The Government of Kerala provides many services to its citizens through different government departments. The vast majority of the services covered under the Right to Services Act (RTS) have been made online by various departments. In the COVID pandemic situation, people needed to have access to all government services through a unified portal from the comfort of their homes without going to government offices. Currently, citizens can access the online services of various departments only through the website of each department which causes practical difficulty. In this context, the Government of Kerala designed a centralised Kerala Service Portal incorporating the online services of all departments.
Over 1300 applications, 57+ departments, 250+ disparate application sets enable access to citizen services in Kerala. The unified service delivery platform aims to provide a consistent experience to its citizens across all services under ‘Kerala Sevanam’. It is a long-haul project (12-36 months) and will be carried out in multiple phases for which the Kerala government will leverage DIGIT by eGov Foundation and use the platform-based approach for building out the unified service delivery platform and enable standardisation. For citizens, the platform will be a single place for availing all services with consistent experience leading to faster TATs. For departments/employees, it will result in visibility into services, and requests, and monitoring KPIs around performance, etc. For administrators, the platform would enable near-real-time information availability leading to improved governance and faster decision-making based on data.
eGov Foundation is acting as an enabling partner for the ‘Kerala Sevanam’ initiative. In Dec 2022, a 4-day DIGIT Immersion workshop was conducted for the conducted for the Kerala State Information Technology, National Institute for Smart Government members and vendor partners to enable the team with information about problem discovery, the platform-based approach, requirement refinement/elicitation, an overview of DIGIT services, and on how to build platforms on DIGIT.
The workshop aimed at enabling the team, right from hiring the right folks (e.g. tech arch) to helping them understand and build the platform thinking. Since DIGIT would be leveraged for building the unified service delivery platform, additional capabilities might be built around DIGIT on which the eGov team will be guiding the partners on how to design using a platform-based approach.
- Identifying picture of success
- What is unified service delivery, how can they achieve it in phases
- How and what KPIs to build the platform for
- eGov way of doing things – program, tech, product, impel