e-governance and citizen information - Universitat Oberta de ...

E-governance and Citizen Information 116 Relationship with Citizensterest for a specific community (publication of Selectivitat exam grades, for example) or withsome extraordinary event or another (like the accident in the Carmel district).With respect to the 012 telephone service development in its use can be appreciated in thistable:Table 1. Development of 012 Calls (1999-2005)Period 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005January 88,354 49,318 89,727 120,394 189,031 175,372 216,681June 60,040 69,459 79,217 148,784 194,379 210,198 261,682Annualaverage66,728 62,515 91,038 146,467 208,478 183,802 233,347Total 800,731 750,183 1,092,457 1,757,600 2,501,734 2,205,620 2,800,168Source: ACD telephone platform 1999-2005. Citizen Information DepartmentAlthough its development in the last year is not as spectacular as the Internet, use of thetelephone has almost quadrupled between 1999 and 2005, taking into account the absolutevolume of calls: use has grown from 800,731 to 2,800,168. Just as with the portal the mainuse of the 012 service is also, principally, instrumental: the majority of calls (62%) weremade in order to request specific information – in many cases about subjects related to oneor another department, but also to make queries about questions, strictly speaking, beyondthe Generalitat's areas of responsibility.This increase in telephone calls and visits to the website has been seen to be accompaniedby a clear improvement in the quality of both these information channels. Despite that factthat in this report we have dealt with different aspects of this process of improvement, wehave created our own indicator based on the response time for an email sent to the Administration.In order to measure the actual functioning of contact with the Administration through emailand based on an experiment by D. West (2002) during our first study, we carried out a testby sending an email using the enquiries mailboxes located on the home pages of the departmentalwebsites and the Gencat homepage. For this test we tried not only to find out inwhich departments the mailboxes were actually operational but also to measure the responsetime for a citizen's enquiry. The test was performed on 18 October 2002 and the queryrequested the timetable and location for face to face enquiries at the department's maininformation office. Three years later we conducted the same test. The comparison betweenthe two tests is presented in the table below:http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic