Catalogue Services
Government services are often distributed across numerous websites, presented inconsistently, and difficult to understand.
Changing this requires two core components:
The service catalogue: This provides the content basis and answers questions such as: What services are available and how are they structured?
The One-Stop Shop: This describes how the service catalogue is presented to users (i.e. the user interface) and answers questions such as: Where can citizens access all services at a glance?
Both elements are inherently connected. While the service catalogue defines the content and structure of government services, the One-Stop Shop is the user interface that presents services in a consistent and an easily accessible manner.
Catalogue services
A government digital service catalogue is an online platform or database that provides information about various digital services and resources offered by a government to its citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders. The service catalogue can be made available to users with a consistent/unified user experience.
No service lives in a vacuum, thus it is important to understand how they fit together to impact the overall user experience. This interplay of services based on the life events that trigger their need can be mapped using the User/Business Life event map. Once the services are mapped, they can be further analyzed to understand the level of their digital maturity and potential for simplification.
Service patterns
As the service catalogue serves as a structured and comprehensive directory of government services, a consistent approach is needed to ensure the consistency of all entries.
Service patterns provide a consistent structural logic that allows services in the catalogue to be organized, compared, and maintained using shared, repeatable components. They enable governments to standardize how services are described and delivered, ensuring the catalogue remains coherent, scalable, and easy to navigate for both administrators and end users.
Further detailed information about Service Patterns can be found here: Service catalogue | Service Patterns | GovStack Specification
One-Stop Shop
Information about government services is often complicated to access and understand for citizens. The lack of homogeneity in location, format, language, and level of detail leads to insufficient clarity regarding the actions and procedures that users must follow to access the services.
A citizen/business One-Stop Shop facilitates access to information on government services, entities, and citizen participation mechanisms among other resources in one place in a user-centric way.
How does a good citizen/business One-Stop Shop benefit its users?
It allows its user to easily:
Find the service/information they need by identifying the event that triggered the need. Example: Registering a newborn
Find the required information and actions to obtain the service
Understand the provided information and actions without any assistance
Obtain services in a uniform, simple, standardized way
Seek support from competent authority when needed
How does a good citizen/business One-Stop Shop benefit digital teams?
A good citizen/business One-Stop Shop allows:
Analysis of the entire catalogue of services to easily identify redundancies in requirements, sequencing of services according to life events, and opportunities for simplification
One-time creation of machine-readable service information that can be accessed by users through various channels
User centricity leading to elevated user experience
Democratized accessibility and improved usage rates
Better management of the service portfolio
Examples
Links to examples of service catalogues:
Mexico: Gob.mx
UK: Gov.uk
Uruguay: Gov.uy
Australia: Gov.au
Singapore: Gov.sg
Peru: Gob.pe
Colombia: Gov.co
Brazil: Gov.br
Estonia: Gov.ee
Argentina: Gob.ar
Abu Dhabi Government Services
Abu Dhabi has developed a catalogue that clusters services based on user/business life events. The following image shows the front end of the One-Stop-Shop for services offered by the Abu Dhabi government:
The following images show the services within each cluster within the user/business life events:
Argentine chatbot "Tina"
Another innovative example is the chatbot developed by the Argentine government. Tina is a trans-actional chatbot that retrieves information from Argentina's digital service catalogue and presents it over chat to its users. This demonstrates the possibility to share the machine-readable content of services with users via multiple channels.
Unique digital platform of the Peruvian State
The landing page of gob.pe that presents the most demanded services:
Each service has its own dedicated service information sheet that presents requirements, citizen feedback on the quality of information on the service sheet, and the date on which the service sheet was last updated.
Activities
Define the structure of the catalogue of services. RFI-II provides a template to assist in cataloguing the services.
Classify services based on their digital maturity. The level of maturity of services facilitates calculating the financial and technical effort that will be required to digitalize a citizen-centric government service. An example of classification is as follows:
Level 1 - Informative: Information on the service is made available online yet the actual transaction happens in person.
Level 2 - Downloadable forms: The users can download and complete the forms while having to submit the same forms in-person or upload the documents.
Level 3 - Submission of webform: Users can validate data showcased on the web form, upload the required documents, fill out forms, and submit them remotely.
Level 4: 100% online
Understand how services are related to one another. A User/Business Life event map can enable visual mapping of services to life events, their clustering, and identification of relations and dependencies.
Standardize information presentation to citizens/businesses:
Develop a Service Information Sheet Standard (SISS): This sheet would contain standardized fields such as service name; requirements; cost for the user; the location where the service can be obtained; concrete actions required from the user; and outcome of the service
Government Entity Information Standard (GEIS): This sheet would contain standardized fields such as the mandate of the entity, the programs it manages, and the services it provides
Citizen Feedback/Participation Standard (CFPS): A standard for the government to seek input from citizens through surveys, discussion forums, and comments on laws
Responsibilities
Who does what:
Head of Service Design - Lead the integration of the service catalogue
Service Design and Delivery Focal point - Complement and update the service catalogue with services from their organisations. They follow up and coordinate the actions within their organization to digitize services according to the approved digitization roadmap
Digital communications team: Develop UX guidelines and training focal points and perform random auditing on quality-of-service sheets to ensure they meet the service sheet standards
Deliverables
Service catalogue, with services mapped to citizen/business life events
Training material on UX writing
Service Information Sheet Standard
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