The starting point of the “DIA on-line project” was the so called "Electronic management of building authorization". However the experiences and lessons learnt suggested the City of Prato to select a simpler administrative procedure among all kind of building authorisations to address mainly specific categories of already skilled and motivated users, in order to try to achieve a full de-materialisation in that field. The final result of this new experience is a completely on-line and dematerialised service supporting the Administrative procedure of the so called “Starting building activity declaration”, which is the most frequently used one and also the simplest one in relation to the kind of documents that have to be managed in an electronic way. The entire process of: a) declaration submission; b) management of agenda of appointment with city civil servants for technical discussion and clarification; c) city planning data and regulation consultation; d) sending of city council acceptance/refusal; e) receiving any alerting via SMS and e-mail related to all the events that can occur during the process, and f) performing any related payment, can be now managed on-line.

Policy Context

The reported case is the result and a follow up of some previous project initiatives aiming to set up basic eServices in Comune di Prato: SPES (http://www.spesproject.org), aiming to introduce the usage of digital signature in de-materialised administrative procedures; CARMEN project (http://www.carmenproject.org), aiming to market validate a specific HW/SW platform enabling Public Administrations to improve their relation with citizens and enterprises, introducing multi-media and knowledge based CRM-like services similarly to what already happens in the private sector, and the EU project EU-Pay (http://www.eu-pay.org), dealing with the multi-channel payment mechanisms for local authorities. The project initiative is fully framed into the national and European efforts to create a more efficient public administration. The SPES, CARMEN and EU-Pay projects have been fund by the EU programme eTEN in the for both of market validation project and initial deployment. Moreover the attempt to de-materialise administrative procedure and document management inside the public administration is on of the main objectives of recent Italian legislation that can be summarised by the act on “digital administration”. Finally the new service is capable to accept a variety of identification instruments including the Italian eID card (Prato has been part of the experimental phases of this national project) and any other certification authority recognised by the SPES partnership.

Description of target users and groups

All the local professionals associations of Architects, Engineers and other technicians have been involved in the initiative. The most important Italian Commercial Certification Authority has been involved to support the releasing of the crypto devices to all the 800 professionals operating in the city area. These intermediate users were selected and provided, for free, with all the necessary missing skill the PKI tokens. To better achieve this target an easier emerging technology of the USB based crypto devices was selected in place of the previously adopted smart-card.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

The on-line service has been partially deployed through eTEN funding in the some pre-existing project initiative. However the specific service software has been developed and integrated with the previously created basic elements using internal specialists of the City Council OCT specialists. The hosting server is located in the Municipality ICT department as any other Municipality server and managed through the internal personnel. The service is sustained through the annual budget assigned to the ICT department as one of the innovative services set up by the city council. The PKI services, the CRM instruments and payment channels are those that have been put in place, respectively, at the end of the SPES, CARMEN and EU-Pay project initiatives.

Technology solution

The basic technology used to set up the service is largely that offered by the Open Source community. The hosting platform is Linux, that is also largely used by Prato City Council for the development of al the new software packages. Also the development platform is Open Source, being the Tomcat java servlet container behind an Apache http server. Only the used DBMS is a commercial one, belonging to the pre-existing back-office sw; this is Oracle 10g.

Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

The advantages for the users (citizens/enterprises), intermediate users (the professionals) and the City administration are very important. The new dematerialised and on-line procedure can result, in fact, in avoiding a lot of trips to the City Council offices, and therefore in the reduction of city mobility needs; the reduction of the time needed by citizens to complete administrative procedures, and, for the city, remarkable savings in a huge data entry activity that was previously necessary with the old paper based procedure. The on-line service is in fact completely integrated with the existing back-office ICT infrastructure. Starting April 2008, this specific administrative procedure will be supported only through the on-line channel, discontinuing the traditional counter based relation.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

The specific application has been developed in cooperation with many other EU partners, which has helped to design an application suitable in a EU-wide environment. The Building permit authorisation sector is one the sectors in which local authorities can offer pan-European electronic services supporting EU citizens’ mobility. In particular the experience of SPES has made possible to recognise digital signatures and digital certificates issued by many other EU CAs according to the EU directive in this field.

Lessons learnt

All the lessons learnt in this experience correspond to the lessons learnt in the previous projects on which this one is based. In particular, in SPES it was clearly understood that: Lesson 1 - The selection of the easiest technology for PKI is a critical factor for the success of de-materialisation initiatives. Lesson 2 - The missing of a pan-European way to identify the citizens in front of an eService is one of the crucial points to be overcome in a pan-EU on-line service. Lesson 3 - In common with the other project initiatives and with the operation of the previously existing “Building authorisation on-line” service, we are aware that a successful implementation of an eService can be more easily achieved when some intermediate users are involved instead of the normal citizens. Lesson 4 – Finally, the specific experience of the “Building authorisation on-line” previous service showed us that it is better, when possible, to discontinue the provision of the traditional service, in order to force the moving towards the usage of the new one.

Scope: International, Local (city or municipality)