Terry Keefe et al.
the organisation to lighter implementations aside key players in the organisation. The common change is the adoption of a new approach to attending citizen information needs, to think of reducing ABR through better information provision with online and natural language interfaces, and to measure the impact on that adoption.
• To achieve a real reduction in the cost for citizens and administration( Did the change contribute to any administrative burden reduction? Did it contribute to reduce the administrative costs as well?)
A strong affirmative answer comes up from the pilots with significant service change / modification enabled by iSAC. Administrative burden reduction was achieved by both citizens and public administration through iSAC. It is estimated that the associated burdens to businesses are also relieved as they are part of the measures regarding the citizens in the piloting. The quantitative ABR is ‐0.78 Euro per capita. The quantitative and the qualitative burdens reduction are higher in those pilots with higher service modification.
• To create a sustainable and transferable online public information application( Is there any endorsement or next adopters for its further deployment and sustainability?)
There are now 8 new partners, referred to as“ next adopters” about to start using iSAC6. The group of next adopters are all local municipalities from France, Italy, Spain and Belgium, with a balanced composition of small( three) and large( four). There is in addition a Belgian social enterprise.
They have adopted iSAC in the last track of the iSAC6 + project in the period of March ‐ September 2012. They have taken advantage from the lessons learned of other pilots in the project, which where assisting them in all the subjects related to change management, service modification, and technical assistance.
The six iSAC6 + pilots have had close contact with the next adopters, especially the three municipalities who have had a key leading role in the early adoption, transferring their enthusiasm and know‐how to the next adopters of their country in France, Italy, and Catalonia‐Spain. The two pilots not experiencing as much benefit as the municipalities were not successful in attracting next adopters. So the project as a whole has met its objectives and has been deservedly declared a success by its EU sponsors. However, as the final report points out, the success has been concentrated on the municipal function of providing a Citizens Advice Service, a valuable and very necessary service. In the case of iSAC6 the areas of failure, or reduced success, have not significantly affected the overall project performance, but in other projects the negative impact may have been more significant.
3.3 Partners and participants
It is worth now looking in detail at the main participants, to see if we can identify the factors which made some highly successful and others much less so.
In iSAC6 + the primary operational objective was to achieve cost and quality benefits for all stakeholders: administrators; service users; and the wider citizenship. In a paper for ECEG 12 we described how we worked with public Administration partners to develop a cost and benefit model and how we identified operational objectives. For some partners we were able to additionally identify a range of organisational change objectives which had underpinned the initial decisions to participate in the project. Organisational and strategic change objectives are typically difficult to quantify and measure as they are often qualitative in nature and described in non‐specific terms. The paper went on to describe how strategic objectives were elaborated to develop success factors and progress indicators, together with examples and explanations of how these strategic objectives were expected to be achieved( Keefe, et al., 2012). It was noticeable that three of the partners from what might be termed traditional city administrations were able to articulate their aims and objectives. The three others found this more difficult, having entered the project motivated more by a desire to explore possibilities offered by the technology rather than for reasons of process innovation and improvement.
Table 1 provides information about each partner and their project outcome. For the purpose of this paper we have included partners who withdrew at any stage including initial proposal.
The use of monitoring and measurement frameworks was highly successful in two areas:
• Measuring the value and cost of the service innovation to both citizens and administrative offices. The project team placed a high priority on developing a robust framework for monitoring progress and measuring benefits, using the Standard Cost Model( SCM) and Balanced Scorecard as described in the
279