Federal information management - context and effects

Abstract

In spite of their common legal basis public sector organizations have developed a plethora of diverse forms and service descriptions for similar or even identical citizen services. As a consequence for citizens as well as for businesses it is difficult to understand the wording of forms and the procedures necessary for citizen and business services. Public administration cannot profit from synergy effects which could be gained by a shared effort for developing these information - although a holistic approach for an integrated information management should be the goal of strategy. The aim of this paper is to combine and integrate data and information from the information domains of services, processes and forms from the public sector domain and provide a holistic approach to make them usable for information managers in the field. To this end, we identify the essential relationships and effects of these information domains on the administrative action. We develop a framework based on the information needs outside of the administration (citizens and private sector) and within the administration, which represents content and interaction. We also examine to which extent such a structure can be further defined on a more detailed level and integrated.