A couple of years ago I was in Portugal to give a talk on Gov 2.0 at a conference the government was organizing. After the talk I went for dinner with the country’s CIO and remember hearing about a fantastic program they were running that – for me – epitomized the notion of a citizen centric approach. It was a help desk called: I Lost My Wallet.

Genius.

Essentially, it was a place you went when… you lost your wallet. What the government had done was bring together all the agencies that controlled a document or card that was likely to have been in your wallet. As a result, rather than running around from agency to agency filling out your name and address over and over again on dozens of different forms, you went to a single desk, filled out one set of forms to get new copies of say, your social insurance card, your drivers license, healthcare card and library card.

But get this. From the briefing I had, my understanding was that this service was not limited to government cards, they’d also partnered with several private entities. For example, I notice that the service also works for replacing Portugal’s Automotive Club Card. In addition – if I remember correctly – I was told the government was negotiating with the banks so that you could also cancel and replace your ATM/bank card and visa cards at this counter as well.

Now this is citizen centric service. Here the government is literally molded itself – pulling together dozens of agencies and private sector actors around a single service – so that a citizens can simply and quickly deal with a high stress moment. Yes, I’d love to live in a world where all these cards disappeared altogether and were simply managed by a single card of your choosing (like say your Oyster card in the UK – so that your subway fare card was also your healthcare card, government ID, and credit card). But we are a few years away from that still and so this is a nice interim service.

But more importantly it shows a real ability to shed silos and build a service around a citizen/customer need. I believe they had a similar service for “I bought a house” since this is a moment when a number of different government services become relevant simultaneously. I of course, can imagine several others – most notably a “my partner just died” service could be invaluable at helping people manage a truly terrible moment when dealing with government bureaucracy is the last thing they want to be doing.

You can find the website for I lost my Wallet here (it is, naturally, in Portuguese). You can also read more about it, as documented by the European Union here. Lots of food for thought here for those of you designing programs to serve citizens, be it in the public or private sector.