HERA final report available for download (german only)

HERA: Process-oriented Cross-organisational E-Government (download Flyer)

Recent e-government approaches adopt a cross-organisational process view, which is motivated by the following observations:

• Government agencies often do not work independently but need to collaborate. This is especially necessary to offer a one-stop shop portal to citizens or companies.
• The delivery of user-oriented e-government services requires in many cases a flexible integration of the services of various stakeholders and thus resembles more a cross-organisational process. For example, the submission of a tax declaration not only includes the submission itself but also its preparation together with the trustee and the auditor, the delivery of the tax assessment and maybe further enquiries and requests for additional documents.
  

The need for a stronger process-oriented view motivated the HERA project. It pursues three major goals:

• A generic framework (reference architecture) for process-oriented e-government applications aims at significantly reducing the effort required to implement and maintain cross-organisational e-government applications. Among others, the framework allows to compose the services provided by the various stakeholders into a coherent process.
• A prototypical implementation of an e-government process for the declaration of company taxes on profits will validate the practical applicability of the generic framework.
• The compliance with major federal e-government initiatives such as the Event Bus Schweiz (Informatikstrategieorgan Bund) and SEDEX (Bundesamt für Statistik) ensures the long-term viability of the HERA architecture.
  

From a user’s point of view, using HERA for the submission of company tax declarations has the following benefits:

• Process transparency
  
• Faster communication
• Complete record files
• Correct processes
• Reduced manual effort and elimination of errors
• Eliminating duplicate efforts
• Integration with related e-government processes

HERA is funded by the CTI Swiss Confederation’s innovation promotion agency under grant number 8617.1.

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