E-Government Case Study

E-Government Case Study - http://www.brasovcity.ro/

Case Study Authors

Radu Paraschivescu, Radu PÐ"Ñ"tru, Irina DorobanÐ*Јu

Organization

The organization that implemented the e-government project is the Brasov City Hall. Specifically, the project was developed by the вЂ?IT Service’ (ro. “Serviciul Informatic”) within the City Hall, led by Mrs. Gabriela Vlad, while the aspects of aesthetic and interface design were handled by an outside firm called “Net Design Romania” (http://www.netdesign.ro). Information for the descriptions of each “direction” (directie) and service (serviciu) under the City Hall was provided by their respective heads-of-service.

Application description

The application is a simple website with a moderate amount of information useful to the citizens of Brasov. Most of the information is related to administrative matters that directly involve the offices within the City Hall. There is also some information about Brasov city as well, such as some statistical data, a brief history of the town and a guide to the means of public transportation. There are a very limited number of interactive elements, mostly contact forms.

Application purpose

The application was meant to serve as an informational resource, primarily for citizens of the city of Brasov, Romania. It was designed to provide them with information as to the structure and functionality of the individual offices within the City Hall, as well as their members and contact information. A side advantage of this was also to reduce the number of inquiries and misplaced phone calls received by the different offices in the City Hall. Since the application has only been implemented since the election of the new mayor, George Scripcaru, it might also have been thought to serve to increase his popularity due to this initiative (though it’s unlikely it was his).

Stakeholders

The stakeholders were the Brasov City Hall, including all of the offices within the City Hall which have provided information to appear on the website. The outside contractor, Net Design Romania, employed for the purpose of interface and aesthetic design, was a stakeholder in this project as well.

Costs and benefits

Though we have no precise information as to the costs of the project, we can estimate. We do know that the infrastructure was not part of the investment, since the website is hosted on a previously existing server within the City Hall. Access to the Internet of the server is provided at a small monthly charge by a local ISP. The website is updated and maintained by the Informatics Service of the City Hall. One person is sufficient for this task but this person is most likely employed full time since he or she also has other duties there (as the website itself specifies). The biggest costs were associated to paying the contractor Net Design Romania to provide the visual design elements and the interface/navigation. Therefore there were no great expenses with this project. The benefits were very limited as well; since the website has not (to our knowledge) been advertised at all, the number of visitors is small. Also, due to the difficulty of finding information on the website because of its faulty design, and knowing that the short attention span of the average Internet surfer is of less than about 8 seconds , few of those visitors are expected to find the information that they need when visiting.

Design-reality gap analysis

Information: In the design phase of the web page, it sought to offer relevant information on the City Hall of Brasov in order to cut down on the many misplaced phone calls that used up the city clerk’s time. The end result is a web page which is indeed fraught with information, but implemented deficiently regarding its accessibility. Since all of the information is useless if the application’s user (hereon simply called “the user”) can’t access it and/or can’t locate the specific pieces of information that he’s looking for at a particular time вЂ" which is what the basic purpose of the website was along the Information dimension вЂ" we can say that there is a large design/reality gap. Gap Score: 9

Technology: The application rests on a server within the City Hall that is linked to the Internet. Most likely the potential problems with this simple arrangement have not been foreseen by the developers, since the server has a poor uptime ratio вЂ" we have not been able to calculate it precisely, but very often it’s possible that the user may find the site doesn’t load and will have to wait for 10 to 30 minutes for it to go back online. So while, ideally, the site would have been online more than 99% of the time (which is the standard guarantee offered by most commercial web hosts), in reality this is not the case. However, when the server is online, the site loads fast enough in Romania, since the server that it’s hosted on is part of the RDS Network, which is spread all over the country and has peering with most other web hosts. The result is that the site loads fast for most users accessing it in Romania. Taking all these aspects into account, the design/reality gap in this case is medium in size. Gap Score: 5.

Processes: The only process to speak of is the PHP-powered back-end which the application administrator uses to update the website. While generally these applications are built with ease-of-use in mind, we have no information regarding the actual functionality of the back-end. Therefore we can’t assign a gap score in this case. Gap Score: N/A

Objectives and values: The objectives of the application were 1) to offer the citizens of Brasov information about the various offices in the City Hall, 2) to provide visitors with information about the city Brasov, 3) to make activities in the City Hall appear more transparent, 4) to decrease the workload of clerks within the City Hall by providing citizens with information that they would otherwise have to inquire about. Items 1) and 4) have barely been achieved at all, while items 2) and 3) were successful to a small degree. Therefore there is a medium-large design/reality gap in what regards the application’s objectives. Gap Score: