eGovernment process knowledge ontology – business process knowledge interdependencies in the public administration

Abstract

Optimising government operations and providing eGovernemt services has assumed a major role for reducing government expenditure as well as tackling demographic challenges in times of financial crises and resource shortages on different levels. However, re-organising public administrations, introducing IT-Systems support, and improving their service delivery is highly complex as their operations are highly interconnected and restricted by laws and regulations. Public service delivery as well as input and output documents, executing roles, are defined by laws and regulations. The impact of change on the different aspects of this domain has to be considered when changing and improving organisational or procedural structures. Hence optimisation efforts of business processes, data quality, laws or organisational structures need good and complete documentation and understanding of activities and interdependencies between the different aspects of public service delivery. Planned changes have to be checked for feasiblity and compliance in regard to the regulations and interdependencies between business processes. This paper presents an eGovernment Process Knowledge ontology that takes a holistic view on the government domain, describes the interdependencies of the different aspects of public service delivery, and maps them to BPM elements. We present change strategies based on the ontology that consider all elements and their interdependencies in the optimisation process. Our methodology will be explained on a real use case from the public administration, the vehicle registration process.