PITEO is an interactive data transmission application that replaces the old process of communication used by the CNE - Comisión Nacional de EnergÃa (National Energy Commission) to provide Inspection Plans information to the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade.
This platform gives the user an easy, secure and agile way of sending, receiving, storing and managing all information related to these Inspection Plans; PITEO fulfils therefore the recommendations addressed by the Law 11/2007 about the use of data transmissions tools for the communications between Public Administrations or Organisms, aiming at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of such communications.
PITEO's first objective is to allow CNE workers to send information about technical, economical and organizational Inspection Plans to managers of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, in accordance to the Spain's Legal Framework. One of the functions of the CNE is to guarantee effective competition to the Spanish energy market. This entity pursues, among other goals, the objectivity and transparency as a basic rule of the electricity and hydrocarbons markets; to be able to ensure these objectives, measures have to be taken and it is necessary to inspect every operator in the market. These inspections should reveal if the procedures followed by the operators are in accordance with the technical, economical and organizational legal instructions enacted by the Government.
Finally, the compiled information gathered by CNE through its inspections has to be sent to the managers of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade to revise it and to take decisions about law changes, sanctions, penalties, or any action necessary to maintain the Spanish Energy Markets in good conditions. This information is sent weekly or monthly and has a significant volume, therefore managers need assistance in its reception and storage to be able to deal properly with it.
The second objective of PITEO is therefore to allow Ministry's managers to receive, store and work with the Inspection Plans; PITEO offers a whole set of functionalities for the managers to complete efficiently and effectively all necessary tasks.
Policy Context
The CNE has been created on the 7th of October 1998, under the Hydrocarbons Sector Law, with the scope to ensure effective competition to the Spanish energy markets and to protect and defend all concerned parties. The CNE is the competent authority for the Hydrocarbons and the Electricity Markets, which compose the Spanish energy market
The law describes also the functions of this public organism; among these, there are tasks as the consultation with the administration for what concerns energy affairs, the participation in the process of creating new rules for the Spanish energy market, providing information about the energy market situation, judging in conflicts between operators or other participants and helping the consumers about everything they could need. In this frame, the most relevant function for what concerns the role of PITEO, is inspecting and giving information about the correct operation of the markets and their participants.
Regarding the inspection functions, the CNE has to complete a long series of tasks; there are not only several operators and participants to be inspected, but also many kinds of different inspections, this resulting in huge amounts of information that need to be treated with enough agility to allow managers to act in time. An example of different types of inspections would be the following: the CNE should inspect that an installation fulfils certain technical conditions, as well as ensuring that economical conditions concerning taxes, tariffs or prices respect the rules of the market and/or even the relations between operators, sellers and distributors. All these kinds of inspections are planned and made by CNE to satisfy requests coming from the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, from Autonomous Regions or even from the CNE itself.
Description of target users and groups
The target users of the PITEO platforms are both managers of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade as well as the CNE personnel, relying on PITEO for data exchange and elaboration.
Description of the way to implement the initiative
PITEO allows interaction between two organisms: Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade and CNE, consisting mainly in the process of sending and managing Inspection Plans information.
The CNE performs periodic inspections in order to evaluate the correct behaviour of the market and of its participants. After these inspections, the CNE shows the results through documents included in the Inspection Plans; all this information is sent to the Ministry managers to be revised and react accordingly.
Only few persons are authorized to send this information to the Ministry through PITEO; these users, as well as the Ministry users, have access to the application trough their digital certificates. Apart from that, the process of sending information is made with digital signatures in order to guarantee authenticity, integrity and non-repudiation. The application also recognizes the kind of information accessible by each user, his/her profile, and whether this user is a Ministry manager or belongs to the CNE.
There are more than two kinds of roles: the application can also distinguish between two kinds of managers depending on the energy area the manager is dedicated to. There are electricity managers and hydrocarbons managers and each role can only access the Inspection Plans related to its specific area of competence. In addition to the secure communication functionality, PITEO also allows managers to evaluate the inspection plans information by performing searches and controlling them and assigning them a state within the application, depending on whether the information is complete and correct and action should be taken at the Ministry, or it is not complete and/or incorrect and it is necessary to get in touch with someone in CNE.
Finally, PITEO has been designed to support more than 5 000 inspection plans per year, corresponding to 41 different categories between electricity and hydrocarbons market. These numbers require good performances of the application to allow an important activity from both kinds of users: managers and workers that send the information.
Technology solution
PITEO uses the SSL protocol to provide a secure communication channel between users and the application itself; this protocol allows in fact high confidentiality.
The access to the application is allowed only trough the authentication via a digital certificate, which ensures the reliability of the credentials provided; further to this, every information sent from people from the CNE must have a digital signature to ensure integrity and non-repudiation. As for the sending process, the worker of the CNE would receive a digital receipt from the Electronic Registry of Ministry of Industry that guarantees that the sending process was made properly and is regulated by the Law 11/2007, about citizens’ electronic access to public services.
PITEO has been designed following a BPM notation called BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) in order to ease the communication with the users of the application and, of course, to use an internal workflow engine developed into the area to provide this kind of functionality. The communication with this workflow engine, called GEN, and with Electronic Registry, Certificate Validation Service and Files Common Repository is realised within the application through Web Services, which make the process easier and give the applications features like integration, reusing and modularity, useful characteristics allowing future developments.
Main results, benefits and impacts
In a constantly developing and liberalised market, like the Spanish energy market, it is necessary to have a dedicated organism to investigate every possible irregularity or dysfunction, to be able to act quickly and allow the market to work properly.This function is absolved, as previously explained, by the collaboration between CNE and the Ministry.
The communication between the concerned parts would happen, in the past, through big amounts of paper, this resulting in bad environmental effects, less efficiency and waste of time. Thanks to PITEO it is possible to stop printing more than 5 000 Inspection Plans per year; concretely, if it is taken into account that each plan is made by 15 attached documents of 4 pages each, this translates into 300 000 pieces of paper every year, which is a quite significant amount of material in environmental terms.
Beside the environmental achievements, this solution leads to a consistent reduction of the time necessary to send, receive, manage and access the information. With PITEO, the sending and receiving processes are now instantaneous and the time for managing and accessing the data is irrelevant.
Return on investment
Return on investment: Not applicable / Not availableTrack record of sharing
PITEO has been selected in the Category of "Efficiency and Sustainability" as one of the projects to be published during the 11th Tecnimap, Open Administration Working Days in Zaragoza:http://www.tecnimap.es/listado-servicios-comunicaciones
Lessons learnt
PITEO is a clear example of the use of ICT tools in the administration; the communication processes between Public Administrations would bring important benefits (economic, environmental and in time saving, etc.) for the administrations themselves, and, as a consequence, for the whole community.
Such implementations were mentioned long ago in Law 30/1992, but the result was not sufficiently satisfactory. Law 11/2007, instead, has changed the way the Spanish administrations offer their services, work internally and also the tools employed to allow communication between different organisms.
PITEO has concretely followed the recommendations of Law 11/2007 in terms of ICT use in communication, interaction and collaboration processes between different administrations allowing its users to do their work in a more efficient and effective way than previously.
Scope: National