Introduction

Ladies & gentlemen, dear participants of the CLRAE and LOCREGIS seminar on local and regional Information Society. We are attending a seminar dealing with various aspects of Information and Communication Technology, which I henceforth will refer to as ICT, and its impact on the local and regional levels of government. You’ve heard about policies and strategies on different levels concerning ICT. Best-practice project presentations have told You - and will continue to tell You - about how to implement and succeed with Information Society projects. What I’m about to present to You is however not primarily an ICT-project. But it has it’s points, nevertheless.

I will tell You about the one-stop-shop in Arjeplog, but first, I’d like to thank the arrangers for the opportunity to come here and spread our experiences and, in some cases, my own belief when it comes to reforming public administration. In the Eurocratic language, I’ve learned it’s called dissemination to spread the word like this and as a manager of a project funded by the regional funds, I’m grateful of this opportunity to execute just that.

Tingsbacka, the name of our one-stop-shop, was opened in 1992 after nearly three years of preparations. During these preparations, a new office building was built, giving room for 100 new workplaces. In this house were all municipal and governmental authorities to be housed. I’d like to put the 100 workplaces into our context: In our Municipality are about 1600 job opportunities to be found, in total, and most of the jobs have traditionally been found in mining and forestry industries. An office building with 100 workplaces is, as You might imagine, a big thing where I live, in lots of aspects.

The one-stop-shop developing project, which I represent, have really changed the local structure and organisation of the public service. During the five years that has gone since the start, the project has gone through a number of phases. In the last couple of phases, CIT has become an important part of the developing process. But before I dive into my topic, please let me tell you something about where I come from and the basic philosophy of our project.
 

About Arjeplog and myself

Arjeplog is a large Municipality with few inhabitants, situated in the middle of Swedish Lapland on the arctic circle. In the west, we border to Norway, north of us lies the quite renown winter-fair town Jokkmokk and our eastern neighbour is the Municipality of Arvidsjaur, where our nearest airport is situated.

The Municipality is 13.000 sq. km in area - not counting some 2.000 sq. km of water - and we are about 3.500 inhabitants populating this area. This means that every one of us have about 3,5 sq. km each at our disposal. If this lovely town where we are right now, with about 500.000 inhabitants at present, would be as sparsely populated as Arjeplog, about 100 people would be living here. Or the other way around: If Arjeplog would be as crowded as Monaco, the most densely populated state in Europe, the whole population of the European Union would easily fit in within our borders!
 

 My name is Stephan Jansson and I’m with the Municipality of Arjeplog. My primary lines of business are project development, project management and issues related to the European Union, especially the Regional Funds. My appearance today here in Helsinki is a result of me being a former manager of the project I’m going to present now.
 

The Tingsbacka project: A Swedish best-practice model on one-stop-shops

The Tingsbacka project is a joint venture in local public sector: Governmental and municipal authorities co-operate in giving service to the public at a community counter. Furthermore, the project has also been a hub in the build-up of a local ICT structure. The building still most certainly is.

What is an one-stop-shop? The question is important, as it’s the foundation of our project. In one occurring Swedish concept, it means a service point, to which the citizens can turn when in need of contact with the public sector. Whether their issues concern governmental, regional or local matters shouldn’t be of importance. The consumer of public service shall not need to turn to more than one official at a time within a one-stop-shop and it shall not make any difference in what authority this official have his or her employment.

When setting up an one-stop-shop, all You really have to do is to arrange a front office or front desk where simple and frequent issues from a number of authorities will be handled. The staff shall consist of service-minded, well-informed and flexible individuals with general knowledge in several fields; so called generalists. This is however not as free of problems as it might seem, which I’ll explain a little bit more about in short time.

Let me first say that I think this is how to create or develop new public service in a way that people in common can understand. And when people understand the service, the chance that they use it is much higher, wouldn’t You agree? Trying to change the public service only by introducing new tools, such as ICT, is of little use, from my point of view. Of what interest is service that nobody or just a small minority understands and uses, or even have access to?

Our one-stop-shop was the first one in Sweden to involve several different authorities, such as the Municipality, the Social security agency, the Employment office, the Police, the County administration and so on. We figured, that in a small place like ours, what use would we have of an one-stop-shop limited to one or a few of these authorities? Our answer was: None!

The kind of one-stop-shop I’m talking about - and there are more than one kind - was originally developed in Denmark. The Danish municipalities were therefore ”first on the field” in this kind of development and much of the basic methods they’ve used are still valid. One such method is the Cruncher.

The purpose of the Cruncher is to determine which tasks are to be solved at the front office and which tasks are to be solved by the specialists in the back office. The idea is to break down all different tasks in the authorities in question originating from citizen enquiries into a number of logical functions. Thereafter will the tasks, or parts of them, be evaluated by complexity. Low complexity tasks, regardless of organisational origin, will be allocated to the front office and handled by the generalists while high complexity tasks will ”stay” in back office and thus be taken care of by the original officials in the different authorities.

The Cruncher is really an eight level scale. It is assumed that the higher level a certain task reaches in the administrative process before it’s finished, the more complex is the task and the longer time and more knowledge it demands to be finished. The model covers all public administrative service tasks, from the most simple information given to a citizen, to giving service to the political level in the local council and boards.

As I said earlier, this is my opinion of how public service is best renewed if it’s supposed to make any sense to the public. Even if the developing of ICT and the use of it grows rapidly, and even if the Information Society already has arrived according to many debaters, the personal encounter is still very important, and to reform public administration only by introducing new ICT applications is to make it easier only for an exclusive few but leaving the masses behind. Most of my friends have PC’s at home, and they are connected to Internet, at home or at work. I would guess that goes for You all as well. But how representative are our social circles? What about people to old to have grown up with a computer and in the wrong line of business? As a matter of fact, there still are a lot of occupations that don’t demand computer skills. Think about that.

Now, I’m not against technical development. On the contrary, I think its great fun! And, as I also said earlier, the one-stop-shop concept needs support of new ICT tools. These tools should primarily be designed to support the officials, but while at it, one might as well prepare them for public use. Regardless of who’s in front of the monitor trying to work the system, it has to be easy manoeuvred. We are however no software developers where I come from, so I think I’ll leave those issues.
 

Conclusions

I guess it’s easy to think, judging from what I’ve said so far, that we’ve come a long way in creating these new public services. In some ways, You could say that we have, in other ways I’d definitely say that we haven’t. I think I’ll concentrate on the former category for a while.

One example of a rather new way of conducting business, at least in Sweden, is what the governmental Social Security Agency and the municipal Social Welfare Bureau have done. They now work very close together, often joined by the Employment Office, to try to solve their mutual clients needs and problems. This wouldn’t even be heard of before this project was set off. There are more examples of the same kind. It’s much easier now to get hold of people within other authorities because we are in the same house, we drink our coffee in the same place and we know each other. Thanks to this, the time needed for handling different cases has rapidly decreased.

Our front office has however still some way to go before we meet up with the original plans and intentions. Still, e.g. the Police has been able to give much better service to the public, thanks to the co-operation with the Municipality and the others. The reason why the development of the work within the front office has developed slower than expected is not lack of - or presence of - ICT support. It’s hard to get a number of different authorities and agencies to work together in practice if ”head-quarters” in the Capital says no.

But that’s where You have to start, and that’s where our Municipality, who doesn’t have to ask Big Daddy above for permission, now has started. With the help of bit-by-bit changes of the organisation and with the help of standard software applications, something is now beginning to happen. Parts of departments are cut loose, put together and moved more closely to the front office organisation. Simple and frequent tasks are being transferred to the front office organisation with them and the rest of the organisation is under evaluation. A proposal for a new organisation is due later this year. We’ve yet only seen the beginning of all this, although we’ve been working on it for several years. Many effects can already be accounted for, but hopefully we’ll see even more of them as time goes by.

So, what can we learn from this? I think there are some things possible to point out:

The short cuts, which I think is one way to describe leaving it all up to the Information Society, are not necessary short cuts to broad introduction of new public services, even if e.g. an Internet-based service without any doubt can be a new channel to some citizens. I would be one for sure, but am I really ”the right kind of citizen”, if You see what I mean, to be the first to be interested, when it comes to new kinds of public service or a reformed public administration? I know enough to take care of my rights anyway!

If new public service shall be created, if public administration shall be reformed, and if it shall be done in a manner appreciated by the man in the street, it have to start in the organisation and among the officials. There’s no doubt about that! You might think I’m a reactionary, but think about what is likely to happen if a new technical device - let’s say a new ICT application - is introduced without the organisation being sure about why or what it’s good for. They won’t even use it themselves! And what happens then? My guess is, that it becomes a lonely monument over the management’s assumed ability to take action and to foresee the future. What do You think?
The ICT is still a very important matter, but it has to be taken for what it is. In this context, I think You have to look upon it as primarily a tool for the skilled official in the encounter with the citizens. And You must understand that it’s the personal encounter with the citizens that has to be reformed and renewed.

Finally, it’s not as easy as one might think to create new public services. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. And what’s the surprise anyway? In Sweden, these systems dates back 350 years after all!
With these final words, I’d like to thank You all for Your attention. Thank you!

The Cruncher