Alessio Gugliotta, Francesco Niglia and Laura Schina
services, by providing some recommendations for an actual enhancement of the adoption in a wider European vision.
2. The scope of the study
The NET‐EUCEN network has collected various examples of running services that are characterised by the application of some aspects of the user‐centricity methodology and, following the main scope of the project“ to enhance the( application of) user centricity in eGovernance”, it’ s of utmost importance to provide the European central and local administrations with good examples that can be used in the short term.
The analysis described in this document represents the second step of best practice scouting, started at the beginning of the project and consolidated in a collective document( NET‐EUCEN D2.0) that already provided a selection of existing services in Europe as well as in the extra‐European( International) Countries.
Starting from a list of 74 different user‐centric cases, 40 of them have been selected for the analysis that brought us to have a more coherent vision highlighting the limits and potentialities of the cases, in terms of the application of the different services to the users and business perspectives. The methodology followed a logical path since the analysis had been focused in three areas: socio‐political, technology and user‐centricity. Each mapped best practice has been analysed in its socio‐economic environment through a light version of the P. E. S. T. to which we added a typical S. W. O. T. analysis carried out by the researchers and the experts in the field through an ad‐hoc analysis’ mask.
3. The sample
The 40 cases selected belong to the repository( NET‐EUCEN D2.0) of more than 70 experiences developed by the NET‐EUCEN network, specifically:
• 25 cases gathered from the knowledge of partners that already entail the aspects of the user centricity. Some of them have been developed by the partners, and others have been scouted through an on‐line survey.
• 49 cases selected in the www. ePractice. eu portal. These cases were retained as actually interesting for NET‐EUCEN among more than 450 cases filtered in the portal, as they are characterised by – at least – two out three of the user‐centricity criteria of user involvement: 1) Co‐design stage: it means the engagement of users in the stages of development of new ideas and concepts, i. e. the definition of the service shall be made by starting from the users’ needs and requirements without any technological constraint. 2) Development and Implementation stages: it means the engagement of a sample / group of users in the first implementation of the services in order to evaluate its features and continuously discuss with developers to optimise the outcomes and suggest improvements and / or changes before the final running of the service; 3) Deployment and Running stages: it is referred to the possibility to validate the service through an, even wide, user‐test campaign. This test shall imply a check of the flexibility of the service from the technological perspective and the interoperability of the applications, thus to give the possibility to customise it following the changes in the political, economic or social environment.
The overall analysis has been enriched by the comparison in the International Arena against the web scouted best practices of Bahrain, Canada, Dubai, Singapore and the U. S., to so to build a global positioning for European scenarios. The selection of cases was based on two mandatory steps:
• Availability of deep information about the cases. We knew all about the 25 cases in the partners’ knowledge, but a specific questionnaire was set‐up for the owner of the cases gathered from the ePractice portal. Only 29 out 49 feedback to this questionnaire were received.
• Selection of the 40 best user‐centric examples out of the remaining sample of fully described 54 cases. This selection related to those services targeted to wider users categories.
As result of selection, this is the list of 40 out of a total of 74 cases we have analysed in the document
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