Untangling public service usage for agribusinesses with dialogic e-government

Abstract

E-government has raised many expectations to public administration employees, businesses and citizens, regarding the simplification of their transactions. Nonetheless, in practice the provision of electronic services is followed by much complexity in the way they are used. A common phenomenon is the confusion of businesses on various issues connected with public service use, such as which public service to use to cover their needs, whether they are eligible to do so, and which agency they should address to. Therefore, the paper tries to address such issues by presenting a dialogic information service for helping agribusinesses' employees to find easily appropriate public services for their business needs and using them without having to search relevant legislation or various public agency Web sites. The proposed service comprises a new extension of the pilot system Agroportal, and has been based on the methods and tools of a European project. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.