The Hungarian Municipality ASP as a good practice of local government digitalisation aligned with the European Interoperability Framework

Mihály Dán, e-Government advisor, Department for e-Government, Ministry of Interior of Hungary

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The new European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is a key instrument for establishing interoperable digital public services at all levels of public administration. Implementing the EIF's principles and ensuring holistic interoperability and integrated public service governance can be a very complex issue. Especially on the local government level, the challenge comes from the autonomous nature and differences between local communities. In Hungary’s experience this can be most easily tackled by the establishment of a central solution – for which ensuring the compliance with the national e-Government policy criteria aligned to the EIF can be ensured effectively.

Regarding the digitalisation of local governments, the experience gained during the decade following the accession of Hungary to the EU has shown that mostly the local governments with larger populations and more resources have been successful in developing their IT solutions. Nevertheless, typically their e-administration service provision did not go further than developing their websites for providing information online. At the same time in the back-office, mainly isolated solutions have been developed; integration between various sector specific systems was still low.

Based on this experience, the Government has come to the conclusion that local government IT developments have to continue in a more centralised way. Due to the need of spreading unified technical quality standards and ensuring an optimal use of investment and operational resources, a centralised application service providing model seemed to be the most appropriate solution to promote local government digitalisation.

How to connect over 3000 municipalities in Hungary?

The Application Service Provider (ASP) model is largely used worldwide in many business sectors and public administrations since a long time as a cost-effective solution. The advantage of the ASP model is that the user can access the software as a service provided by a remote service provider online via a simple web browser. This model can be technologically and economically advantageous also for municipalities to support the wide range of their functions.

As a first step towards the realisation of a central ASP for local governments, between 2012 and 2015 the pilot project “Establishing a Municipality ASP center” was implemented with the use of EU funds. The pilot started in 2015 with 55 voluntarily participating local municipalities, and further 39 municipalities joined from January 2016.

Following the successful pilot, the Government decided to develop the service and extend it at the national level on a mandatory basis. The implementation started in 2016 within the project “Municipality ASP 2.0” financed by EU funds within the framework of the Public Administration and Civil Service Development Operational Programme. Also the necessary legislation has been adopted to make the use of services of the Municipality ASP compulsory for local governments.

The goal of the Municipality ASP is to provide modern, integrated and cost-effective state of the art IT solutions in SaaS model for local governments, fostering standardised internal operation and a common platform-based provision of local e-Government services to citizens and businesses.

According to the Government Decree No. 257/2016. (VIII. 31.) on the Municipality ASP, on 1 January 2017 a total number of 1,679 mostly smaller local governments have been connected to the service with a partial portfolio. As a next milestone, on 1 January 2018 over 1,200 more municipalities joined, this time already accessing full service portfolio. From this date those connected in 2017 got access to all of the services as well.

As a result with 2,994 connected municipalities, more than 93 percent of Hungarian local governments are now using the central Municipality ASP solution – an outstanding result also at the European level. The next enlargement of the Municipality ASP on 1 January 2019 will involve the remaining approximately two hundred local governments as well.

The current service portfolio consists of the following integrated systems:

• Framework system and operational support systems
• Financial management system
• Local tax management system
• Property cadastre system
• Industrial and commercial management system
• Document management system
• Inheritance registration system
• Online form management tool
• Local government e-administration single point of contact portal
• Municipality portal service (optional service for publishing a local government website cost-efficiently)

Benefits of Municipality ASP

The work of local government officers is supported by the integration between the systems, as well as by the external data connections and back-office and client-side electronic administration functionalities.

Within the framework of the project, priority has been given to the compliance with the e-Government policy principles laid down in the domestic e-Government strategies as well as the e-Government policy criteria set by the Ministry of Interior. This also means that the alignment with the e-Government development objectives of the European Union, including the EIF, is ensured.

Accordingly, the project has placed great emphasis on increasing the rate of use of open source software, the reuse of existing solutions, improving the transparency of local government operations. At the same time, it helps protecting personal and non-personal data, increasing technology neutrality, and providing all of this with a focus on user-centricity. In addition, it is of the utmost importance that as a result of the project, significant progress has been made in delivering client-side services and in providing one-stop shop electronic administration for the citizens and businesses towards the local government sector.

With respect to open source solutions, it is notable that many of the Municipality ASP’s systems are based on PostgreSQL database management, the Municipality portal service uses a Drupal development framework, but also the system’s infrastructure within the Government Data Center provides many open source software solutions. The Municipality ASP’s user interface itself is platform independent due to the nature of the web browser based ASP model, thus it can be used in an open source or free software environment as well.

Another very important objective of the project is to improve interoperability and  reuse of existing solutions such as the regulated electronic administrative services provided by the state (the “building blocks” of electronic administrative processes), and to foster the once-only principle.

A good example of reusing existing solutions is the use of the eID cards for user authentication. As a result, the local government employees can only access the Municipality ASP’s applications by using their own electronic identity card. Another example of reuse to highlight is the electronic administration service provision process, where the project has integrated the centrally provided regulated electronic administrative services to comply with e-Government policy criteria and the relevant legal provisions. It was also an important requirement that interconnection with external systems and base registries had to be done via the Central Governmental Service Bus (KKSzB) technical interoperability platform.

As a result of the project, a significant step has been made in the case of the connected municipalities at all levels of interoperability. The former local administrative silos are gradually disappearing thanks to the undergone significant development, thus making cooperation within the public administration easier.

e-Government service provision process of the Municipality ASP in practice The Municipality ASP’s portfolio provides an online form management tool for local governments. The Municipality ASP Center itself has the competence to edit online form templates for local government use, so far it provides 60 templates. Further templates are going to be published continuously. Most of the forms available now are related to procedures that are supported by the specialised professional applications within the ASP portfolio. These are mostly the local taxation system and the industry and commerce management system, but other cases are also covered, even procedures that are not supported by a specific software of the ASP’s portfolio. The form templates provided centrally can be customised by the municipality officers with the use of the online form management tool, after which they can be published on the Municipality ASP’s Local Government E-Administration Portal the point of single contact for local government e-administration. The Portal has a local government search engine, but default municipalities and favourites can be set. After the client selects a local government, there is another search engine available to find relevant forms published online by category. So far more than 93% of connected local governments have already published personalised online forms out of 60 available templates. /isa2/file/screenshotofthelocalgovernmente-administrationportalshowingtheformsearchengine-croppedpng_enscreenshot_of_the_local_government_e-administration_portal_showing_the_form_search_engine-cropped.png Screenshot of the Local Government E-administration Portal showing the form search engine. For initiating a procedure, the client selects the relevant form, and after a few seconds of initialisation it pops up already pre-filled with some of the data gained from the respective base registries: the personal data and contact data, as well as tax ID, social security number and contact details (e-mail address, mobile phone number) are pre-filled, and the disposition register of the client is also automatically consulted. In case that no online form is available for a specific procedure, there is a direct link navigating to the e-Paper service launched in 2017. This can be used for official, authenticated electronic communication with the public administration in such cases that do not have separate forms. It means that practically all cases can be administered online, except for such procedures where according to the law there is no place for e-administration. /isa2/file/screenshotofanonlineformforopeningaretailstoreinthetownofbatonyterenyepng_enscreenshot_of_an_online_form_for_opening_a_retail_store_in_the_town_of_batonyterenye.png Screenshot of an online form for opening a retail store in the town of Bátonyterenye Both these services are available for use after the client authenticated himself via the Central Authentication Agent service integrated into the e-administration service of the Municipality ASP. Authentication is possible with the use of a Client Gate account, the Hungarian elD card or telephone code identification. (Following the adherence of Hungary to the eIDAS scheme, the eIDAS authentication will be also available.) After the specific form (or a general e-Paper form) has been filled, necessary documents attached and everything sent, the authenticated electronic file will be delivered with the help of a digital post solution by an authentic e-delivery service to the local government’s authentic digital mailbox. The Municipality ASP’s document management software supports the entire electronic administration back-office process. It automatically receives and downloads incoming files from the digital mailbox(es) of the local government. Following processing it also supports electronic authentication and sending the answer via the e-delivery service to the personal authentic digital mailbox of the client.  The Municipality ASP is to be developed constantly both in regards to back-office and client-side services during the upcoming months. Ongoing developments include usability improvements as well as the introduction of new functions. Further pre-filling of data will be available in the near future as there are developments under way that are aiming to include more interoperable connections. One of these will be the pre-filling of local tax balance data in the related forms directly from the local tax management system of the Municipality ASP. Also the electronic payment service is planned to be introduced in 2019, so that the clients can easily pay their dues via the Portal. In addition a data warehouse solution is currently being developed to support the local governments’ as well as the central government’s planning and analysis tasks, providing big data analysis of the anonymized data derived from the above listed systems.