Jack Verhoosel is an IT-Architect and Senior Business Consultant at TNO ICT, a Dutch research and consultancy institute.

He leads a group on e-business and e-government technology, interoperability and standardization, architecture and consultancy. In his role of IT architect and senior business consultant, he has been working for various government organisations, such as the SVB, IND, ICTU (the central ICT organisation of the Dutch government). In addition, he is responsible for various large projects both in R&D activities as in the business and government areas.

Presentation

An eGovernment Architecture for Self-Service to Citizens: The Dutch Social Insurance case

In The Netherlands, the Social Insurance Bank (the Dutch acronym is SVB) is a large government institute that is since 1956 responsible for the provisioning of social insurance services. These government services are provided to around 5 million citizens and include old age pension and child benefit. The total amount of payments for these services is around € 30 billion per year.

Currently, the main channels used by the SVB to communicate with citizens are regular mail, telephone and face-to-face assistance at the desk. For the next couple of years the SVB wants to make a shift towards providing transactional self-services via the web. These services will support citizens in helping themselves to get access to social insurance without any intervention of an SVB employee. For example, citizens can use a self-service to apply for an old age pension at the age of 65 years. This self-service guides the citizen through the application process, asks for the necessary information and ends with a legal statement about the height of the old age pension and the date when the first payment will be made.

The SVB uses old, large and monolithic IT systems to provide their services to citizens. These systems are inflexible and maintenance costs are high. Therefore, the SVB has started in 2008 a project to define a new IT-architecture for the next 5 years. This architecture forms the basis for the development or purchasing in 2009 of new IT-components that provide flexibility and support self-servicing.

The objective of this presentation is to sketch an outline of the new IT-architecture for the SVB that needs to be realized in order to support self-servicing of citizens. Another objective of the presentation is to describe the main lessons learned in defining this IT-architecture and give recommendations on the methodology used and on the management of using the architecture to achieve change in the organization and its IT.

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