PICTURE

An Instrument to Provide ICT Investment Strategies for European Public Administrations

WP5 Design and Implementation of PICTURE: Main results

All methodological concepts have been pulled together in a prototype implementing the PICTURE approach. The following figure illustrates the application of the PICTURE approach in a public administration that wants to improve the quality of their services for the citizens (step 1 – the trigger). That endeavor is supported by a PICTURE expert who is typically a specially trained person in the IT department. This person is responsible for configuring the PICTURE tool according to the goals of the reorganization project (this relates to process modeling as well as to the process analysis) and serves as the advisor in the public administration (2).

The actual PICTURE project in a public administration is conducted in three phases. In the first phase, the modeling phase, the processes of the public administrations are captured. As the decision makers and the PICTURE expert typically do not have an overview over all relevant processes, modeling coordinators from all involved departments assist them in identifying these processes (3). The modeling coordinators then assign modeling tasks to the actual modelers. These modelers are domain experts from the public administrations who model exactly those parts of the processes they are familiar with (4). This allows for a distributed modeling of the whole process landscape of the public administration.

In the next phase, the analysis phase, a semi-automated process analysis is performed and inefficiencies are identified, based on the information captured in the process models. The impact of different ICT investments on these inefficiencies is measured in quantitative, qualitative, and monetary terms (5). In the last phase, the visualization phase, the analysis results are presented to the decision makers in form of consolidated reports. The decision makers can use the results to derive the appropriate reorganization steps and reasonable ICT investments (6).