3.4 Be Informed Exploitation Plans

Company Profile

Be Informed is an internationally operating, independent software vendor. The Be Informed business process platform transforms administrative processes. Thanks to Be Informed’s unique semantic technology and solutions, business applications become completely model-driven, allowing organizations to instantly execute on new strategies and regulations. Organizations using Be Informed often report cost savings of tens of percents. Further benefits include a much higher straight-through processing rate leading to vastly improved productivity, and a reduction in time-to-change from months to days.

The role of Be Informed in MOLTO is to make sure that the solutions developed in the project can indeed be readily integrated into their solutions (the Be Informed Business Process Platform in particular). Be Informed will build on its strong expertise in its domain to guide the project and make sure that the results are exploitable from a commercial point of view in the mid-term. Dissemination to, and feedback from, its client base, as part of the use case development in WP12, will increase the degree of suitability for exploitation.

Be Informed's exploitation strategy is tightly linked to its goal of quickly commercializing MOLTO results, and calls for a rapid and continuous flow of information to its sales force, existing client base and potential future customers. In addition, as an innovative company, Be Informed plans academic talks and publications.

Products Relevant to Opportunity

The outcome of MOLTO is relevant for Be Informed's Business Process Platform. For both client and server product components the translation services based on the GF based prototype can offer translation support at design time as well as runtime. This would enable several usage scenarios to deal with verbalization activities of customers business models and others artefacts.

For more detailed information about this product and its solutions see www.beinformed.com.

Research Transfer Process

The main approach of Be Informed Research and Innovation is based on co-innovation with customers, partners, and other third parties. These activities usually result in a working prototype. Prototypes which seem promising to get enough traction with customers are handed over to Be Informed Product and Solution development.

The MOLTO deliverables will be promoted to our clients and partner in the public sector. The prototype of the MOLTO multilingual verbalization component for integration with Be Informed Business Process Platform will be made available as an optional product component.

Relevant Trends in business domain

In this section we present a concise overview of relevant public sector trends and views within and across European Union Member States on future public services. This background information is not only necessary to understand the societal and political context in which multilingual public sector services take place, but also to detect synergies (and potential divergences) between visions about ontology driven services, language aspects and current developments within the public sector. The presented overview is inter alia based upon recent studies by the OECD (Towards Smarter and more transparent Government, e-government status spring 2010; OECD e-Government project; 25 March 2010; GOV/PGC/EGOV(2010)) and research results from the CROSSROAD Project (A Participative Roadmap for ICT Research in Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling; a support action under the European Commission 7th Framework Programme. http://crossroad.epu.ntua.gr/the-project/objectives/FP7-ICT-4-248458).

Within the context of this project we are dealing with public sector services that provide information and advice and perform transactions between citizens or companies and administrations. By using ontologies which contain concepts, their relations and respective rules, public sector services become decision centric and goal driven. This enables the public sector to become more agile, customer centric, efficient, effective and accountable as well.

In this section we will use the concepts of Governments and Public Sector interchangeably. Political institutions and administrative structures of counties are diverse, but regardless of their shape, they are all part of the Public Sector ecosystem that provides public sector services to citizens and companies or institutions. Governments in Europe face an increasing number of challenges such as ageing populations, immigration, climate change and globalization, further reinforced by the financial crisis. The globalization trend has limited the freedom of governments to manage their national economies and new challenges such as immigration and an ageing population seem to fundamentally affect the scope of public sector activities. At the same time, society’s expectations of public service delivery have by no means diminished as citizens from the 1980s onwards have become more concerned with choice and service quality. The paradox faced is one of open-ended demand versus a capped or falling resource share for actual delivery. Consequently, public administrations are under constant pressure to modernize their practices to meet new societal demands with reduced budgets.

In the Visionary Scenarios Design of the CROSSROAD Project, the researchers present a summary of the main trends with respect to ICT for governance and policy making in the wider context of an evolving public sector. They define a set of core policy trends across the governance and policy modelling domain, which also resonate with the use case settings of the MOLTO project.

1. Greater transparency and accountability of the public sector. A demand for a more transparent and accountable government can be discerned. Many EU Member States have put transparency and accountability policies in place.
2. Improved accessibility of public services. An increased awareness and perception of the needs and wishes of citizens, results in a drive towards more choice and accessibility of public services.
3. Quality, efficiency and effectiveness of the public sector. Many policies are aimed at delivering cheaper solutions while ensuring quality. An increased attention is given to efficiency, as in many sectors government institutions face considerable budget cuts. This trend is particularly driven by dwindling public finances.
4. New models of governance and the emergence and active participation of new stakeholders. A trend that can be discerned in most public sector domains is the emergence of new partnerships, the involvement of intermediaries and the acknowledgement of new stakeholder roles. Citizens, civil society, advocacy groups are increasingly empowered to organise themselves and play a role in public service delivery.
5. Stronger evidence based policy. A resurgence of governance models that value principles such as accountability, monitoring and evaluation reaffirms the principles of evidence-based policy as a necessity for making informed decisions.
6. Citizens’ empowerment, expression of diversity, choice. The role of users is re-valued in a way that acknowledges their new found skills and growing empowerment. The principles of facilitating increased participation, user created content, user engagement, increased independence and ownership of public services applies to all public sector domains.
7. Improved digital competencies, bridging the digital divide. As in all domains technologies increasingly play an important role in the provision of public services, in all sectors questions arise as to the ICT skills of citizens required to have access to those services.
8. Promotion of independent living and self-organisation. Policy makers acknowledge that ICTs can play an important role for inclusion of all citizens and in order to achieve social equity and cohesion. In many countries ICT policies aim at enhancing the independence of citizens – for instance elderly or disadvantaged groups.

Within the context of this project we are dealing with public sector services which provide information and advice and perform transactions between citizens or companies and administrations. This type of services is decision centric by nature. They are dealing with rights, permissions and obligations, for instance in the domain of permits and grants. The activities that have to be supported by the services are knowledge intensive. Another characteristic is that they are event driven. This makes them perfect candidates for semantic enabled services. Ontologies are situated at the core of this kind of services.

We have to take into account that ontology support for public services is not only positioned at the end of the service chain, where government and citizen meet each other, but throughout the whole service chain. Treating a request for a permit and deciding upon this request is based upon the same rules as getting advice whether one is entitled to acquire the permit. So, the concepts and rules that are used in ontologies apply as well to the citizens interactions as to the administrative officials interactions. The need for localization can however differ between these two target groups. In a traditional view public sector services are positioned at the execution and enforcement layer of the public sector infrastructure. This layer deals with policy implementation. For reasons of scoping we will focus in this stage of the project also on this policy implementation layer.

We foresee however a trend in which the use of ontologies will go more upstream towards the policy making process, since this will leverage the best outcome.