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By publicplan GmbH on
Digital business registration in North Rhine-Westphalia
Since the 1st of July 2018, the new "Gewerbe-Service-Portal.NRW" has been providing citizen-friendly eGovernment by allowing company founders in the German federal state North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) to electronically register a business from home. The implementation was carried out by publicplan GmbH on behalf of d-NRW AöR. With the aid of a clearly arranged online form, commercial registration can be transmitted to the responsible public authorities with just a few clicks. Furthermore, an integrated chatbot helps the user with questions.
Service portal
In addition to the business registration, the portal offers information to the topic “foundation of an enterprise”. Furthermore, users have access to all service providers of the "Einheitliche Ansprechpartner NRW" (EA NRW). The online service supports specialised staff in taking up a service occupation or professional authentification. The search for a competent trading supervision department can also occur via the “Verwaltungssuchmaschine” (VSM) that was developed by d-NRW and publicplan GmbH on behalf of the “Ministerium für Wirtschaft, Innovation, Digitalisierung und Energie NRW” (MWIDE). The VSM is a search engine specialized for information about the public sector.
Business registration together with Chatbot “Guido“
"Guido" is a smart dialogue assistant for questions. He ensures automatic retrievability of information in plain language and is also able to identify each business type by a key. The chatbot determines every suitable business type by approaching the key through request of information. After successful determination, it is automatically transmitted to the form. Therefore, “Guido” saves the complicated search for many similar types of business. The director of publicplan GmbH, Dr. Christian Knebel says: "Thanks to our numerous eGovernment projects, we can draw on a wealth of experience in order to implement such a comprehensive portal. publicplan's integrated chatbot technology is the perfect complement to a contemporary citizen service."
Why Drupal was chosen:
Open source based technologies give us access to a large developer community with over 35,000 add-on modules. In addition, there are no license costs. In individual development, we can return new technologies to the Drupal community to help to improve the product.
• Low cost
• Higher safety and better quality
• Independence
• Comprehensive option
• Accessibility
When choosing an appropriate content management system we rely on the advantages of open source solutions. Drupal is already out-of-the-box equipped with many functions, so that standard functionalities can be implemented very easily and with little effort. Thanks to its modular structure, Drupal enables a very good integration capability and integration with third-party systems. Due to the special structure of the CMS, functions can be easily expanded and also rebuilt, keeping the code base clean.
Ensuring accessibility is a high priority for the development of Drupal. In general, Drupal, in comparison to other content management systems, is already very accessible for editors in the backend. Drupal 8 has made a lot of progress and improvements in this area, and has created a foundation that will guarantee site accessibility in many areas. The most important changes are presented below.
The portal was developed on the basis of the content management Drupal-based system deGov and nrwGOV. The software is geared to the needs of state and local authorities NRW. Dr. Christian Knebel explains: "Using Drupal provided us with the ideal technical basis for converting business registration into a fast and uncomplicated digital process. This saves company founders a lot of time they can put into building their business."
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The portal aims to provide more flexibility for entrepreneurs to start their own business by saving time through digitization. The electronic forwarding and processing of applications by competent authorities ensures a more efficient processing within the administration. The result is a modern and user-friendly communication between citizens and authorities. In the future, the "Gewerbe-Service-Portal.NRW" will be developed into a comprehensive service platform, so that further administrative processes can be carried out from home. For a free service, the portal connection should be made to all municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia. An integration of the Citizen Service Account is planned in order to enable a connection to electronic payment systems for the 1st of October 2018.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Responsive design is a basic requirement in today's world to ensure its use without local restrictions. Adapting to the screen size of each user thus largely allows mobility.
Data protection plays a major role, especially after the introduction of the GDPR. For example, a privacy-compliant integration of social media share buttons should be taken into account.
Paragraphs offers a flexible page layout with numerous content elements that give the page an individual look.
Permissions by term will be used in the near future. This module extends Drupal with access restrictions on taxonomy with respect to users and their roles.
In addition, we have used numerous proprietary modules such as GovBot (a Chatbot for the public sector), Jira in terms of agile project management, the distribution nrwGOV, form solution and service account.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
publicplan Team Murphy
publicplan Team Rocket
publicplan Team Nightrider
publicplan Team Orbit
publicplan Team Shield
Sectors:
Government
Comments
Chatbot “Guido“
I am interested in the chatbot you described. I looked over a website that listed it and it was in German. It had a open source page but none of it seemed to be about the chatbot. I am also interested in drupal because I have a website that lists chat-bots. What programming language did you use to create it and do you have a link you would like to share for this bot?
Chatbot “Guido“
Hi Chatbotfriend,
Thank you for your question.
I guess the open source site you found is the Github team site GovBotIO. It's a relic of our first designs based on the MS Botframework. Our newer bots are instead based on Cognigy.AI as a highly flexible backend framework. So Guido, like all the other GovBot instances, consists of the following three layers:
So basically the programming language is Javascript in different flavours per component.
I hope this information is helpful to you. If you require any further information, feel free to contact us.
Indeed a golden opportunity
It is a golden opportunity for startsup that could begin registration electronically straight from home. Drupal is not only getting reputed day by day but also providing a brilliant solution for people who are not from programming background.
Thanks.