Opportunities and Challenges of Process Sharing Platforms in E-Government

A process sharing platform will be launched in 2015 for the Swiss E-Government BPM community. The platform will be open to public administrations, private BPM practitioners, and academics. We reflect in this paper on the general opportunities and challenges of such a platform. We have identified four domains in which it can greatly improve the efficiency of BPM projects and the general BPM uptake in public administrations: planning, process modeling, comparative analysis and systemic analysis. Despite all the potential of such a platform, we believe that there is also a risk that the users might not engage sufficiently in the community for the platform to be successful. We believe the communication on and about the platform should be given particular attention, by the use of professional marketing tools and methods. We also advise that a step-by-step BPM methodology serving as a general guideline for the public administration should be published on the platform and maintained by the community. This methodology could not only help in rising the success rate of BPM projects in the administration, but could also improve the perception of added value of the platform amongst practitioners and decision-makers by raising their understanding of BPM to the required level.