Computer Science Methods and Technologies applied to the Italian Public Administration

by Ivo De Lotto

New information technologies are playing an important role in modernising and rationalising processes and activities in the public administration, both at central and local levels.

The Italian Research Council (CNR) has set up a "strategic research project" to study information science methods and technologies for managing, controlling and automatizing activities of the public administration. The project received funding in 1995 for the first phase. The goal of this initial phase is to conduct feasibility studies on five application areas by Spring 1996. The areas have been chosen with the aid of the Italian Authority for information systems in Public Administration (AIPA). The feasibility studies are being prepared in cooperation with qualified representatives of local and central government.

The five areas regard:

• Metrics and measuring techniques to evaluate automation systems, products, processes and providers; methods to plan and control computer-aided office work, to monitor information systems and to draft announcements of jobs in the public sector
• Public administration processes and data reengineering with the aim of
• supporting application redesign, reusability of administrative data and processes, application migration to client-server architectures and database integration and interconnection
• Information systems and network security with proposals for standards designed to meet the needs of central and local government
• Heterogeneous data management with reference to space-time data bases, geographic information systems and the management of data with incompatible formats
• Multimedia work-places for innovative communication techniques for citizens, modern machine-user interfaces and cooperative and distributed working.

The project has limited funding and aims simply at demonstrating the usefulness of new information technologies in state administrative activities, at highlighting problems and offering solutions that benefit from technological innovations. It also intends to provide a few practical examples of running applications.

Six CNR institutes and twelve universities are participating in the project. The latter are all members of CINI, the national consortium of universities for computer science research promotion and coordination.