Provincial online public service portal

The government of a coastal province with 1.4 million residents set out to handle most administrative procedures online, from business registration to construction permits. Its legacy system supported only around 200 procedures, worked poorly on mobile phones and could not exchange data with the software used by individual departments. Zentrova is now delivering a new public service portal together with the case-processing platform behind it.

The challenge

Residents often visited the one-stop service centre two or three times for a single application: once to ask, again to submit missing documents, and finally to collect the result. Officials re-keyed information from paper forms, which led to errors and made reporting difficult. Because each department used its own software, provincial leaders had no consolidated view of how applications were progressing. Many residents in fishing and farming communities also worked irregular hours, making office visits especially costly for them.

Our solution

• Unified public service portal on web and mobile, designed around residents' needs, with forms pre-filled from data the government already holds.
• Electronic identity verification (eKYC) and OCR for documents, reducing data entry for residents and officials alike.
• Microservices case-processing platform where approval workflows are configured per procedure, without rewriting software.
• Data integration hub connecting departmental systems and shared government databases using national data exchange standards.
• Leadership dashboard tracking overdue cases, satisfaction scores and workload by department.
• Security by information system classification, with independent penetration testing before every expansion.

Results

Phase one, covering the 480 most frequently used procedures, is live at provincial level and in nine districts and towns:

• 72% of phase-one applications are now filed online.
• Average processing time reduced by 35%.
• Overdue cases down from 8.4% to 1.6%.
• Resident satisfaction at 93%.

Phase two will bring all 1,250 procedures onto the portal and extend it to commune level ahead of formal acceptance in 2027. Alongside the technology, Zentrova is training more than 1,500 officials and supporting community help desks so that older residents are not left behind as services move online. Residents can also follow every application by text message, and phase-two procedures are being redesigned using feedback from more than 3,000 users collected during phase one.

People can now complete their paperwork in the evening, on their phones, without taking time off work. — Senior official, Office of the Provincial People's Committee