knowledge (such as best practices), organising it in repositories for later access, finding knowledge (using search engines and other schemes) and providing organised ways to find people who have needed knowledge. Nevertheless, the human element is paramount in knowledge management.

Expert systems support the intellectual work of professionals engaged in design, diagnosis, or evaluation of complex situations requiring expert knowledge in a well-defined area (Alter, 1999). They are used to support problem-solving processes, which can also have repetitive elements, but many situations have unique characteristics that must be considered based on expert knowledge. They capture some of the special knowledge of the experts and make it available to others who have less knowledge or experience. Therefore, the main benefits of these systems are:
•	to preserve an expert’s knowledge,
•	to improve the performance of less experienced people doing similar tasks,
•	to enforce some consistency in the way people do particular types of work.

Knowledge management systems and expert systems both contribute to those CAF criteria that are oriented to the people (both customers and employees), mainly to Human Resource Management and People (Employees) Results, but also to Policy and Strategy (in that sub criteria, where the flow of knowledge is important), Process and Change Management (in the sense of process improvement and innovation).

Transaction processing systems (TPS) collect and store information about transactions and sometimes control decisions made as part of a transaction (A transaction is a business event that generates or modifies data stored in an information system). They are designed based on detailed specification for how the transaction should be performed and how to control the collection of specific data in specific data formats and in accordance with rules, policies, and goals of the organisation (Alter, 1999). They create databases that can be accessed directly, thereby making some person-to-person communication unnecessary. They give immediate feedback on decisions while processing transactions and provide information for planning and management decisions. Almost all previous-mentioned types of information systems use data, collected with transaction processing systems. Thereby they directly or indirectly contribute to most of CAF criteria.

3.4	Interactions between administrative bodies and institutions

Many of previous-described information systems can be used also in interactions between administrative bodies and institutions. Besides them, there are to types of IT applications, which are particularly important for this field.

Electronic data interchange (EDI) involves the computer-to-computer exchange of standardised information items and of transactions. In many respects, it can be seen as a mere extension of workflow systems to span organisations boundaries (Lenk, 1998). So far, it is not very wide used, but in the future electronic cooperation and exchange between administrative agencies and with private sector will become the rule with interorganisational linkage becoming a dominant concern of information management. EDI is expected to reduce error rates and the duplication of data entering and thereby the reduction of costs and time. In this way, it can contribute to the criterion Key Performance Results, and by its nature, it also contributes to External Partnerships and Resources criterion.

Special applications for authorised access to databases, which are managed by another administrative body or institution, are specially designed to allow a public servant to access those data, which he needs to carry out particular administrative procedure. These applications can have the same benefits as EDI. Beside that, they can lead to a better service delivery, since the customer do not have to go to different administrative bodies to get different papers, required for one administrative procedure. In this way, they can greatly contribute to two more CAF criteria: Process and Change Management and Customer/Citizen-Oriented Results.

3.5	Influences of information systems on main CAF criteria

Table 1 summarises our findings that are described in previous chapters in more detail. Almost all information systems can contribute to all CAF criteria in a certain degree. In this table, we present only those contributions, for which we believe that are the most important. It is very difficult to quantify influences to those criteria, which have mostly “soft” elements (Human Resource Management, Impact on Society). However, in general we can conclude that IT has an essential role in quality management as a whole. It is both an enabler and an implementer of quality management. 

	Leader-ship	Policy and Strategy	Human Resource Manage-ment	External Partnership 
and 
Resources	Process and Change Manage-ment	Customer/ 
Citizen- 
Oriented Results	People  (Employee) Results	Impact on Society	Key Perfor-mance Results	
Web-pages	X	X			X	X		X	X	
Portal	X	X			X	X		X	X	
Workflow management system					X		X		X	
Groupware systems	X	X			X		X			
Decision support systems	X	X	X	X	X					
Management information systems	X	X	X	X	X					
Expert systems		X	X		X		X			
Document management systems					X					
Knowledge management systems		X	X		X		X			
Performance measurement systems				X	X	X	X		X	
Transaction processing systems					X	X	X		X	
Electronic data interchange				X					X	
Applications for authorized access to databases				X	X	X			X	
Table 1: Contribution of information system types to CAF criteria

4	SOME EXAMPLES OF INTRODUCTION OF IT IN SLOVENIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND ITS INFLUENCES ON QUALITY 

4.1	Central and local government bodies on the Internet

Over the last few years, the Internet has become one of the most important means of communication in all social areas and the public sector is no exception. Internet offer citizens:
•	a new way of accessing information, 
•	new possibilities of communication with central and local government and 
•	new forms of participation in their strategy and policy formation.

We can say that central and local government bodies in Slovenia already became aware of importance of their presence on the Internet and their awareness is still growing. This trend is proved by our two researches, which we performed last two years (for details see Vintar et al., 2000; Vintar et al., 1999). In Slovenia, more than half of central and local government bodies have their own web pages. They mainly publish basic information like addresses, phone numbers and official hours; present the leading staff, organisational structure and descriptions of tasks and competences. But local government bodies publish also a lot of information about tourism and information about municipal council’s work, from different calls, materials and minutes of its meetings, results of municipal elections, municipal regulations, official notices, information for craftsmen and businessmen, municipal gazettes and so on. Many pages include also different statistical data in the shape of graphs and tables.

Some organisations offer information about administrative procedures and public competitions. Information include guidelines for filling in and sending applications, lists of all necessary additions to applications, legal groundings for procedure execution and forms for applications, which are mainly prepared for downloading or printing and later sending via regular post. 

Majority of government bodies also publish e-mail addresses. In this way, citizens can forward their questions, remarks or claims to the leading staff or other employees, but some of them have a central e-mail address. A few pages offer interactive forums and discussion groups where citizens can participate in discussions about different topics or send their comments and suggestions about activities, policies and strategies, bills, public tenders or other matters. The advantage of this is that all messages from citizens as well as answers are published and thus contribute not only to forming public opinion but also to actively participate in government’s activities.

But citizens have considerable difficulties with searching of appropriate service over all these web pages. Causes are in non-standardized and non-linked services, which are dispersed over different government bodies’ web pages. That is why so-called administrative portals are emerging recently. They not only join all these services but also integrate them into one single window or entry point to the government (see chapter 3.2). In Slovenia first version of such a portal have been introduced recently (http://e-gov.gov.si/e-uprava/index.html).

However it is true that all these things are still at the early stage of development. What is available today, are different information and basic communication services, which enable, with exception of e-mail and small first of other services, mainly one-way communication. At the moment transaction services are very rare. But in the future they will enable on-line transactions like ticket reservation, electronic submissions of administrative cases, forms and other documents, tracking of administrative procedures, receiving documents, on-line access to different databases, electronic payments of administrative fees or taxes, electronic voting and so on. Only then, citizens will be able to do all their business with government from anywhere and at anytime.

Although we do not have many studies of citizens’ opinions about quality improvements, which are consequences of Internet usage, we can conclude that use of Internet contribute to better-informed citizens and therefore there are less problems in interactions with government. However, in the future, with development of transaction services, Internet will overcome many barriers of time and space that are usual in paper-based operation.

4.2	IT support to the legislative procedure

Legislative procedure is one of the most important procedures of decision-making in modern society, considering participation of a number of actors and importance of decisions taken for the well being of the citizens (Jermol, 1999). IT support has been introduced gradually, however with great success. At first, IT enabled involvement of relevant government bodies to take part in the procedure (ministries, government cabinet and the National assembly), later electronic interchange of documents among all parties involved was introduced.

Information systems have completely abolished slow and rigid paper operation of the parliament, enabled to enter each data only once and at the same time made it accessible to all who need it, i.e. member of national assembly, assembly working bodies, governmental bodies and the citizens. For example, one can follow what is happening with a particular bill throughout the various procedures and phases, find out positions of different parties and all other documents that are attached to the proposal and are hierarchically organised and gathered in a data folder. 

Introduction of the system brought more clear and transparent legislative procedure, better and more efficient cooperation between government bodies and more efficient documents interchange.

Besides, access to some databases is possible also for the general public through the National assembly’s web pages (www.dz-rs.si). Citizens can:
•	follow the phases and changes of each bill through proceedings in the National Assembly as well as all passed laws from the constitution of Slovenia in 1991;
•	follow sessions of the National assembly and working bodies from calls and minutes of the sessions to word-to-word reports. Following the session live on Internet is also possible.

But regrettably, citizens can only access data from the National assembly information system. Therefore, Internet access to drafts that are in procedure of forming and reconciliation within ministries is not possible yet. Publication of each draft depends on decisions of some individuals within particular ministries. Thus, we found only two drafts on the ministries web pages. Access to other normative acts passed by Slovenian government is also problematic, as they are accessible only through commercial provider of legal information (IUS-Info).

In this place, it is also worth to mention the problem of public access to regulations passed by local authorities. In this respect municipalities are left to their own interests and resources, as procedure of forming and passing these regulations is not included in information system mentioned above. We can say that only some municipalities, whose web pages contain also regulations in full text, are aware of the importance of this problem. However, we hope that these weaknesses will be abolished soon, as projects for its solution are also in the full progress.

4.3	Health insurance card

The health insurance card is a modern electronic document based on smart card technology, offers both to insured persons and to health professionals, employers and health insurance providers, a range of benefits (Health insurance card, 2001). In September 1995, the Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia, in line with European and global development trends, as well as with its own business goals, devised a plan of substitution of the current health care booklet for a health insurance card in execution of all kind of health services.

Goals of introduction of health insurance card as an electronic tool designed for the communications between the insured person, the physician, the health centre, the hospital, the health insurance provider, the pharmacy and other stakeholders in the system are the following:
•	to rationalize of operation in the field of health care and health insurance; 
•	to promote transparency of financial liabilities between subjects in health care and health insurance systems;
•	to cut down the number of various (unnecessary) procedures now required during the insured persons' implementation of their rights;
•	to simplify and improve communication between the Institute, the physicians and the health care organisations;
•	to reduce the extent of administrative and paper-based tasks and thereby achieve a higher efficiency of operation at the Institute and within the health care service;
•	and therefore to improve the quality of services and handling of insured persons both at the Institute and at other health care service providers;

Following a successful implementation in a pilot region, from October 1999 to July 2000, the national scale introduction has been carried out of the new document for the purposes of health care and health insurance. The cards have been issued to all with a valid compulsory health insurance in Slovenia. In the first phase, a card with administrative functions has been introduced, serving in the implementation of rights deriving from compulsory and voluntary health insurance and providing the support to the procedures of the selection of personal physicians. Since October 1, 2000, the Health Insurance Card is the only valid document for proving the validity of health insurance rights

The card holds essential and stable data involved in the implementation of health care rights deriving from health insurance. The access to data stored in the card chip is possible only by means of a card reader, in the presence of a health professional card issued to physicians, medical nurses, administrative staff at the reception desks, pharmacists, physiotherapists and other health professionals, as well as to authorised officers of the health insurance companies. With this the security of personal data within information processing systems was essentially improved.

With the introduction of the card system, the work of the health professional cardholders is simplified and expedited. They no longer have to manually enter the insured person's data for the purposes of invoicing their services to health insurance providers. Applying the health insurance card as the medium, the data from the Institute's central database to the local service provider's database are transferred. The health professional is to insert his health professional card into a special device - card reader, and log in with his personal password. When receiving a patient, the health professional inserts the health insurance card into the second slot of the same card reader. The card reader serves to the health professional cardholder to read and modify data according to this access rights. The data are displayed on the screen and, as necessary, uploaded to the local databases.

Furthermore, updating of the validity of the health insurance once a month by employers is not required any more. Instead, the insured persons themselves are responsible for the updating of validity of their card data by means of self-service terminals, which are located in health centres, hospitals, Institute regional unit headquarters and branch offices. The card can be updated immediately before visiting a doctor or every three months. The procedure is simple. One should just insert the card into the terminal slot, wait for the message on the screen and withdraw the card. The spoken explanation of the procedure is also possible.

In the future, the Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia plans further developments. Already this year an extensive campaign is planned to be launched, to inform the Slovene public on the gathering of voluntary declarations of commitment to donor organs and tissues for transplants after death. The corresponding data item will be recorded in the health insurance card chip, where the data section is already provided.

According to plans, the introduction of electronic prescription and electronic medical technical aid order form is to represent the next step in the implementation of the chip card technology in the health care sector in Slovenia. In future, the electronic prescription is envisaged to bring a range of benefits to physicians, pharmacists and insured persons, to advance the transparency of the prescribing and consumption of drugs, to reduce the administrative chores and to reduce the errors, to advance the quality of drug prescription and issuing, and to advance the level of service quality in general.

It is also important to note that, at the conference Cartes 2000 in Paris at the end of October 2000, a prestigious international award for the health care sector has been given to the Slovene national Health Insurance Card System, as the most comprehensive existing smart healthcare solution today.

5	CONCLUSIONS

Discussion about influence of IT on quality of governance and in particular quality of public services is somewhat improvised. All governments in the world are implementing IT based services as rapidly as possible expecting improved performance, efficiency, increased quality etc. It is being generally acknowledged that introduction of IT is always positive approach to improve performance of an organisation, although investment costs into new technologies are rocketing into the sky. It is obvious that managers are making decisions in this filed more on intuitive basis than on the ground of some formal criteria. We are still lacking thorough studies, which would enable us to develop more deterministic quantitative price/performance models referring to implementation and use of new technologies. 

And it is the same when we come to the issue of ‘quality’ in relation to IT. We were trying to make an overview and selection of available technologies and solutions which are used in different working fields and areas of public bodies and which, according to our firm believe, can contribute to better quality of an administration. Furthermore we were also trying to put these technologies and solutions in line with CAF scheme. In the end we underpinned our observations with some examples from Slovenian public sector. However we should admit that our observations and conclusions were significantly based on intuition and deduction from our own experiences rather than quality focused empirical research. This still remains to be done in the future.

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