i-CITY has been working for several years to build the new digital platform that supports the omnichannel strategy of the City of Brussels and completely transforms the citizen's experience with its administration. The objective is to contact my city as I want, where I want and when I want! Various IT platforms make this a reality. Spotlight on CIRM and the citizen portal mybxl.be.
"BXL2021 is one of the most value-creating master programmes for the City and its citizens, and we are all (the teams involved in the City, all the Project and Program Managers, developers, analysts, support teams), together, the technological builders," explains Raf Louis of the DPF (Digital Process Factory). Because creating this new experience for citizens with their city requires creating an omnichannel digital platform that meets all the needs of today's and tomorrow's citizens and agents, fed with authentic data and perfectly integrated to digitise and optimise the user's journey. To achieve this ambitious goal, several programmes have been set up, each containing a series of interdependent projects.
Making such a digital platform work is a challenge that can only be understood when one properly considers the added value it brings: orchestrated and increasingly automated business processes to deliver more efficiently the products expected by the citizen, efficient and secure data access and processing, a range of scalable, modern solutions implemented with a very agile mindset.
Thanks to our collective ability to bring all these elements to life, agents and citizens benefit from an already optimised and ever-evolving user experience.
In concrete terms, do these new 'digital' modes of operation appeal to citizens?
An initial assessment can be made after one year of the official launch of the mybxl.be citizen portal. Today, citizens have the following administrative procedures at their fingertips:
- Issuance of extracts of civil status certificates
- Issuance of certificates
- Issuance of extracts from the criminal record
- Issuance of a pin code
- Issuance of a "street artist" permit
- Processing an alert
- Processing a request for removal of bulky items
- Processing a request for greening
Already, with the first eight 'citizen-oriented' processes put into production in the last few months, almost 150,000 products delivered annually to citizens have been digitised, which represents almost 40% of the total number of products addressed to the various City services each year.
54% of these products were made via the mybxl.be portal and 31% via the existing self-service terminals. Finally, 15% of these requests were made at the counters by agents in the Bruce system.
The opening of Brucity gives a further boost to the BXL2021 master programme by integrating two new key functionalities on the portal and kiosks: 'digital payment and electronic signatures'. Thanks to this progress, 9 new digital processes will go into production during the first quarter of 2023.
These are the processes related to the issuance of 'Riverain' cards, parental authorisations, passports, identity cards and the management of equipment rentals.
The number of products handled through these additional processes is estimated to be more than 94,000 per year. This will bring the percentage of cases processed digitally to almost 70% of the total annual volume of applications to the City.
The figures show a growing trend among citizens to integrate the digital approach into their habits, since 85% of requests were sent via the Internet, either from private computers, telephones and tablets via the citizen portal, or from the terminals made available to them in the administrative centres and branches. The continuous enrichment and improvement of the mybxl.be portal and the provision of new terminals equipped with our CIRM in Brucity will undoubtedly increase this percentage in the short and medium term.