E-Government in Agriculture and in Segments of the Food Chain - A Practitioner Report
Authors: Ines Heer; R. Riedl
Year: 2013

Aiming to share our experience this paper targets managers running complex projects, persons interested in open source technology and players of egovernment. The project commenced in 2006 as one of the largest interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder e-government-projects of Switzerland. The intention was to create a simple, cheap, stable and safe system for agriculture administration and control as well as for segments of the food chain. For this purpose multiple disciplines had to be considered and multiple stakeholders from different fields had to be brought together. Subjects of this paper include: transparent government, models of collaboration among government, NGOs and citizens, customer-centric e-government and infrastructure for data sharing. 1 Initial situation and motivation For many years, the burden of farmers due to administration increased [SB06] [RD10]. Food scandals in the past led to a confidence loss in many consumers [TH04]. Consumers worldwide increasingly demand proof of production and food distribution. Because of this there are more and more controls on farms. In Switzerland, federal agencies, cantonal authorities, farms, private-legal bodies and label-organizations employ information systems for the processing of their tasks. These hardly interact with each other and cause farmers to have high administrative costs for the notification of data. For example, a farmer who lives on the border of two cantons has to send data to both cantonal governments, to different federal agencies, to the slaughterers and to label organizations. The government uses the submitted data to calculate direct payments, generate statistics, prepare controls of the farms and evaluate the political measures for regions etc. Thus there is a strong demand for an e-government portal that serves all stakeholders: farmers, farm controllers and various users with veterinarian or food scope. A new administration and information system for agriculture was composed in Switzerland, aiming to simplify administration while also coordinating controls. A common and constant agricultural information system for all participants of the sector of agriculture was targeted, both on the canton as well as federal level. A project was created and a system (web portal) built. Farmers are the main users of the system, in certain ranges also controllers of the federal and of the cantonal government (agricultural and food controllers), employees of the administrations and of label organizations. Thereby it is assumed that all users have a SuisseID, the standardized electronic certificate of identity in Switzerland. 2 Requirements and specific challenges The project had the practical goals of • reducing the total administration costs, • ameliorating the usability and the accessibility of the data base for stakeholders, • covering new aspects like control coordination or primary production and • staying abreast of computing changes. In conclusion the principal purposes are: • a simplified administration, realized through a central web-portal; • a standardized identification of firms and single users; • standardized processes and data with a fully automated and fast synchronization; • the adaptation of data quality and actuality on user needs under compliance with data protection, and • the allocation of an information system to support new or changing needs. The large number and width of stakeholders as well as the great differences between the involved systems were specifically challenging with this project. The project was a prime example for multi-project management. IT-systems of the federal administration, which covered different ranges of agriculture and veterinary, had already been implemented in Switzerland for some time. Most of these federal systems are part of the internal network of the federal administration. From there they communicate with other systems in the same network, in cantonal and in external networks. The positioning in and the security policy of the federal network make the access from outside even more complicated. With the introduction of a new allocation to the network zones, it is intended to transfer individual specialized application systems to a newly created network zone. The process allows entitled persons to access systems more simply while meeting safety-relevant standards that enable improved protection from external attacks.