Govmates, Inc. (Govmates), a joint venture established by Change Inc. (Change) and Konica Minolta Publitech, Inc. (Konica Minolta Publitech), has been awarded a ¥500 million ($3.7 million/ €3.5 million) contract for a “project to build a standardised model of operations for cities and towns” from the Ehime Prefectural Government.
Through the project, Govmates will visualise and standardise the internal work of all 20 cities and towns in Ehime Prefecture for the 27 procedures that the Japanese government has been working to digitalise using My Number Cards, and will help cut government costs while reducing the workload of government staff.
Through the project, the local governments in Ehime Prefecture aim to increase residents’ satisfaction with services by cutting costs and allocating more time to higher-value government services or services unique to local government. This is the first project in Japan where all local governments in a prefecture work on digitalizing administrative procedures under the initiative of a prefectural government.
Through the project, the Ehime Prefectural Government will standardise the internal workflow of handling both electronic and paper-based applications among all 20 cities and towns in the prefecture and eliminate the use of paper forms throughout the process.
Specifically, the Ehime Prefectural Government will establish and operate a data cleansing centre; first, it will build a system for digitalising the contents of paper-based applications, and then distribute the data to the 20 cities and towns to be integrated with the flow of electronic applications in a fully digital, standardised method.
Ehime Prefecture has diverse local governments with population sizes ranging from under 10,000 to more than 500,000, which is representative of local government models across Japan. The know-how of standardising the handling of online applications gained through the project can be deployed to local governments nationwide. Govmates will promptly deploy the know-how with more than 60 business partners across the country.
Meanwhile, the internal procedures of local governments other than handling online applications will be standardised and digitalised, starting with labour-intensive operations, based on government-wide work volume data of more than 160 local governments owned by Govmates. The know-how will be deployed across Japan.
