An e-Government Project Case Study: Validation of DEMO’s Qualities and Method/Tool Improvements

Abstract

This paper reflects some useful outcomes of a practical enterprise change project where the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) was used in the initial stage as to give a neutral and concise but comprehensive view of the organization of a local government administration having the purpose to implement an e-government project. One of the main contributions of this paper is a case study on how applying DEMO we were able to confirm, in practice, its qualities of conciseness and comprehensiveness. Namely we specified a generic pattern that reflects the functioning of a local government Citizen Service Desk (CSD) and its integration with several other government agencies. The DEMO based specification of this CSD gave important insights to (1) perceive current operational constraints and (2) devise a strategical roadmap for the implementation phase of the e-government project. During our enterprise engineering project we were faced with some problems while applying current official DEMO Way of Working (DWoW), namely (1) the lack of a tool and method steps to quickly and collaboratively collect enterprise model data and (2) inability to efficiently and effectively propagate model changes in interdependent organizational artifacts. The other main contribution of this paper is a collaborative prototype tool which also implements some improvements to the DWoW as to solve the just mentioned problems.