RÉSUMÉ: De plus en plus de gouvernements considèrent l'accès à l'information électronique comme un moyen d'accroître le service, de réduire les coûts et d'augmenter les revenus. Le gouvernement de la Colombie-Britannique exploite le service BC Online comme une entreprise, ce qui génère des profits et entraîne un haut niveau de satisfaction chez les clients de ce service. Le service BC Online est un modèle dont pourraient s'inspirer d'autres gouvernements songeant à offrir des services analogues.
Delivering on this triple bind of better service, lower cost and increased revenues can be daunting, but there are opportunities to leverage governments' huge investment in information technologies to meet the first two goals. Governments must reconcile themselves to charging a price for their information in order to meet the third. While there is an ongoing public policy dialogue as to whether governments should charge for information created and maintained by tax dollars, in many jurisdictions this precedent is well established and accepted by administrations and information consumers alike.
BC OnLine is an example of a successful user-pay government information enterprise that has operated in British Columbia since 1989. It is profitable and runs without subsidy from the Province. It serves over 15,000 users in over 5,000 law practices, bank branches, real estate offices and other businesses in British Columbia, and its gross revenues in 1993/94 were over $32 million on a volume of about 4.2 million transactions. Its customers maintain that BC OnLine provides them with improved service and good value, and its customer base has grown by 10% to 15% a year since its inception.
While there are a growing number of government information access services in Canada and around the world, few operate without subsidy and fewer still enjoy the number of subscribers that BC OnLine does. Why has BC OnLine been so successful, and what can other jurisdictions learn from BC OnLine's experience?
Available information includes:
Major customer groups are:
Similarly, a bank lending money to a consumer for the purchase of a new car will almost always register a security interest in that car through the Personal Property Registry system.
Customers pay a retail price for each search or registration. Payment is managed through an automated deposit account system. Customers keep a positive balance on account and the system decrements the cost of each search or registration as the service is provided through BC OnLine.
Customers can refresh their deposit account balance by making a payment at over seventy-five Government Agent, Land Title, Companies, Personal Property or Assessment Authority offices throughout British Columbia, or by using an EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) option to automatically replenish their deposit account.
Price for each transaction is set by the database owner. The BC Assessment Authority, for example, sets the retail price for a property assessment search. BC OnLine collects that fee and retains a set portion of it to defray its own costs, and remits the remainder to the Authority's bank account.
In essence BC OnLine acts as an information broker for government ministries and entities. BC OnLine owns no information itself, but provides an electronic distribution mechanism and requisite support services for ministries to electronically retail their information. BC OnLine does not replace traditional counter services for access to government databases, and customers can still go to government offices and get their information in paper form from ministry staff. BC OnLine simply provides an electronic access option.
BC OnLine is a service of BC Systems Corporation, delivered in partnership with data-owning ministries and entities of the Provincial government. As a Crown corporation, BC Systems manages one of the largest private networks and one of the largest datacentres in Canada on behalf of the Province, as well as providing a wide range of professional information technology services to the public sector.
If the information enjoys structural demand, interruption of electronic access to this information will cause hardship to BC OnLine customers and to their customers in turn. Reliability, availability and serviceability are truly components of BC OnLine's "product", and are critical to its market acceptance. If computers and networks don't operate reliably, customers will return to previous, predictable methods of access.
While BC OnLine does maintain admirable uptime statistics, reliability and availability are only part of the "usability" picture for customers. When their modem fails, they don't know how to request the exact information they require, or their communication software isn't operating as it should, BC OnLine customers can get help with a 1-800 call to BC OnLine's HelpDesk. In BC OnLine's most recent client survey, 44% of customers rated the HelpDesk service as "excellent". The quality of this service and support is a key component of customer satisfaction.
From an infrastructure perspective, BC Online had a head start. The information BC OnLine distributes was already stored in automated databases running on BC Systems' mainframes. BC Systems' provincial network infrastructure was also in place to allow BC OnLine customers toll-free dial access to it. As a Crown corporation, BC Systems was also ready with the financial flexibility to create and grow an information enterprise in a way that appropriation-based ministries could not.
Pricing policy has been one reason for BC OnLine's rapid acceptance and continued growth. Government established a two-tiered pricing structure at BC OnLine's inception in 1989. Reasoning that if business people used their own staff and computers to retrieve government information instead of government staff and equipment, that digital information should be cheaper than the same information in paper form obtained over the counter. A price differential of one or two dollars was established between electronic and counter service, and this incentive was enough to quickly build BC OnLine's customer base.
Finally, BC OnLine was lucky enough to work with managers in data-owning ministries who were willing to take a risk and try a new service delivery method. Their willingness to step outside the traditional service delivery paradigm and attempt an electronic method has led to the development of strong partnerships and cooperative working relationships between BC OnLine and government data owners.