The Services Guide is a cross-sector partnership between all public agencies of Alagoas, that worked together under the management of SEPLAG to deliver the project. It's also a collaborative partnership with the private sector, developed after networking done at a hackathon, to deliver an artificial intelligence that acts as a virtual customer service of the public sector.

The idea of Jaque as an avatar of the government, acting not only as a symbol, but actually communicating with the civil society and executing public functions.

The whole project being an integrated platform between civil society and government, based upon an Application Programming Interface (API) that feeds government open data to an automatized A.I, enabling further study and analysis of this data to be used for strategic policy making.

The project is simultaneously on different stages, being them development of proposals, implementation and evaluation. The Services Guide was implemented on December 2016, and went through four “waves” of regular growth, as it depended on the work of a large number of public agencies. On May 2018 its final version was officially implemented and, since them, there was a solid growth on the months that followed. On the other hand, the artificial intelligence part of the project, Jaque, was implemented on May 2018, having been developed under Proof of Concept, as a partnership with Ilha Soft, a local app development company that has projects in partnership with the federal government and UNICEF. The proposals for the development of Jaque is now under open bidding.

The project was intersectoral, combining efforts from the government of Alagoas and Ilha Soft, a private IT company. SEPLAG led the project by idealizing the platform and its main features, assigning one hundred and eighty public serves out of the sixty-four agencies involved to head the project internally, and training each agency on how to submit their information into a content management system. Ilha Soft, under a proof of concept agreement, develop the virtual clerk based on AI.

The main beneficiaries are the civil society, which now has a digital catalogue on public services to consult, which reflects on a cheaper, faster and more efficient process. The public agencies of Alagoas, which now can provide information about their service on an user-friendly digital platform; and Ilha Soft and the private sector, which had (and still have) the opportunity to develop an innovative project with on a state scale and with great potential for social impact.

The Services Guide offered an environment for the amplification of the transparency policies being undertaken by the government, and optimized the search on public services, making it easier for the civil society to access information they need. The catalogue is currently comprised of 1.546 services and 1.236 service units, made available in a standardized and simplified manner, involving more than 60 public agencies, becoming one of the biggest platforms on information on public service of the country. During May 2018, the number of informations given was 110.000, an increase of almost 1.000% in relation to the month of May 2017. From January 2017 to August 2018, more than 210.000 users accessed more than 760.000 informations, 636.000 of them being only during the year 2018, and 125.000 of them only on August 2018, with 143.671 users from May 2018 to August 2018, which shows the exponential growth of the project. All numeric results were measured using Google Analytics.

The main difficulties were gathering executive support of the public agencies, especially on the initial stage of the project; dealing with commissioned positions turnover - which hurts continuity -, and not being able to assign a large workforce to work solely on the project; creating a good communication channel with all of the public agencies; not having enough investment to expand Jaque, as it was developed under PoC, and having to deal with the technical instabilities of the software with a small team; and lastly, managing to give visibility to the Services Guide. To respond to some of these problems, SEPLAG worked hard to structure good communication with the other public agencies, by assigning communication and transparency assessors in each agency, who were responsible for preparing and submitting the information, which was essential for productivity. It also worked hard to improve the search engine optimization ranking, successfully putting it on the top five of search tools.

The main conditions are related mostly to policies, leadership and human resources. In regards to policies, the administration agenda to modernize the public service and the consequent openness to innovation at SEPLAG are considered vital factors for the feasibility of the project. Also, having to comply with federal laws and decrees is a major incentive, given the urgent nature of this obligation. In this sense, SEPLAG managed to sanction the Services Guide as a state decree, which gave it the official stamp it needed. Moreover, a strong and creative leadership, that is able to promote productive dialogue between different agencies, structure cross-sector partnership and assign the right people for the job is essential. Finally, human resources is what impels the project forward in the operational field. The assigning of a communication assessor and a transparency assessor in each agency served as a link connecting both sides and was fundamental for the delivery of information.

It’s important to stress that especially in third-world countries, public administration is often bureaucratic, stressful and inefficient, putting the citizen in a situation of exclusion and misinformation. This type of project puts the citizen almost on the same level of the public serves in terms of access to information, giving them power to demand, question and critically evaluate services, which beforehand they wouldn’t be able to. Services Guide is, therefore, a powerful tool for the transparency of the public service. In this sense, it can be used as an inspiration or a direct reference to other states and countries, as it can be easily replicated anywhere, the methodology is accessible, and it can be expanded to other platforms, such as social media, or even adapted to other functions in different sectors. It’s part of a global trend of shifting the traditional government-citizen relationship, which holds unforeseen potential.

The project struggled a lot in its initial stage to gather executive support, and basically grew as a bottom-up project, building its ground on the technical foundations and from there attracting the interest of the decision-makers. Initially, many public agencies were reluctant with the project, given its complexity and the responsibility that lies behind it, fearing that a great level of transparency and exposure could be harmful. Indeed, we feel like this lack of support has delayed - even hurt -, the possible technological advancement of the project, due to lack of support from agencies that have technological know-how but aren’t willing to work closely together. With this, we learned a lot about how the lack of strategic support is harmful to a project, and the great level of importance of negotiation designed to be mutually beneficial.

However, we learned a lot more about finding ways to go around it. The first important point is that SEPLAG, the creator of the project, gave up on its central role in order to build a horizontal relationship with the other agencies and make the whole of the public administration the real protagonist. This was a fundamental attitude to overcome the lack of strategic support, as it helped with the adherence of the first agencies on the initial (and most troublesome) stage. Secondly, adjusting the project to be done in four “waves”, organizing it in a way that the biggest public agencies (like the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Health) would be on different parts, and the most difficult and complex agencies would be in the end, guaranteed a more mature team to deal with them. Finally, since the beginning, training and monitoring were part of the structure of the project, as well open data and open government, which gave the consistency and the tools the project needed to be tracked, expanded and solidified.

The Services Guide won the “VIII Award for Innovative Actions of the State of Alagoas”, in the category of “Modernization of Management”. It was also one of the selected cases to the presented on the “III Week of Innovation” promoted by the National Public Admnistration School (ENAP). Also, Ilha Soft is part of the UNICEF Innovation Fund portfolio, because of the “push” technology that’s behind Jaque, which is “a platform for creating omnichannel chatbots”. Earlier this year, on June, they were invited to go to NY to present their projects at UNICEF, where they had the opportunity to talk about Jaque - which received lots of praises. There, they had their investment renewed for another year.