Governments Change Fast - Portals Still Struggle

An alarming example of the challenges of Web-based Service Portals appeared after the latest government change in Greece: After the Sunday 4th October national elections in Greece, the new prime minister announced and performed a rapid change in the government structure, merging ministries and establishing new ones. Although very swiftly announced as a presidential decree in the Government Gazette on the 7th October, and effective on the same date as the new ministers assumed power, the change will still need many days (or weeks) to be propagated in Governmental Portals. As one of the hundreds of examples try the central government gateway (http://www.ermis.gov.gr/) where new and old ministries still appear in a mixed picture, on the 10th October(see picture with not existing ministries underlined in red). The situation gets more complicated when diving into the vast numbers of general secretaries and supervised organisations, maintained two and three times in different governmental portals.

The above situation is just the tip of the iceberg, in a process of changing service forms (for the more than 2,000 services and more than 10,000 governmental documents maintained in multiple sites). Hint: Content Syndication is the answer to issues like that. As the National Interoperability Framework (http://www.e-gif.gov.gr/) indicates, information should be maintained by the owner only and automatically propagated in multiple, content “consuming” sites.