This week we want to present you the third good practice shared by the ARCTIC PACER partners of Umeå University (Västerbotten, Sweden), lead partners of the BitStream II project: the ‘Evaluation method to assess the value of potential e-services’.

This method helps to effectively evaluate and prioritize potential e-services, which are documented in an Excel workbook. Swedish partners explain that when planning the development of a new e-service, eight different areas have to be considered: requirement analysis, intervention, project overview, service analysis, compilation, plausibility assessment, scenarios and result analysis.

According to our partners, “the method works well but it has the disadvantage of being very thorough”. In almost all cases the new e-service is supposed to replace a manually conducted service. This means that the method demands that the organization using it has data showing the volume of use of the manual service and through which channels it is accessed by citizens.

It also requires that the organization has data showing how much time is used to handle each case for the service and the operating cost of the service. “The method has been tested by Umeå kommun and Statens innkrevingssentral, and during the tests we discovered that, that data needed to use the method very seldom was to be found in these organizations. Therefore, the method is currently not used in their daily businesses”, adds our partner Mikael Söderström from Umeå University. The Excel workbook and the manual for the method can be downloaded (in Swedish) from the project website: bitstreamproject.org.