Designing service-centered Web sites for public administrations

There is presently no well-established method for the analysis and design of Internet sites. Current approaches mainly rely on graphical tools to assemble pages. This paper presents a method to support the development of Web sites for public administration. In our approach, a Web site is an integrated set of customized services. The services we consider are specific to public administration although some can be used by other (private) organizations. Our method has two main steps. The first step is to make the right choices and to avoid some Internet project pitfalls by check-listing items which must be considered before, during and after a project. It includes the selection of intended services, in particular transactional services which imply a workflow between a citizen and a public administration. The second step consists of service parameterization. This paper outlines the method and presents a pilot project in Switzerland which involves a thirty-user extranet of transactional administrative services for unemployed people