Government to citizen communications: From generic to tailored documents in public administration

Information and communication technologies afford public administrations the opportunity to communicate more directly with individual members of their constituencies by offering tailored information services on-line. This paper focuses on delivering tailored informational brochures describing the programs offered by a public administration agency to the public it serves. The goal is to better communicate with the public by moving from brochures written for generic audiences, which must include careful discussions of the conditions distinguishing the various constituencies within the generic audience, to brochures written for individuals, which can be personalised to focus on the information relevant to one reader. This paper presents a scoping study that identified key requirements for such tailoring and a prototype application developed in response to the study. The paper pays particular attention to the forms of document tailoring appropriate in the eGovernment domain and to the information that must be represented to support this tailoring.