Applying Business Process Change (BPC) to Implement Multi-agency Collaboration: The Case of the Greek Public Administration

A great number of recent studies in the e-government area focus on investigating how technology-induced changes in the public sector connect with the New Public Management (NPM) reform, envisioned by many politicians. Researchers in this field contend that e-government denotes a structural and process-oriented change of governmental organizations, with the objective of getting them to run more efficiently. Adopting this perspective, this paper revisits a well-established business process change (BPC) methodology for the public sector and applies it to analyse the Greek initiative of Citizens Service Centers (CSCs) towards a one-stop hybrid (physical and electronic) government model. Considering the particularities of public organizations, we position our research as dealing fundamentally with ex-ante planned incremental changes at the micro level, being part of either a revolutionary or evolutionary transformation program at the macro level. We argue in favor of extending the six stages of the initially prescribed BPC methodology with an additional stage, named ‘institutionalize change’. This serves the need of applying BPC to implement changes that enable multi-agency collaboration at a national level.