Irene Bernhard and Kerstin Grundén
provide services in very different ways however. The implementation of e‐Government in municipalities also varies greatly( SKL, 2011).
2. Contact centers
The concept and meaning of a CC derives from the concept of a commercial call center, increasingly used in the private sector since the beginning of the twenty‐first century( Norman, 2005). A call centre is a place where you deal with phone calls completely dependent on the use of IT. The use of the“ contact center” concept in Sweden indicates an extended function, focussing not only on phone calls, but also other contiguous work tasks( Andersson Bäck, 2008). The traditional model of a call center is thus transformed when CCs are established in Swedish municipalities( Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996). Every citizen is supposed to receive the same level of service regardless of economic status. The CC is a front office for citizens and businesses, and the main communication mode is by phone. The employees of the CC answer simple questions and guide citizens in using the municipal website and other e‐services. All incoming phone calls are registered in electronic information systems, and initiated matters are transferred by the systems to the case administrators at the back office.
Figure 1 below shows the intermediary function of a CC as a front office, answering questions from citizens and transferring citizen matters to the handling officers in the back office. The arrows in the figure show the main communication patterns, and indicate which group mainly initiates contact. The figure also indicates that the employees at CC answer most of the questions from citizens and transfer matters once initiated to the back office.
Citizens and businesses
Employees at the CC front office
Handling Officers at the back office
Figure 1: A conceptual model of the intermediary function of a contact center focussing on the main communication patterns.( The model is adapted from Bernhard, 2011)
The phone calls from citizens and businesses to the CC replace their earlier communication patterns, when they used to call the handling officers in the back office directly to resolve their issues. Now the handling officers call citizens only once they have started to deal with a matter.
The implementation of CCs in Swedish municipalities is an example of implementation of local e‐Government. E‐government is often associated with increased citizen availability to public e‐services, but it also means a fundamental organizational change in public organizations requiring new competencies( Grönlund, 2001; Worrall et al., 2010). There is a need for reorganization of back‐office routines in order to optimize the efficiency and quality aspects resulting from the implementation of CC. According to a study of more than twenty governments in different countries, Accenture( 2007) found many governments at an important crossroad. The main focus for public service organizations has been on improvements of front‐end services to citizens, neglecting the importance of also aligning back‐end aspects.
Implementation of e‐Government does not simply mean implementation of new technology solutions. Implementation challenges are also changes in work practices, work cultures, behaviors, power structures and learning processes( Grundén, 2009; Worrall et al., 2011). Implementation of local e‐Government such as CCs is characterized by huge and complex change processes that require new competencies both for employees and management in the municipal organization, as well as for citizens and businesses. The extended use of ICT support for municipal service production and re‐organization efforts could contribute to more efficient routines, but will also put demands on continuous learning processes in order to meet the new requirements. As more and more CCs are implemented in municipalities, the possibilities to learn from such experiences will increase. It seems important not simply to try to imitate examples from other organizations, according to a global study of e‐Government( Accenture, 2007), but instead use such examples as inspiration and also be aware of the importance of the local context when CCs are implemented.
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