Mapping improvement options of government services: illustration of ‘concept-mapping’

Abstract

This paper introduces concept mapping – one form of ‘structured conceptualization’ – through describing and structuring improvement options of Hungarian government service centres (in Hungarian, these service centres are also known as ‘government windows’ or ‘kormányablakok’). Hungarian service centres are implementations of the ‘one-stop shop’ concept where almost all government service needs (close to 2,500 cases or procedures; the most common ones are about ID cards, passports and vehicle registrations) of citizens can be met independently of their residence. Conse-quently, successful implementation of this concept requires new, service-oriented attitude from the staff and much higher level of technical integration than before. Concept mapping uses inputs from stakeholders (managers and staff members of these centres) to describe the problem domain (service improvement options in this example), using natural language input (Hungarian in this case). These inputs are then grouped (by multi-dimensional scaling and Ward hierarchical clustering) and rated by importance. Inputs from the stakeholders were solicited continually throughout the project to determine the final number of clusters and to develop an action plan for improvement, considering the relative importance of the options. Pattern matching was also used to highlight differences between stake-holder groups.