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

E-governance and Citizen Information 88 Structure and Organisationremaining departments only offered information relating specifically to those departments'own area of responsibility. This has clear costs in terms of economic and human resources.The compartmentalisation of the Administration in this case is not only explicit in the duplicationof the organisational division across the territory (above all in the various major cities),but also, as has been observed, when there are attempts at unification, the departments arereluctant even to share the information about citizens they have at their disposal (P14).There is, nevertheless, a plan for future implementation that would break the logic that hasdominated until now. Thus, for the integration of this communication channel, “what is wantedis to bring together the Generalitat's existing offices and convert them into general officesor ones that at least offer this general information as well” (P75). The departments still carrya lot of weight in this, since, as the same interviewee commented, “it still remains to be seenwhat the departments will have to say about it” (P75).b) The Internet ChannelWith regard to the Internet, at the beginning of 2004 there were a total of 267 websites linkeddirectly to the Generalitat of Catalonia. The websites, moreover, showed a high level of heterogeneitywith respect to their design, presentation, contents and level of development.The use indices of the large majority of the websites were low, a fact that highlights problemslike the high dispersal of information and resources used (creation and maintenance ofthese websites). Despite having made an effort at homogenisation with the approval of astylebook for all the units and the structuring of part of the contents using a so-called “vitalstatistics” organisation, in many cases these directives were not followed. Because therewere actions that had not been “agreed with the departments, they did not feel involved”(P27).Therefore the Generalitat's Internet presence was structured along the lines of bureaucraticcompartmentalisation. In other words, by associating the majority of the contents with thevarious existing administrative units, without homogeneity “either at the design or the technicallevel” (P15).The plan to redesign and revamp the portal sought to overcome this situation with a thematicorganisation of all the information available and a new style guide. At the same timeit pointed to the possibility of closing some of the websites according to rationalisation(economic, information, etc.) criteria. Finally, a new portal was launched with a new wayof organising information and which, moreover, adopted a single domain name for all thehttp://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic