e-Enabled cooperation among administrations in Italy (ICAR)

ICAR (Interoperabilità e Cooperazione Applicativa tra le Regioni e le Province Autonome) is setting up and testing the shared technical infrastructure for applications cooperation among Italian regional authorities, following the national standards defined for development of the so-called Sistema Pubblico di Connettività e Cooperazione, SPC (Public Connectivity and Cooperation System). The SPC model is that of a "light SOA" based on three pillars: - formalisation of service agreements, which makes it possible to define not only interfaces, but also behaviours, service level agreements (SLAs), security requirements and linkages with domain ontologies; - definition of a federated identity and access management system; - definition of metadata (the object of cooperation), semantics and domain ontologies. The ICAR project (25 M? budget) is co-funded with 9.5 M? by Centro Nazionale per l?Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione, Cnipa (National Centre for IT in Public Administration), within line 1 of the second phase of the Italian e-government plan for regional and local authorities. ICAR?s participants are 16 Italian regions (out of 19 altogether) and the autonomous province of Trento; the remaining regions and the autonomous province of Bolzano are constantly informed about the project?s developments and are expected to re-use its results. ICAR aims to overcome the current situation where administrations manage and exchange among them digital information organised and formatted in many different ways, leading to slow information transfer and huge needs for data control and corrections, hence additional costs for the public administration and (unnecessary) requests to citizens and companies to provide their data again and again to public offices. ICAR?s specific objectives are aimed to achieve through ten different sub-projects; three infrastructural projects and seven business application projects. The infrastructural projects address - the physical and logical infrastructure for IOP at interregional level, - the management of SLAs; and - the implementation of an interregional federated authentication system. The business application projects aim to test the quality of the IOP services within specific domains where cooperation among regional authorities is crucial: compensations in health services, civil registration services, job and employment services, regional car taxation and others. I.e. the specific requirement to achieve interoperability was to link the about 10,000 public administration offices concerned by ICAR; this means their directories of services and documents. ICAR is the organisational model to overcome this requirement by acting as a kind of clearinghouse, providing the infrastructure, standards and projects mentioned above... The full detailed case description focusing on interoperability is attached as PDF to this entry (see end of this page).

Main results, benefits and impacts

Main indicators of impact and results are the outreach of service provision and the effects achieved for agencies and other users: ICAR?s impact is not easy to measure, as it will materialise differently in each Region, depending also on the business domain. However, short term and long term effects can be envisaged. Short term effects have already emerged from the effort put by regional authorities into standardising and optimising the information systems and flows addressed by ICAR. This effort has also involved central government in terms of analysis and possibly revision of existing laws and regulations in order to make the above changes possible (this has happened, for instance, with the Ministry of the Interior which rules over the civil registration service, managed at operational level by each Municipality). In the longer term, ICAR will benefit the millions of citizens and companies of the regions involved, along with over 10,000 public administration offices, thanks to the increased speed of data exchange and processing, hence reduction of waiting time, and to the improved "quality" of the data exchanged, with the reduction of a number of current shortcomings (e.g. disputes on inter-regional compensations for health services).

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

The learning points are indicated by the innovative issues of the case: ICAR shows that a shared infrastructure to manage IOP at all levels of government is strongly needed and can be built, based on a light SOA and through a strongly concerted effort among all the partners involved. Its most important feature is the definition of a set of implementation specifications for an applications cooperation system, which are fully compliant with the Italian national standards in this domain and make it possible to develop further services for the enforcement of SLA's and the smooth functioning of a federated authentication system. Besides, the model which is being tested in seven different business-application domains can be replicated with any other information flow currently existing among regions, regardless of the specific type of data being dealt with. Transferability limits of the case: As a model, ICAR can be transferred to any local public administration; while its implementation results can be transferred or extended only to other administrations which are involved in the information flows addressed by the seven application sub-projects. ICAR's general model could be transferred to any public administration system in Europe and elsewhere, addressing all the IOP layers (technical, syntactic, semantic and organisational). Scope: Regional (sub-national)