Document based process improvement in the public sector: settling for the second best is the best you can do

Documents play an important role in the public sector. Contemporary ICT (e.g. workflow management systems, image processing, electronic document management and electronic document interchange) offers possibilities to support organizational processes which handle large volumes of documents, enabling new organizational structures. In an inter-organizational setting this may result in a shift of boundaries between co-operating organizations. The paper describes a case study conducted at the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment of the Netherlands. We studied the Individual Rent Subsidy (IRS) program. A central governmental agency, 633 municipalities, and 2000 private organizations, such as non-profit housing corporations, are involved in the IRS program. Almost one million applications are yearly processed. Nearly all information is exchanged in hardcopy form. The possibilities of supporting the IRS program with ICT are examined. For this purpose a simulation model was constructed. Two kinds of alternatives were studied: optimizing current document exchange without changing the competence in the organizational chain and (re)structuring the inter-organizational structure. The paper demonstrates that the lack of consistency in the IRS operations at the local level is a barrier for implementing ICT on an inter-organizational level. Secondly, it illustrates that considerations at a political level block an efficient process structure