2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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ServiceOntario

ServiceOntario Web site

The vision of the Ontario Ministry of Government Services is to be a responsive, innovative world leader in customer service and consumer protection by delivering quality products for a fair, safe, dynamic and informed Ontario marketplace. In keeping with this, the ministry relaunched its Integrated Service Delivery Division in October 2004, rechristening it as ServiceOntario.

With headquarters in Toronto, ServiceOntario employs about 250 people and reaches Ontarians through a network of information centres, public access terminals and stand-alone electronic kiosks.

Challenge

ServiceOntario identified a need for an interactive Web site that would support a new kind of interaction between the provincial government and those it serves. It needed to remove bureaucratic hindrances and conform to today's heightened need for privacy and security.

Objectives

To succeed this solution would need to:

• Incorporate best practices;
• Have "no wrong door;"
• Be accessible;
• Provide service in English and French;
• Be multi-channel and multi-jurisdictional;
• Provide users the services they want, when, where and how they want them;
• Be intuitively understandable by being customer-centric.

A ServiceOntario online channel would provide clients with a means to access all the information they required in one place, instead of having to know in advance in which ministerial bailiwick it resided or hunt for it at numerous Web sites. Services and information would be organized in a way that appeared logical to clients, as well as being comprehensive and easy to find.

"We also wanted an electronic presence to support our telephone support, electronic kiosks and customer-service counters," explains Mary Tate, assistant deputy minister of ServiceOntario.

"The more successfully customers could serve themselves online, the higher the quality of services ServiceOntario representatives could provide to a subset of them in person at the counter and from the call centres, thereby increasing productivity while reducing service costs."

Solution

The project was carried out entirely by ServiceOntario staff. During the first nine months, the project team classified material into logical topics that would be of interest to specific groups. The site was divided into two main gateways, one for businesses and the other for individuals, with each subdivided again into additional topics containing useful information and links.

Today, a visitor to www.serviceontario.ca accesses a new and secure infrastructure. While services offered on the site appear to the client as one integrated system, behind the front end, information is treated at the highest level of security and handled as separate individual transactions, to conform with privacy laws.

The ServiceOntario site collects the user's information without keeping a copy of it, encripts it at many layers, and parses it out to each of the government facilities implicated in the client transaction. The client's information is never gathered together in a single file and each government agency or ministry accesses only specifically pertinent information.

For example, the Integrated Address Change application permits individuals to change or update addresses online for their Ontario health card, driver's licence and outdoors card. Although to a client this appears as a single contact to a group of ministries, it is actually three discrete transactions to three different ministries. The same is true of the Change Your Business information service, which lets businesses communicate to the Ontario Ministry of Government Services, the Ontario Ministry of Finance and Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, all at once.

Ontario citizens commonly interact with the government through the completion of forms, and the ServiceOntario Web site hosts an online forms service that organizes 400 of them by topic, as well as providing search functions. Clients no longer have to guess which ministry program a particular form belongs to. They can simply select the appropriate one from a number of categories.

The usage rate for August 2005 was 66,000 unique users and more services are to be added to the site, based on volume and usage.

Innovative User of Technology

The new online channel is a new way of doing government business in Ontario. The channel provides information and services that seamlessly cross ministry and government jurisdictions. The concept works hand-in-hand with call centres and in-person information counters.

Relationships are being built with the federal and municipal governments with the aim of providing the citizens of Ontario online information and services from all three levels of government.

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all its stakeholders, ServiceOntario has been awarded a Silver Award of Excellence from the 2005 Canadian Information Productivity Awards in the Customer Care Not For Profit category.

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