How the city of Roeselare in Belgium reviewed their internal processes to identify opportunities to develop new ways to deliver services
Jasmien Wellens – Stad Roeselare, Belgium
The City of Roeselare developed a four-stage process to review their internal catalogue of service processes with the aim of identifying services which might be suitable use cases for the development of future blockchain-enabled services. This approach was designed to be portable, so other organisations could adopt it.
- initial internal scan of city processes
- review of potential use cases with Cronos, an external specialist
- more in depth review of processes with Cronos, the process owner in the Municipality, and the city’s strategic unit
- identification of services that were suitable environments to develop new blockchain-enabled proof of concepts
Stage 1 – Initial scan of city processes
The process catalogue of the Belgian City of Roeselare in Flanders was scanned to see which processes could potentially be optimised through the adoption of blockchain-enabled services. The first process scan was done by
the policy officers of the City’s Strategic Unit, which identified 40 potential use cases.
Stage 2 – review of potential use cases with specialists
The initial long-list of potential services was then reviewed a second time, in collaboration with an external partner – The Value Hub (part of the Cronos Group, an external consultancy and blockchain specialist).
Stage 3 – review of potential use cases with specialists
The short list of four processes that had potential for improvement through the adoption of blockchain-enabled processes/ services were then more extensively analysed with the City’s process owner, The Value Hub, and the Strategic Unit.
Identifying potential blockchain success factors
A structured process was used in these workshops to identify when the factors that indicate that a process could potentially be optimised by blockchain- enabled solutions were all present.
When all of these factors were rated as high by the workshop participants, this indicated to everyone that the process might be a suitable candidate for a blockchain-enabled solution. A visualisation of this analysis can be found below:
Understanding processes to improve processes
In these workshops, the process owners of the processes which showed potential for improvement with blockchain solutions did a ‘deep dive’ into how their process actually worked with the team from The Value Hub. This involved a complete analysis of these processes ‘from the first step to the last’. The process owners found this process of examining their processes with other internal and experts was very useful – regardless of whether or not their process was identified as a potential blockchain use case.
Roeselare’s goal in this scanning exercise was to identify one process with the potential to be transformed by an blockchain-enabled solution, which could then be optimised by the development of an appropriate solution.
Roeselare has identified the ‘Leisure Pass’ process as suitable for a blockchain proof of concept – this use case is set out in more detail later in this magazine.
