This pilot study investigated the possibilities and consequences of the use of telematics in social services, particularly the labour market, social security and federal welfare offices.
It has been shown that information and communications technologies have an increasingly important role in the provision of public social services, where they significantly improve customer orientation, transparency of services and efficient deployment of resources. This is achieved, for example, with public terminals or kiosk systems for decentralised information and self-service transactions, electronic data and document exchange, and management information systems. It is also apparent that technical and organisational design decisions have to be thought out very carefully in order to achieve a compromise between a number of conflicting objectives: easier access to services through decentralised telematics versus new barriers to social access, computer-assisted customer management versus personal consultancy, increased efficiency versus humane working conditions, and data protection and privacy versus complex data networks. Although these conflicts can only be reconciled or defused to a limited extent, the study showed some possible approaches that might be applied.
12/1995 - 12/1996