Integrated public service delivery requires collaboration between various government organizations. There is much discussion about how such a public service network should be orchestrated and which organizational entity should manage the dependencies. In this chapter, three orchestration options are identified and the strengths and weaknesses are evaluated using a group support system. The session participants identified criteria for evaluating orchestration arrangements and discussed and scored the three variants. The findings highlight the inherent conflict about who becomes the orchestrator, and show that detailed analysis is needed to safeguard a sound decision-making process and that path-dependencies influence the selection of alternative options.

A big challenge for governments all over the world is to deliver secure, reliable, transparent and accountable services to their citizens and businesses. Effective and efficient service delivery requires the orchestration of business processes going beyond the border of single agencies. Little is known about how to orchestrate these cross-agency service-delivery processes, and consequently governmental decision-makers are looking for support in designing such processes. This paper investigates the applicability of two existing reference models, the Workflow Reference Model and the extended SOA reference model, to guide the development of cross-agency process orchestration. Although these reference models contain important elements, we found that these models they do not provide support for issues like ensuring correct and in-time service-delivery processes, secure information sharing and transparent and accountable processes.

In response to the demand for better service provisioning, governments from all over the world are looking for technologies to automate their cross-agency processes. This chapter investigates the applicability of web service orchestration for the automation of governmental cross-agency service delivery processes by investigating a case study of a business counter. Our case study shows that web service orchestration using BPEL4WS is a feasible technology for automating governmental cross-agency service-delivery processes, but also shows a gap between the capabilities of web service orchestration technology and the organizational arrangements that are needed for automating the processes. We identified three organizational issues that at least need to be addressed before governments can profit fully from the advantages of web service orchestration technology: (1) Ensuring correct and in-time execution of business processes (2) Information sharing and (3) Responsibility and accountability

A big challenge for governments from all over the world is to improve the service provisioning to their clients, citizens, and businesses. This is partly motivated by the aim to reduce the administrative burdens for citizens and businesses (e.g., Dutch Government, 2003, 2004), but also demanded by its clients, who expect the public sector to increase its attention on customer service just as businesses have done as a result of the rise of Internet technologies (Donnelly, Wisniewski, Dalrymple, & Curry, 1995; McIvor, McHugh, & Cadden, 2002). Due to the fragmented nature of governments (Wimmer, 2002), the activities that make up the service-delivery processes of many governmental services are often performed by different governmental agencies (Castellano, Pastore, Arcieri, & Summo, 2004; Contenti, Termini, Mecella, & Baldoni, 2003; Gortmaker & Janssen, 2004). Managing these service-delivery processes that span multiple agencies requires adequate coordination between the different subprocesses and different agencies. The trend of moving toward electronic service delivery makes the need of coordinating cross-agency service-delivery processes even more apparent, as citizens and business expect fast responses and customer-centric service provisioning. A complication is that information systems are also largely fragmented, which gives rise to a whole new range of coordination issues that need to be solved. A promising technology that offers many advantages to the problem of automating cross-agency processes is Web service orchestration (Gortmaker, Janssen, & Wagenaar, 2004). However, there is a lack of experience reports, literature, and case studies concerning the potential of Web service orchestration (van Hillegersberg, Boeke, & van den Heuvel, 2004). Moreover, orchestration should be viewed on at least two different levels: on a technical, and an organizational level (Gortmaker & Janssen, 2004). On a technical level, Web-service orchestration makes use of the potential of Web-service technology to orchestrate different Web services into one overall service-delivery process. On an organizational level, orchestration can be viewed as performing process orchestrator roles aimed at managing the interdependencies between various subprocesses performed by multiple agencies. This article investigates research issues concerning the application of Web-service orchestration technology and process orchestrator roles for coordinating cross-agency business processes. These research issues need to be resolved in order to be able to use process orchestrators in an efficient and effective way to coordinate governmental cross-agency service-delivery processes. First, we present the background of both Web-service orchestration and process orchestrators. Thereafter, we investigate a case study and use this case study to demonstrate the research issues that should be addressed for automating cross-agency processes using Web-service orchestration and process orchestrators. Finally, further trends are presented and conclusions are drawn.

Abstract Public managers are looking for ways to fully exploit the advantages of Web services and Web services orchestration technology for improving service delivery. This article analyzes the quest toward the creation of citizen-centric, cross-agency processes using Web service orchestration technology. Based on pilot projects in the Netherlands, the authors find that the use of Web service orchestration technology requires the introduction of new process orchestration roles and an evolution from hierarchical to agreement-driven relationships. Eight process orchestration roles and a stage model developed by the authors are presented.

A big challenge for governments all over the world is to improve the service provisioning to their clients, citizens and businesses. One way of improving service-provisioning is by means of a a one-stop-shop that integrates services that are performed by different semi autonomous agencies. This requires the coordination of service-delivery processes that run across different agencies. This is also called process orchestration. As little is known about process orchestrators, governmental decision-makers need support in designing them. This paper investigates the applicability of existing reference models from domains that are closely related to process orchestration, the Workflow Reference Model and the extended SOA reference model, to governmental decision-makers for implementing process orchestration in e-government, and identifies several main requirements for a reference mode for process orchestration, based on a case study performed at a business counter.

Due to the fragmented nature of governments, governmental services are delivered by cross-agency service-delivery processes. Accountability for these cross-agency service-delivery processes is especially challenging, as it is unclear who is accountable for the whole cross-agency process. Unclear accountability relationships lead to untransparent processes. In this paper, we investigate literature on accountability, derive a framework for accountability of cross-agency service-delivery processes, and propose several initial mechanisms and guidelines for ensuring accountability of these processes.

Although web service technology seems to offer many advantages, the benefits remain largely, limited to the field of data and application integration. We investigate the applicability, of business process orchestration in e-government by investigating the state-of-the-art of orchestration technology and conducting a case study. Although existing web service technology can be used for process orchestration, many. mainly organizational types of issues need to be resolved before full advantage can be taken front web services technologies.

Governments from all over the world are looking for technologies to facilitate the coordination of their inter-agency processes in order to improve the service-delivery to their customers. Web Service Orchestration (WSO) technology supports the coordination of cross-departmental processes. The advantages of WSO for governments, however, are not very clear. As a result, governments hesitate to adopt orchestration technology.Advantages of WSO, as found in literature, have a narrow-focus, mainly concerning technological advantages. The advantages of Workflow Management (WFM), a related technology that has been around for years, are much broader. We found a large gap between the advantages that were found for WSO and WFM. We conducted a case study at a business counter to test whether the advantages of WSO and WFM as found in literature were also found for a practical application of WSO.