The Architecture of 3 D Administration

The objective of this article is to introduce the main blocks in building virtual front and back offices of public administration. Virtual administration is probably kind of an ultimate or top stage of ICT platforms of e-government. First a justification is given why 3D government fits in the recent EU directives of e-government development. The relevant scholarship contains a brief description of the visualized e-government, and then a fully illustrated, step by step survey reveals the itinerary to construct virtual government which is the main result of the study. The article concludes with a discussion on the practical benefit of such a research if there is one.


Introduction to the e-Government Environment of Virtual Reality
The Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future (COCOPS) is a major European Union project in public administration research (Note 1).Its Working Program 8 aims to explore the futures of public administration reforms in the special highlight of the measures so far taken in the name of new public administration and the ongoing global economic crisis hitting Europe's economy severely.There are symptoms of the changes that are emerging in the new modes of governance towards demand-driven and responsive character.The COCOPS team say that structural changes have led to a growth of network governance-style arrangements and a virtualization of the public sector through the growth of e-government (Walle, 2013).The topic of this study aims at introducing the theory of the convergence of the digital interactive television and the virtual reality programs applied in the content development of e-government.
The issue of virtualization and e-government is important, because the budget-cutting strategies introduced in public administration in many countries seem to work against the priorities of responsive, inclusive and customer friendly government like it has been observed in Germany, France, Spain and Hungary where the international comparative research revealed a considerable deteriorated state of public administration services over the last five years (Walle 2013) as reflected in the public managers' perceived impact of new public management measures.
The study relates to few previous works (e.g.Jenei, 2010;Tózsa, 2012Tózsa, , 2013) ) in the area as the topic concerns future development of public sector service content.
The objectives of the study include  outlining the scope of content development for digital interactive television and virtual reality applications in a customer friendly front office service and a cost effective back office operation;  the tasks that have to be observed when doing research and pilot applications in these ICT platforms;  the convergence of the communication tools in mobile, television and virtual reality Internet devices, similar to the one we have witnessed in the case of smart phones (i.e. the convergence of cell phones and the Internet).
Therefore it is rather a hypothetical study of considerations of the futures of public services, where the practical content development issues are perceived in pilot working models and not in any actual front or back office operations.Evaluation and surveying the practical applications are tomorrow's issues.

Importance of Virtual Reality in Administration
To underline the importance of the topic two quotations can be mentioned from Friedrich August von Hayek professor.The first one goes 'governance is the art of causing the least possible damage to society' and it has been the major philosophical initiative of the introduction of e-government and all public administration reforms that have tried so far to improve government services.According to the other 'the more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.'In electronic-government the workflows have to be digitized what requires planning and automation.The lack of personal contact between the customer and the customer representative is often mentioned as one of the main reasons blocking the widespread application of e-government.
When virtual reality is going to be introduced in e-government, this problem, however, seems to be solved as it will be seen in this article.Also, at present, if the avatars of real bio-physical form are not taken into consideration, there is no further stage of ICT development available in theory for government administration purposes than the Internet-based convergence of interactive digital television and smart phones.

Relevant Scholarship on e-Government Modernization
Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) has emerged as one possible platform, since it brings an interactive capacity to a medium that is both familiar and easy to use.While we now have a significant evidence base of provider and user experiences, the relative immaturity of the technology and the nature of the iDTV initiatives themselves have prevented a full investigation of electronic public services via iDTV (Smith & Webster, 2006).This may also be due to the interest and market policy of the large multinational broadcasting companies who have to protect their IpTV services on the one hand and have to prevent the market distribution of the decoders with Internet modems needed for interactive DTV on the other.The selling of more advanced DTV decoders ensuring interoperability will have to be due, when there is a stronger market demand for that in the information societies all over Europe I suppose, based on the informal information received from one of those companies.Until then the international EuroITV Conferences are to strengthen the future social demand, with introducing research project reports on the application of iDTV mainly in local community building processes.
The best way to contribute to electronic and mobile government is by creating a public administration network in virtual communities.This could be a proper definition of Virtual Public Administration (VPA) as pointed out by Kapogiannis et al (2008).They came to the conclusion that where the sense of time is presented in terms of project management implementation in virtual and real terms, procedures in virtual reality could be more effective in terms of time, management of risk and service levels.Their perception may serve as the basic platform of iDTV and virtual reality convergence as it was among the first ones to summarize the benefits of virtual reality -in the public sector and in virtual communities.That is what the iDTV projects aim at, too: virtual communities, simplicity to use, interoperability, less time needed and risk in management or administration.
However, the public administration application of iDTV was a rather unique idea in the middle 2000s (Tózsa 2006) and was still in 2010, when it was first introduced on the program of EuroITV in Tampere Finland as an independent panel discussion (Jenei, 2010).

Application Design
In late 2011 the American Utherverse's Hungarian distributor (Virtual Planet's) offered the Faculty of Pubic Administration a co-operation in e-government development, as they were planning to build a virtual city with entertainment facilities, banks, shops and a municipality.Using the so far collected experiences in constructing administration workflow for mobile handsets and television, the Budaörs Municipality was chosen as a pilot environment for virtual 3D administration.Budaörs is a small Hungarian town west of Budapest, which is the capital city.It is situated in a gateway position of the capital and its local government office was used for testing mobile and television government experiences by the University earlier.After creating the office environment a successful press conference took place in the summer of 2012 where the operation of the pilot was introduced displaying a real time conversation between the avatars of a customer and a customer representative in front of the professional press and an audience of local government employees, professionals and academic representatives from the University.The results and the output of the pilot are published in a Video (accessible in Hungarian language at Tózsa, Illés, & Gelencsér, 2012) and in a study in English (Tózsa, 2013).In the following a somewhat more elaborated approach is published regarding the building of a system to be applied in municipal front and back office processes.

Future Challenges
'The futures of an agency's work now rests in new and evolving technologies that support real-time, dynamic interactions.'This is exactly where the building of the 3D virtual administration fits in.The new 'applications demand dynamic technologies involving data access, database management, authentication, and security of a very different nature from the old Web.The dynamic Web makes closer connections between an agency's internal systems and the outside world, presenting new risks and demanding new tools and techniques for managing them.' (Dawes 2002) This quotation though more than 10 years old, still can be seen on the web page of the Centre for Technology in Government (University of Albany) serving like a justification of the shift from the static Web to a dynamic and interactive Web.
One thing is sure, navigare necesse est, as Pompeius Magnus had said, scientific survey, academic research and university education of the new horizons must not stop either because of financial difficulties or the temporary lack of social demand.In a step by step approach to the perfect and virtual, visualized e-government it is wise to hold with the Japanese proverb that goes like 'vision without action is daydream, but action without vision is nightmare.'

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Figure 4. B Figur