New Wine in Old Bottles: Chatbots in Government

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New Wine in Old Bottles: Chatbots in Government

Colin Van Noordt, Gianluca Misuraca

To cite this version:

Colin Van Noordt, Gianluca Misuraca. New Wine in Old Bottles: Chatbots in Government. 11th

International Conference on Electronic Participation (ePart), Sep 2019, San Benedetto Del Tronto,

Italy. pp.49-59, �10.1007/978-3-030-27397-2_5�. �hal-02446018�

New Wine in Old Bottles: Chatbots in Government

Exploring the transformative impact of Chatbots in

public service delivery

Colin van Noordt

 and Gianluca Misuraca

Visiting Researcher, Joint Research Centre Seville, Sevilla, ES

PIONEER

-Master Student, Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven

[email protected]

Senior Scientist, Joint Research Centre Seville, Sevilla, ES

[email protected]

Abstract. Advances in Artificial Intelligence technologies have revived the in-

terest in Chatbots in both the private and the public sector. Chatbots could im-

prove public service delivery by being able to answer frequently asked ques-

tions and conduct transactions, relieving staff from mundane tasks. However,

previous e-Government research shows that the adoption of newer technologies

does not always mean public services get improved. It is therefore of interest to

research to which degree newer, advanced technologies such as Chatbots are

able to improve, change and restructure public service delivery. This paper

gives an exploratory insight using desktop research into three Chatbots current-

ly used in the public administrations of Latvia, Vienna and Bonn. The findings

suggest that minor organisational changes are accompanied with the introduc-

tion of Chatbot-technology in public administrations, but question whether

Chatbots are able to transform traditional services to digital, integrated public

service transactions.

Keywords: Digital Transformation, e-Government, Artificial Intelligence,

Chatbot.

1 Introduction

There has been a big interest in the possible gains of using Information and Commu-

nication Technologies (ICT) for the delivery of public services to citizens. Already

during the 1990s, there was a strong belief that information technology services are

able to create a new, better functioning government of the future [1]. Government

operations would be able to become more efficient, of higher quality and also more

accessible to the public.

Public Sector Innovation & eGovernance. This is a joint-master degree from the KU Leuven,

WWU Münster and the Tallinn Technological University.

The internet is always available 24 hours every day, so citizens would be able to

avoid the slow and hierarchical structures of traditional government. They would not

have to rely on the opening times of the government anymore since the Internet al-

lows citizens to find information themselves online and is able to deliver services

through the web [1, 2].

Lately, another technology has captured the attention of the field. Coming from the

realm of Artificial Intelligence, advances in Natural Language Processing-

technologies have revived the potential of Chatbots [3]. Early Chatbots were limited

in their functionalities as they were only able to respond to simple queries. Recent

advances in Artificial Intelligence technologies, in particular the ability for machines

to understand the context of languages better, made it possible for Chatbots to tackle

more complex tasks and host more human-like conversations [3].The optimism for

this technology is great; it has already been predicted by Gartner that by 2020, the

average person will have more conversations with Chatbots than with their own

spouse [4].

In this paper, three cases of Chatbot used in European public administrations are

described and briefly discussed on their transformative potential and integrated ser-

vice delivery. As these Chatbots are frequently mentioned and have won numerous

awards, they could be an indicator of how the future of Chatbots in the European

public sector might look like in the upcoming years. The main aim of this research is

therefore to answer ''Which organizational changes occur within public service deliv-

ery due to the introduction of Chatbot-technologies?". By analysing the transforma-

tive impact of three cases, a greater understanding could be achieved on the impact of

Chatbots within the public sector. In order to answer the research question, this paper

follows a multiple case study design to identify which kind of changes the Chatbot

technology introduced. By analysing three well-known cases of Chatbots technolo-

gies, the findings could be more robust and generalizable rather than relying on one

single case study [5]. The data collection had been done by document based desktop

research. While this enables research from a distance, it does limit the correct inter-

pretation of documents found online and restricts the researcher from gaining addi-

tional information not found on websites by for example conducting interviews [6].

2 The promise of e-Government

An ICT-driven government is argued to be more responsive to citizen-needs, more

democratic, transparent and efficient than a traditional government [2]. Early e-

Government documents have showed that there was a great wish that technologies

would enable a more joined up government apparatus, where different sectors of the

government work together across organisational barriers to tackle public problems in

an integrated approach, rather than different public organisations working isolated

from each other [2, 7].Government-wide information structures would allow different

departments to work together in a more quicker and efficient way as ICT would ease

the communication across organisational barriers [8].

The ICT-reformed public services would then improve government-citizen relations,

reducing democratic gaps and other disappointments experienced by citizens [9]. For

digital public service delivery, it was expected that there would be continuous pro-

gress from information provision online to one and two-way communication between

citizens and the public organisation, transactional services and lastly cross-agency

integrative e-services with more citizen engagement [10].

However, many of the proclaimed benefits of e-government have not been realized

[11]. Despite many investments and projects to realize new innovative forms of gov-

ernance and government service delivery, no substantial gains have been made in the

e-government field. While there are many government services now available online,

there is a significant mismatch within the supply and the demand for these online

services [11]. The techno-deterministic premise that ICT-introduction within the pub-

lic sector would eventually lead to significant reforms within public organisations did

not come by as expected [9]. In fact, most government agencies did not change their

organizational practices towards more citizen-oriented public services if they adopted

ICT as there is still a lack of integration between different public organisations [2].

When public organisations actually do provide public services online, it is frequently

only possible to gain information from the website rather than being able to conduct

interactions or transactions with the public organisation [1, 12]. It has been argued

that this strong focus on information provision exists because it is seen as ''low-

hanging fruit''; implementing transactional digital services would require much more

resources and effort [12].

The promise of fully integrated public service delivery, without the need to go to

multiple organisations, is usually not implemented [13]. This lack of integration

among different public organisations was one of the challenges e-Government was

supposed to solve, but rather, it is one of the greatest challenges which hinder the

potential of e-Government [2]. IT-adoption in governments rather supports current

organisational practices and power rather than changing the processes towards citi-

zen's needs [14].

The introduction of eGovernment-technologies has been argued to enable changes

of different magnitudes within public administrations: at the workplace level, organi-

sational level and inter-organisational level [15]. Firstly, technology allows for small,

incremental changes by automating existing processes and thereby improving the

efficiency of government operations. Secondly, ICT could allow more general organi-

zational changes to support the introduction of newer technologies. These changes are

small adaptions and internal changes, commonly referred to as first-order changes

[16]. Technology introductions in the public sector frequently bring about these kinds

of changes [15]. Thirdly, ICT could also enable transformative or even disruptive

changes by enabling new mechanisms for public service delivery or policymaking,

but limited empirical examples of these changes exist. Lastly, there could be more

radical changes which change the governance systems or radically transform policy-

making mechanisms [16]. These second-order changes are much more substantial as

they radically alter traditional practices, but are more difficult to organize, especially

in the public sector [15].

3 The revival of Chatbots

Chatbots, shorter for conversational agents, are computer programmes which are able

to detect and understand language, through text or through speech, and have the abil-

ity to communicate back [3]. Simply put, Chatbots are computer programs which are

able to recognise the input from a user using pattern matching technologies, access

information and reply with the information found in the knowledge database [17].

Conversational agents are not really a new technology; the first Chatbot was already

programmed in 1966 in order to discover if humans would be able to find out if they

would be talking to a person or a machine [18]. However, the potential for Chatbots is

now taken much more seriously due to advances in AI-technologies and changing

communication patterns. A lot of our daily communication occurs through messaging

apps and we have grown quite comfortable with communicating with them; this

makes the introduction of Chatbots quite frictionless [19]. Currently, there are already

numerous applications of Chatbots used by the private sector, with the most well-

known being the virtual assistants of our mobile phones: Siri, Alexa and Google.

Chatbots are starting to appear into numerous other business sectors in order for peo-

ple to obtain information or to complete interactions without the need for humans [3].

Common usages of Chatbots are as customer service assistants, making reservations,

paying bills and allowing customers to buy products or services online [20].

The public sector has also been looking into the usage of Chatbots to improve pub-

lic service delivery. The main proclaimed benefits of Chatbots are that they allow

organisations to reduce their administrative burden and enhance communication with

citizens [3]. In addition, Chatbots would enable people to overcome information over-

load; rather than having to find information themselves, the Chatbot will help them to

find what they need [21]. Early use cases of Chatbots within public organisations

focus on answering citizen's questions or complaints through customer support,

searching documents, routing citizens to the correct office, translations or drafting

documents [22]. Most Chatbots are well suited to help citizens navigate through web-

sites with lots of information, answer simple questions or conduct transactions.

This removes the need for humans to answer the same kinds of questions over and

over again, allowing human operators to spend more time on complex cases [23, 24].

Others even see the potential of Chatbots to radically improve the citizen experience,

improve citizen engagement and enabling new forms of decision-making with the

help of citizen's interactions with Chatbots. Chatbots could be used to conduct sur-

veys and gain feedback on public services in a more useful way as the Chatbot would

be able to ask follow-up questions [25, 26]. There is certainly a potential value for

government organisations to embrace Chatbots, but based on the history of e-

Government progress, there is a strong need to gather empirical evidence from its

effects.

4 Current Chatbots in government service delivery

4.1 UNA in Latvia:

In 2018, the Register of Enterprises of Latvia introduced the Chatbot UNA to an-

swer frequently asked questions regarding the process of enterprise registration. The

name UNA has a symbolic meaning as it stands for the Future Support of Entrepre-

neurs in the Latvian language. This way, UNA acts as an indicator for the future of

the Latvian public administration; Chatbots are available 24/7 and thus able to make

communication between citizens and the state accessible and friendly [27]. UNA is

available on both the website of the Register of Enterprises as well as on the Face-

book page as part of the Facebook messenger application [28]. UNA is able to answer

frequently asked questions about the registration of their businesses as well as the

liquidation, merchants, companies and organizations. If citizens already have an ap-

plication in progress, they are also able to ask about the progress of their documents.

At the moment, UNA only works in the Latvian language [27].

The Chatbot has been developed because the organization had to respond to a lot of

calls and emails, which were more or less the same each time. The high numbers of

organizational resources spent to answering the same kinds of questions could easily

be lessened by using Artificial Intelligence, especially Natural Language Processing

techniques [29]. A Latvian company, Tilde, specializing in Artificial Intelligence

technologies cooperated in the development of UNA. The usage of the conversational

agent has been argued to be highly successful and has been nominated for numerous

awards such as the OECD's Public Excellence, World Summit Awards and others [30,

31]. According to the first performance indicators, 44% of the questions asked on

UNA are considered to be general of nature and easily taken care of by the Chatbot.

Other non-standard issues are still handled by the support staff, but now they have

more time to focus on more complex tasks [30]. While there are plans for UMA to

perform the registration of legal subjects and legal facts in the future, currently, the

Chatbot is only available to provide information to commonly asked questions. Citi-

zens are still required to collect and fill in numerous documents, sign and stamp, send

the filled in documents to the Register and pay the fees using the traditional processes

[32].

Another element worth considering is that UMA is not designed to assist citizens

with the whole process of starting a business, but solely answers questions about the

process of registering the Enterprise as this is the task of the Register of Enterprises of

Latvia. Arguably, there are numerous other services which new business owners have

to conduct such as applying for licenses, permits, getting a business bank account,

buying property, paying taxes and others which UMA is not able to answer questions

about.

Starting a business is considered a ''life event'', whereby numerous processes from different

(public) organizations have to be followed by a citizen. See also the Quality of Public Ad-

ministration Toolbox from the European Commission about why redesigning digital services

based on these events has many benefits to citizens.

4.2 WienBot in Vienna:

In 2017, the Chatbot WienBot was launched in Vienna. This conversational bot has

been designed to provide answers to frequently asked questions people have. The City

of Vienna discovered that there are thousands of searches every month on the munici-

pal website in order to gain more information about the online services available in

the city. WienBot improves this process by enabling citizens to find information

"quickly, smart and on-the-go" [33].Rather than having to search for the correct page

on the municipal website, citizens are able to ask the WienBot which will provide an

immediate answer. The amount of information WienBot provides is very broad and

diverse as the website of the municipality has many different online services [33]. At

the moment, WienBot is able to provide answers to around 350 different topics and

services of the city. WienBot works solely in the German language, but is also able to

reply in the local dialect [34].

The WienBot has been developed in order to make the information about the dif-

ferent services the City of Vienna provides more easy and understandable. It follows

the current trend that much more information about the municipal services is looked

up on the smartphone. However, rather than having the citizen to look up the infor-

mation themselves, the Chatbot will give a quick answer to any question someone

might have [33].

Citizens will still be able to find additional information on the websites, but for

quick information, WienBot should be sufficient. Especially information about the

availability of public parking spaces in the city is mentioned as a well-desired func-

tionality of WienBot [33]. The City of Vienna was responsible for the development of

the application themselves. It won the World Summit Award in 2017 for the best

Government & Citizen Engagement application [35].

Even though there are a large number of topics WienBot is able to answer, the

Chatbot is solely aimed at information provision for already existing governmental

information. It is not possible to transact any governmental services through the Chat-

bot. Instead, citizens will get a link with more information about where to go to in

order to obtain certain government services [33]. While the WienBot is arguably very

useful to gain information, there is no possibility to avoid going to the office by con-

ducting transactions online through the Chatbot. It is unclear if there are future plans

in order to incorporate the future of transactions through the applications. For exam-

ple, if a person tells the WienBot that he has lost an item; it will provide him or her

with a link to the relevant pages of the lost property office (Fundamt) rather than al-

lowing citizens to use the services through the Chatbot [33].

The transformative potential for the WienBot is hereby severely reduced as citizens

would still be required to go through the traditional public services in order to gain

what they need, rather than being able to ask WienBot to conduct these transactions

for them.

4.3 GovBot/ Botty Bonn in Bonn

In the City of Bonn, Germany, the GovBot [36] has been implemented in order to

assist citizens with their administrative services. Citizens are able to ask for applica-

tion forms, opening hours or are able to book an appointment through an interactive

process with the Chatbot [37]. The City of Bonn didn't develop the Chatbot them-

selves but are using the GovBot developed by the software companies Publicplan and

Materna. They developed a Chatbot which has been specifically designed for usage in

the (German) public administration. Currently, the GovBot technology is used in the

search engine of the administration of North-Rhein Westphalia, the City of Bonn and

in the City of Krefeld [38]. Citizens are able to access the Chatbot on a specialized

website.

GovBot is a Chatbot based on machine learning and an integrated knowledge base

of administrative knowledge. The main aim of GovBot is to relieve the administrative

staff within the public administration with labour-intensive and recurrent tasks of

handling the same kind of citizen requests. Rather than having citizens ask the civil

service themselves with questions, they are able to gain the same answers immediate-

ly through the use of the GovBot [37, 39].

In addition, the GovBot is able to assist citizens with administrative processes by

helping citizens fill in administrative forms. Citizens are then able to come prepared

to their appointment with the documents filled in correctly, such as the application of

a license plate [40]. Currently, the Chatbot is still in a testing phase and will be added

with more information in the future [37].

Even though the Chatbot is still in a testing phase, the main aim of the GovBot is to

facilitate better information provision to citizens about general affairs or current ad-

ministrative procedures. As of now, it seemed not to be possible to conduct any trans-

actions or government services through the Chatbot rather than scheduling an ap-

pointment at the office. There is much to praise about assisting citizens with difficult

forms and the GovBot definitely could play a big role in this. However, there is no

actual change on existing administrative processes with the introduction of the Chat-

bot; citizens still need to make an appointment at the civil service after filling in the

forms and go through the standard procedure, rather than being able to finish the

transaction through the GovBot.

5 Discussion and conclusions

This brief exploratory insight suggests that current Chatbots which have been imple-

mented within the European public sector certainty provide a certain value for the

citizens. All three Chatbots aim to improve the communication between citizens and

the administrative bodies by providing easy answers to often asked questions. Citi-

zens are able to find the information they are looking for in a quick and reliable way

without the need to navigate the governmental websites themselves or contact the

customer service, enabling staff to spend their time on other tasks.

Table 1. Overview of Chatbots in government

Chatbot

Value

UNA

WienBot

GovBot

Information provi-

sion

Yes

Transactional ser-

vices

Planned

Integrated infor-

mation

Organisational

changes

First order changes by having staff

focus on more complex tasks

None identified

None

identified

Even with the introduction of advanced technologies, there is a significant focus on

information provision towards citizens, rather than using them to provide better gov-

ernment services to citizens. Instead of using Chatbots in such a way that citizens

don't even need to come to the administrative office, citizens are still required to fol-

low the traditional procedures, although this time empowered by the knowledge pro-

vided by the Chatbot. It would be truly a change if citizens would be able to send the

documents online as well or conduct the whole process through the Chatbot. There

seems to be awareness that transactions provide more value towards citizens. The

developers from UNA in Latvia aim to facilitate transactions in the future through the

Chatbot, but at the moment this is not yet the case.

There are technologies in place to facilitate these transactions; most countries have

some form of e-ID system in place already which citizens could use to identify them-

selves with. An online payment system or e-Signature system would make it possible

for citizens to conduct their government transactions fully digital. However, this does

require that the actual administrative procedures should be replaced, a task which is

significantly more challenging to accomplish.

Just like the lack of transactions, the e-Government literature frequently mentions

that the lack of an integrative approach with joined-up public services hinders the

potential of e-Government services. All of the mentioned Chatbots seemed to be fully

based on the knowledge from the developing organization and don't take into account

the knowledge from other, relevant public organizations. This is unfortunate as citi-

zens frequently have to contact different public institutions when they are in need of

public services.

The aim of this paper was to explore whether the introduction of Chatbot-

technology within the public sector woul be accompanied with transformational

changes. However, based on these early findings, we suggest that only first-order

occur: namely the automation of current activities and some (minor) organizational

changes to facilitate or as an effect to its introduction. Civil servants would be able to

devote more time towards more complex cases when many questions get answered by

the Chatbots, but the actual nature of their work doesn't seem to change at all.

They are still conducting the same processes as before, even when some of these

tasks could be done by different technologies too.

Our findings do not suggest that any second-order changes happened due to the in-

troduction of Chatbots. Public service delivery has not been radically changed, nor

was there any mentioning of changes in the governance system, citizen engagement or

reforms of the policy-making processes due to the implementation of the Chatbot.

If these practices are left unchanged, more institutions might implement Chatbots

in order to improve their information provision towards their citizens. While this goal

is very noble and paved with good intentions, there is a serious chance that these

Chatbots are going to reflect the current fragmented landscape of governance. Instead

of the current practice that citizens have to find the information they need from 10

different government websites, they will have to ''talk'' with 10 different Chatbots

because the knowledge bases of the Chatbots are not integrated. Each of the Chatbots

will only be able to answer the citizens the questions they have that correspond to the

activities of the organization, rather than giving citizens a full, integrative respond

that will cover the whole journey they will take.

If there is no sufficient amount of data sharing between public organizations, citi-

zens will still be required to provide the same kind of information multiple times.

Filling in the same kind of information on a government form is, with or without a

Chatbot, a tedious and annoying task for all. Just having a Chatbot is not going to

make this procedure any more value adding. If the public sector truly wants to gain

maximum benefits from emerging technologies, such as Chatbots, it will require mas-

sive public reform, a change in administrative culture and a strong reflection on the

current organizational practices. Rather than having technology help understand citi-

zens with the current administrative procedures, there should be questions raised if

certain administrative procedures could be made easier or removed at all!

There is much more research needed to make more valid conclusions as this paper

so far briefly scanned a couple of Chatbot implementations within the public sector.

The field is still rapidly evolving and the reflections given here might quickly become

invalid if multiple public organisations realise the potential which digital transfor-

mation could provide them. Furthermore, the lack of interviews limits the scope of

changes which might have been introduced with the Chatbot technology. Possibly,

certain organisational changes did occur but were not mentioned online. This restricts

the current conclusion but should be seen as an invitation to conduct further research

on these cases. Artificial Intelligence technologies such as Chatbots are an intriguing

set of new technologies, likely to leave a big impact on our society in the near-future.

However, it is advisable to take the transformative discourse of these technologies

with a pinch of salt. A true understanding of the impact these technologies will bring

the public sector requires a clear and realistic view on how they get adopted and used

in practice, by institutions and by citizens.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are purely those of the authors and may not be

regarded as stating the official position of the European Commission they are affiliated to.

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