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UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT

PROGRAMME IN UZBEKISTAN

LOCAL GOVERNANCE SUPPORT PARTICIPATION AND

PARTNERSHIP PROJECT

Article: Overview of international best practices on One-Stop-Shop for

delivering public services

The views expressed in this publication are those of author and do not

necessarily represent those of the United Nations, including UNDP, or their

Member States.

Tashkent 2012

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SUBJECT

Introduction………………………………………………………………

Citizen Service Center (CSC) in Brazil……………………………......

Government Service in Canada……………………………….............

The OSS concept in Croatia…………………………………………...

National eGovernment in Czech…………………………………………

Information centre in Finland……………………………………………

OSS information centre in Hungary……………………………………

Government portal in India………………………………………………

Public administration OSS system in Portugal…………………………

Multi-Functional Centers (MFC) in Russia……………………………

E-government programmes in Singapore…………………………….

E-government services for citizens in Slovenia and United Kingdom…

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………

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Introduction

UNDP Uzbekistan’s Local Governance Support Project (LGSP) will soon assist city

khokimiyats of Djizak and Namangan to launch two One-Stop-Shop (OSS) systems for

provision of public (government) services which will be fully operational by the end of 2011.

One of LGSP’s aims is promoting public administration reform aimed for a

decentralised governance system by enhancing “the partnership capacities of local

governments with civil society and the private sector through public relations and e-

Government tools”. In line with this, one of the main activities of the LGSP is to ensure the

population has ready and easy access to information related to the work of agencies at all

levels of government. With improvements in the service delivery by public administrations at

the local level, there should be an improvement and increase in transparency, accountability

and efficiency, which benefits both the citizens as well as the government.

With the OSS, government service providers will move to a more client-oriented

system of service provision. With a physical location, the OSS may target the entirety of the

population of the specific municipality, or district, or region as clients, at the local level of

government, as it is the first level of service provider for citizens. The citizens seeking public

service assistance need only seek information and service consultations with the various

government organisations under one roof. In this one location, citizens could find

representatives of the relevant government authorities who are competent in dealing with the

citizens’ specific questions, such as questions of pensions, health, issuance of certificates,

taxes, and other citizen services provided by government agencies. “The citizen has a single

entry point for his transactions with the public administration” (Contiades 2007). The

different agencies will be able to provide information, issuance of services and answers

directly relevant to the particular citizen through the single-window system of the OSS.

For LGSP, the OSS model is one step closer to introducing wider usage of E-

Government in Uzbekistan’s public administration system. With a citizen-centric front-office

and a more efficient back-office connected to the different government agencies and services,

this system is not only more convenient for the citizen; it is also a more efficient system for

the civil servants working in the local government agencies.

In Sergeli district of Tashkent City, a One-Stop-Shop pilot model was developed and

launched in late spring of 2010 with the help of UNDP Uzbekistan ICTP project. This OSS

was designed to test and develop a unique conceptual approach of integrating the OSS system

to provide public services on a “one window” concept designed for Uzbekistan. With the

establishment of this OSS, it allowed the khokimiyat in charge of administering to over 200

thousand citizens to provide a wider range of public services in one location. It increased

efficiency and decreased the difficulty and time spent for citizens to deal with separate civil

servants. Citizens used to have to visit each government organisation in order to find and

complete necessary certificates and documents. The OSS enabled the citizens, clients, to

reduce lengthy and time-consuming procedures to acquire public services in one location.

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The Sergeli OSS experience and lessons learned will serve as the basis for the two

city khokimiyat OSS, one in Djizak and one in Namangan. This is an expansion of the

introduction and development strategy of e-Government in Uzbekistan. The OSS in both

locations will be monitored and evaluated, and the experience will be documented with the

aim of developing a toolkit and progress and evaluation report which may be used for future

similar initiatives.

Not only was Sergeli studied carefully, but best practises and lessons learned from the

experiences of many different countries and regions who have implemented such citizen-

centric OSS services for their population were examined. Many European governments have

focused on the OSS as a way to increase citizen and government public services interactivity.

The OSS has to be structured taking into account the citizens’ needs, and technological and

bureaucratic capacities of the individual public administration cultures. Because of this there

are many variations on the model in different countries.

Citizen Service Center (CSC) in Brazil

Brazil has a Citizen Service Center (CSC) called Poupatempo, which translates to

“saves time”. Some of the most popular services offered in this OSS are driver’s licenses,

identity cards, and work documents. In order to streamline the process citizens had to go

through to get these documents, decrease the time, the lack of information, the black market

for places in line and payment rates due to intermediaries, the government established CSCs

(Annenberg 2007). The OSS was then established, with 23 different physical, centrally urban

located kiosks in different states, run by state governments, and some on a Public-Private

Partnership model, each one is capable of handling multiple services. In São Paulo, mobile

units were also created in order to service isolated and rural populations, increasing citizen

inclusion. The Poupatempo Program enables 400 separate services from 68 different agencies

to be accessible in one location, and is a citizen-centric public administration service.

Poupatempo is also delivered through electronic means, with more than 500,000 services

offered. It maintains mechanisms to continually train service employees, and hand-written,

telephone or internet based feedback options for users. The Brazilian experience is aiming to

be influential in providing a new model of citizen-oriented public administration service for

developing countries, due to the costs per citizen of service, which is 1.29 USD per citizen

for each service, which does not include civil servant salaries.

Government Service in Canada

Canada has a nationwide range of OSS multiple channel system, Service Canada, with

a range of government services under its broad umbrella, such as education, employment,

health, housing, immigration, income and legal assistance services, personal documents,

savings plans, start up of businesses and travel. Established in 2005, it offers access to

government programmes and services through different channels, such as physical kiosks,

telephone, mail and Internet services. According to its Client Satisfaction Research in 2010,

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which surveyed 4,009 users, most citizens accessed the OSS through the internet (49 per

cent) or the telephone (58 per cent), while the frequent users accessed the website the most,

and contacted the service in relation to seeking assistance for more than one service, with 57

per cent surveyed responding satisfaction with the quality of the service (Service Canada

2011).Under the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development, it actively promotes

continual employee capacity building and has internal accountability mechanisms.

The OSS concept in Croatia

In Croatia, the OSS concept was implemented to increase and improve the level of

state government services and organised as public entry points the Financial Agency (FINA)

The implementation program was based on legal documents; the Commencement of the One

Stop Shop Concept Design, the OSS Program Strategy and the Implementation Plan for the

OSS Program. The ICT network was critical for OSS and implemented between 2005 and

2007. The main competencies are social security matters; employment, social security and

employment for disabled persons and old age social security, as well as registering employees

for pension and health insurance. The availability of the OSS allows citizens and businesses

to use rights and easily (Contiades 2007).

In a strategy to increase efficiency, effectiveness and qualitaty of public services for

citizens, Cyprus’ public administration established Citizen Service Centers (CSC), the first of

which was in the capital, Nicosia. As of 2005, it provides more than 550,000 services and

relayed 282,088 information services to citizens over the telephone. To increase inclusiveness

in the island, some CSCs operate in more remote mountainous areas. These had positive

impacts as isolated and rural citizens could save time and money from unnecessary travel in

order to access public administration services. An official survey carried out in 2007 showed

that 91 per cent of citizens ranked the CSCs as “very positive” on the quality of services that

were provided. Due to its reception by its clients, the citizens, there are plans to expand,

especially in more inclusive citizen services by creating a mobile CSC and Contact Center

(Alexandrou 2008). Cyprus’ national model was pre-empted by regional municipality

attempts at OSS, in particular a Citizen Service Bureau established in Strovolos Municipality.

It was designed to improve municipality services, by providing a centralised place where

citizens direct applications, charges, complaints and problems to various local municipality

government bodies, which since its inception receives around 6000 service requests annually

with 85 per cent cases processed (Strovolos Municipality Cyprus 2006).

National eGovernment in Czech

CzechPOINT is the Czech Republic’s national eGovernment one-stop-shop to

establish contact points, reduce geographic exclusion and provide savings for users. Contact

points were established in existing government authority offices, post offices economic

chamber offices and Czech embassies. It streamlined the range of services provided by the

different government agencies and bodies into a single window in many different locations.

One way to evaluate the impact and results of the project is to see the amount of issued

documents through CzechPOINT; until 2009 from its initial launch, they issued 1,680,000

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public register copies, more than 900,000 Criminal Register, 418,000 Land Registers, saving

the citizen time and money (Kusák 2009). The evaluation was quick to stress that these public

administration service improvements also needed to emphasise traditional methods of

delivery, not only internet based delivery, to include all citizens. However, it was noted that

the success not only lay in the client-based orientation of the OSS but in the successful

cooperation between public agencies in order to provide OSS services to the citizens.

Information centre in Finland

Finland has Suomi.fi, a multilingual website, both an information center and OSS.

Recently improved, it increased its electronic presence and services, and citizen ease of

access, by allowing Finnish site visitors to specify and select their home municipality in order

to have the links and information relevant to that area appear first, and expanding a user

guide in order to help citizens navigate the electronic Service process. It also shares services

with other Finnish public administration platforms.

France’s public administration has similar, though not exactly, OSS procedures in

some levels of government for a few services. Some administrations have taken it upon

themselves to develop such OSS procedures., as generally internet acceptance as a tool for

civil society have been more accepted by local levels of government (Baquiast 1999). One

such procedure which replicates some aspects, but not all, of the OSS, is the Parthenay

Community of Communes, which has an accessible website, but also allows citizens to

access information, forms and documents in regards to social services in their communes.

However, many social services are run by separate government bodies which have protected

data forms to prevent fraud and citizens must still go to the physical branch locations of each

government body.

OSS information centre in Hungary

Hungary has developed Magyarorszag.hu, an internet website portal which acts as an

OSS and information centre. In addition, individual local governments, such as Budapest’s

XIII district, implemented improvements to their local administration,enabling them to

become more client and citizen oriented and thus serving through similar models to OSS.

Government portal in India

India has a government portal which streamlines access to government services for

citizens, foreigners, and businesses, through a “single window” electronic OSS. The portal

itself was cooperation between various government ministries and departments at the central,

the state and the district level, and run by the Department of Information Technology. In

order to provide accurate, reliable, timely and current content for all citizens, National Portal

Coordinators of State Governments and Union Territory administrations are appointed in

order to maintain and contribute to the portal with information that directly pertains to their

respective regions. The National Portal coordinators are nominated by the individual State or

Union Territory governments.

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Linea Amica is the Italian government’s online single-window OSS that extends its

information services through radio. The website was launched in 2011, and the new portal

allows citizens to access information and public services from multiple channels, and allows

users to automatically provide feedback on the level of satisfaction. It was developed by the

Ministry for Public Administration, to increase transparency and simplify public services, and

promote E-Government. This website is the latest in a string of E-Government initiatives in

the past that Italy had promoted, and the first to provide multiple services from different

sectors and different government agencies through one channel (eGovernment Practice

Editorial Team 2011).

Luxembourg has De Guichet, an OSS with a complementary website to serve its

citizens and a separate extension for businesses. For Luxembourg, it was not necessary to

make everything online accessible. The government placed its importance on the uniform

single point of contact aspect. Despite increased internet use, it was still important for

services to be accessible through traditional forms, and the physical locations of the OSS

remains important (Soisson 2008), while information and news are disseminated and

accessible through many technological formats, and available in several languages, as well as

targeting different users, differentiating between the individual citizen and businesses.

Public administration OSS system in Portugal

Portugal has a centrally organised public administration OSS system, Portal do

Cidadão of off-line and on-line services. While ot all services are available on the website,

there are 950 services provided through the OSS, provided by 163 different government

bodies or agencies, and those services available online are accessible by citizens through

secure private accounts. In Portugal’s Municipality of Pombal, Citizen Forum developed a

single counter citizen service, through multiple channels; physical locations called “Balcão de

Atendimento Municipal” and an internet-based Municipal Portal, which was developed in

order to allow citizens to access government services without having to physically appear at

the municipality. Both are accessible through the same Citizen Card which is also used by the

central government OSS, and the Pombal government has uniform customer service tools

through the multiple channels. The municipality services an average of 5,432.67 visits per

month through the various access points, and customer service reduced waiting periods,

mishandled processes, processing costs and increased customer satisfaction by streamlining

access to citizen services (Salvador 2009).

Multi-Functional Centers (MFC) in Russia

Russia has 167 Multi-Functional Centers (MFC), located in almost 80 regions and

cities, as part of the move toward a “service” State, and in order to decrease opportunities for

corruption. Various state authorities, departments and agencies have representatives available

in every MFC, providing an OSS solution for citizens needing to access services and

information, and the MFC facilitates the documentation collection and filing processes, as

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well as citizen payment processes for government services and utilities, with over 100

different types of government services. There are other services available for citizens, such as

photocopying services, notarial services, among others. One MFC in the city of Tambov is

able to process around 900 citizens without the need for prolonged queuing (RBS 2008).

Because there are many MFCs throughout the country, there are differences in the amount of

citizen services offered, however the average for each is 45 services in one MFC, and MFC

establishments are not federally regulated (Яковлева 2009).

Complementary to the MFCs, Портал государственных услуг (Public Services

Portal) is Russia’s e-Government online government service portal for citizens and

businesses. Launched in 2009, the platform itself is a citizen-centric, user-friendly platform

with services arranged by departments, needs or “life situations”, such as applying for a

passport or purchasing a house. Like the MFC, it is meant to be able to be more available to

citizens and to increase good governance through increasing transparent service provision.

Recently there are plans to increase the accessibility by allowing specific nanometre-

technology chip-embedded bank cards to enable secure access to the portal (East-West

Digital News 2011). A new version of the web portal was launched in order to be accessible

by all forms of technology platforms, increasing user-friendliness.

One of the first, Zelenograd Administrative District of Moscow implemented a “One-

Window” OSS . Using a special software, civil servants process citizen requests. Able to

access different information and data between different departments through the city through

a document flow, processing time was decreased and eased document preparation. The 900

families registered in the district access services through one of two locations, facsimile and a

telephone call center that processes an average of 350 requests for services, with a maximum

of 1000, increasing efficiency but decreasing risks for mistakes in the processing. In 2002, an

electronic access point was established, a portal to 300 links and 12 information systems,

which is accessed by over 800 citizens on average per day (Zelenograd Administration

District 2007).

E-government programmes in Singapore

Singapore has three E-Government programmes in place, one for citizens, for

businesses and for government. In a country with a high percentage of broadband internet

usage, the internet is a suitable channel for connecting citizens and the government (Saxena

2011). Citizens use different E-Government programmes. The E-Government programmes

are continually added to, and the services for citizens are modelled as OSS. The main one,

established by the Ministry of Finance, is eCitizen, which offers improved service delivery

for citizens as well as non-residents, with services ranging from filing taxes, seeking

available apartments, applying for passports or registering for the military. There are also

more available for specific services, such as provision of government data for public use,

online mobile government services search, and a platform for official government news and

information.

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E-government services for citizens in Slovenia and United Kingdom

Slovakia has a centralised OSS, with a web portal, called Obcan.sk. It links itself to

eight regional portals and 2,890 local websites, and includes E-Government services for

citizens , and as of 2010 had a capacity for 20 different service provisions. Importantly, this

service provides a base platform from which other regions and municipalities may create

their own websites (Shynkaruk 2010), and contributes to Slovakia’s E-Government

development plans to increase citizen electronic service users.

Slovenia has an OSS service accessible over the internet called e-VEM for

entrepreneurs and citizens, accessible from a internet portal or through a local physical

location. Over 200 different agencies use the OSS system to provide services. Citizens also

avail of help from specialist civil servants to assist in accessing their services or, with the

registration of a digital certificate, directly from home with an internet connection. The

decisions of applications and service requests are able to be electronically sent, reducing

government redundancies and errors. The OSS is estimated to save citizens 807.833 euro by

saving on registration fees, form fees, transport costs and time (Batagelj 2006).

In the United Kingdom, the Department of Social Security spearheaded a virtual OSS,

Info4Local, services that combined easy accessibility, at the time of its launch, to several, but

not all, central government departments and government agencies (Contiades 2007, 31).

More inclusive OSS initiatives by individual local governments are also available. Boroughs

such as Wirral have networked communities of OSS that provide services from physical

locations in the different convenient towns of the particular borough. They provide service,

advice and consultations with Council services and partner services, and are staffed by

trained advisors who are trained and equipped to handle questions related to available

services.

Many different countries are tackling the issue of more efficient and improved service

provision for their citizens. The OSS model is one which is available in both the traditional

manner, with providing physical, accessible locations for citizens, and the modern manner,

including service access through telephone and secure internet portals. However, not only is

the front-office streamlining of citizen service provision important but also the ability of the

back-office, the different public services and government agencies, to work together in order

to provide such services in a single-window. This not only improves client services, but also

improves efficiency and transparency as well as accountability in the government and public

administration.

Soraya Soemadiredja, LGSP Intern

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