ABC Luxembourg has proudly contributed to the the Sixth International SPICE Conference, held at the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor, with the presentation of the industrial experience entitled "Using Business Process Management at the Citizen Center of the City of Luxembourg to Improve Business and ICT Solution Definition Process and to Initiate a Continuous Improvement Cycle".

The industrial experience
This industrial experience is based on an exciting success story at the City of Luxembourg. Instead of time consuming trips to different city offices, residents now go to the Citizen Center for everything from changes of residence, applications for identity cards, passports and tax reporting forms, to resident parking permits. Gathering all these services into one geographical location was a prerequisite of this customer-centered initiative. Nevertheless, the major challenge laid in the business process improvement request, both from a business and an ICT perspective.

The major results
The presentation illustrates three major results of this real-life project.
1. How the city operations have been reorganized into optimized business processes to deliver a higher level of service to citizens.
2. How the most appropriate IT solution was identified to support the newly defined business solution.
3. How the project delivery process succeeded in meeting strict budget and time constraints set by the City of Luxembourg, and in dealing with resistance to change from both business and IT units by mobilizing all impacted people throughout the project from its very beginning.

The road map
To achieve these results, the project went through three phases demonstrating best BPM practices.

The first phase described the As-Is situation by documenting all the business processes to be centralized from the various city departments. 59 structured processes and 32 individual processes, 80 products and services, or 202 legal documents are examples of documented pieces of information, capturing an extended knowledge of all the functional processes and actors with their associated business rules and the IT application cartography supporting them.

The second phase focused on the new organization and solution (To-Be situation), with a two-fold objective.
(a) To define an optimized business solution by consolidating the numerous services within a business solution revisiting all products and services according to a new customer-focused concept: the citizen’s life events. Moreover, business processes were reorganized using various improvement practices: define a common business glossary of terms, identify common sub-processes, simplify and/or harmonize them, split and/or combine them. With such a “Process Warehouse”, the City of Luxembourg owns a City Administration Knowledge Base unique in Luxembourg, and extremely valuable even for external “administration partners”.
(b) To define the most appropriate ICT solution using the IT application cartography to make a sound impact analysis and assess all ICT solution design and development risks. Documenting such information was a highly critical success factor to make the right decisions to better align both business and ICT solutions and to meet project delivery constraints in terms of deadlines and internal resources.

The third phase developed the ICT solution identified to support the optimized business solution and is operating at the Citizen Center since July 2005.

Today, the Business Process Management approach used as a guideline for the Citizen Center project clearly shows major connections with ISO 15504 recommended approach of process improvement. The “Process Warehouse” is now the cornerstone to go further within a continuous improvement cycle: for instance, process performance measurement practices are already under discussion as the next target step.

Doc. SPICE 2006 - Conference Slides