Before the official start of the steering committee meeting in Karlstad the project group working with the Processes and Workflows hold a short workshop. The workshop gave a draft outline of some municipalities work on processes and inspiration to other municipalities working in the same area. This is summary of the presentations and discussions during the workshop.

Goal analysis - Monika Magnusson

Postdoc and senior lecturer Monika Magnusson from Karlstad University gave a presentation on goal analysis, its uses and benefits and how this approach could serve as a tool for structured and result-oriented work. She showed during the presentation, some examples of the work together with Karlstad municipality.

General about goal analysis

A goal analysis is a systematic way to identify, organize, evaluate, develop and establish the goal of an organization.
It’s a way to clarify what the organization wants to achieve, what goals are most important (main goal) and the which objectives that are sub goals.

Finding goals

We find the goals from statements, from documents, interviews, websites, etc.
The goals are often of different types: main/sub goals, present/future (new/modified goals), officially/unofficial, documented/not documented, approved/not approved goals.
Much of this work is to precisely identify, classify and categorize the goals (main goal and sub goals).

Gains of a goal analysis

- Goals that are vigorous, documented, accepted, known and non-conflicting
- An overview of the most important local and national goals for e-services and how local actions (such as an ‘e-office’) are related to these goals 
- A foundation for evaluating, measuring, and prioritizing between services
- Decreased complexity by decomposing goals into sub goals
- Basis for legitimating and communicating (coherent) goals, concepts and action to different actors and in diverse channels
- Detecting goals without planned actions (”black holes”) or actions without apparent meaning by relating goals to actions at different levels
- A foundation for evaluating local e-government efforts
- An overview of fulfilled goals and work that remains
 
The local project

In order to work more structured and provide an opportunity to prioritize the various goal and understand the connection between the goals, the Karlstad municipality along with Karlstad University used goal analysis on some of the areas of e-government development.

Goal areas analyzed was the vision for e-services, National and local goal for e-government. In addition to these goal areas it showed also that goal analysis was useful for structuring the work on a common process model for Karlstad municipality.

Karlstad University conducted a goal analysis of possible projects to work together with Karlstad Municipality, which proved important in order to prioritize and manage cooperation in an efficient manner, both for Karlstad municipality and Karlstad University.

Karlstad University also submitted a report to Karlstad municipality where the results, observations and recommendations were summarized.

To develop a common process model - Per-Erik Karlsson and Marie-Therese Christiansson

Per-Erik Karlsson, project leader from Karlstads municipality presented together with
Marie-Therese Christiansson, Senior Lecturer at Karlstad University, the work on creating a common process model.

During the spring Karlstads municipality began together with Karlstad University a project to develop a process model for the development of e-services, a model that hopefully can be generally used to map process in the municipality.

Per-Erik presented the background for the project and why processes can be an area to interact transnational.
Among background factors were that some business processes will move to "Web", more complex e-services across different departments borders (the experience of other municipalities). There was interest and different experiences from the different partners within the Smart Cities project - a good area to start changing experience transnational.
As support and guidance for the implementation of this project were Karlstad University that has very experienced researchers in this area.

The first project within the local process project was carried out with the objective of reaching a process to identify processes, policies and related guidelines that will need to be developed. The project was implemented in three workshops with staff from various departments and presented finally on ITUG, Karlstads municipality decision group on IT issues.

Marie-Therese presented from research and practice about how we get a process development happen in practice. Furthermore, she showed the importance of a common vision and a common approach to basic ideas, values, process mapping / modelling to reach the goal, a common process model.

To adopt an already developed process-oriented framework way of working - The ITIL framework – Gunnar Kartman

Why not adapt an approach to an already proven framework with work processes?

Gunnar Kartman from Karlstads municipality gave a presentation about Karlstad municipalities IT-department work to structure there way of working with the ITIL framework and the systems used to support the processes in the ITIL framework.

The IT department must have well defined and functioning processes. It will be an important part of a well functioning municipality when moving towards e-governance.

ITIL stands for "IT Infrastructure Library" and is a compilation (a framework) of the "Best practices" (good experience) made over many years with the participation of companies from around the world.

ITIL describes a general level, how to structure their approach and their organization to deliver IT services in a stable and cost-effective manner by having the controlled management of the errors, actions and change, and long-term planning to prevent crises.

There are a number of tools that can be used in support of ITIL in the introduction of an organization. The focus should always be on people and their ways of working (= processes).

The introduction of ITIL in a business requires a lot of preliminary work to understand and adapt existing work procedures and practices to the requirements of the ITIL sets.

It also requires training of employees with a focus on the benefits of what may be viewed as a more bureaucratic approach and, finally, a good tool that makes it easy to work according to ITIL.

Originally considered by many as the ultimate goal of implementing ITIL in an organization was to cost savings through a stable and intelligent IT environment where changes are controlled.

This is still but more and more realize that the ITIL enables, and in many cases strictly necessary, to create the flexibility and security required by businesses. Increasingly intense competition leaves less margin for error and changes must be introduced more frequently and with less lead time. This becomes more important than reducing the absolute cost of IT support.

Process Modelling Tools  - Comparison and Decision - Albena Margaritova 

Albena Margaritova from Edinburgh Municipalities presented Edinburgh's efforts to evaluate different process tools to finally come up with a recommendation for the municipality.

In the presentation Albena explained difference between process modelling and process mapping tools and why a process modelling tool was preferred.

A process modelling tool can be used for example to:

• Create a process library with versions control
• Simulate different aspects of a process for example time and resources
• Ability to facilitate publishing processes at different levels
• Linking together several advanced process maps
• Integration with other systems

Edinburgh currently has a process modelling tool but it does not use its full capacity and is used in various degrees in different administrations.

An analysis was conducted by a desired future situation where it was found that:

- Employees involved in process documentation use a common tool (e.g. Visio) to map the processes

- These process maps are fed into and edited with process analysis components from the process modelling tool by a small number of key people

- All council employees will be able to view the exported processes on the intranet

The analysis was conducted on a number of tools on a number of analysis criteria such as

- The full cost of tools, installation, support
- Process library function
- Integration with other tools and systems
- Data migration options and costs
- Time and cost of training
- Technical requirements
- Maturity of the tool
- Web hosting options
- Other companies that use a particular tool

Along the results of the analysis was, finally, a draft decision.
The results of the analysis showed that the tool Corporate Modeler (A tool investment in the past) suited Edinburgh needs best, but that it will need to do an upgrade to a newer version.

Discussion for the next workshop transnational

Workshop ended with each partner project leader reported status on progress of local projects
This report included:

- How far they have got with their concrete projects,
- How they have approached this until now,
- What difficulties do they have and how they think to resolve them
- What help do they expect from the partners and
- What from their recent research and achievements they would like to share.
- What can your municipality contribute to a workshop transnational
-Identified issues in your local project,Is there issues we can solve through support by the Academic Network?

The results of this discussion will be used in a larger workshop to wider exchange of experience between countries during autumn 2009.