Applying BPMS to the Public Sector Using OSS

A great effort is currently placed in reengineering the public sector services processes due to the recently released Digital Reform Bible of the Hellenic State. It is recognized that the lack of process automation leads employees to working inefficiently, wasting time in repetitive, sometimes even unnecessary procedures. In this context, there is a great loss of available resources in the public sector and of citizens’ person hours. This paper aims to bring evidence that Business Process Management Systems can be adopted by the public sector, improving the performance of the reformed processes. We also show that this goal can be achieved using Open Source Software. Towards this end we did a case study in a public organization, i.e. the Technical University of Crete, reforming a time consuming process, that of printer cartridges procurement, that involves a large number of actors. Moreover, our case study addresses the challenging task of modeling a process with feedback (loop). In order to find out whether this kind of systems can indeed improve the performance of the institution and can be accepted by the affected parties, a pilot test was conducted, followed by a survey. The latter confirmed our hypothesis that performance is improved and also provided encouraging results regarding the employees’ acceptance of the system, both from the users’ (participants) and the administrators’ points of view.