Regione Emilia-Romagna.

The Emilia-Romagna Labour Information System (in Italian SILER), by the Regional Government of Emilia-Romagna, provides services supporting the whole regional network of Employment Service Centers; the Centers' main goal is to provide administration, governance and provision of information and services to citizens and businesses. The SILER system even provides online services for citizens and businesses which prefer the Internet to achieve direct access without intermediaries.

The system mainly constitutes information availability on a "loop" paradigm, provided by a strong interoperability with the legacy systems run by the different players involved in provisioning of employment services.

 The SILER system is now regularly up and running and the policy makers of the current employment scenario have no alternative tools in order to be effectively supported in their tasks.

Policy Context

The Regional Law 11/04 Development of Regional Information Society's aim was to ensure for all citizens and businesses the access to the most comprehensive range of information and services in the employment filed.

Moreover, in the Regional Law 17/05 Rules for the promotion of employment, quality, safety and regularity of work, some of the actions identified to achieve the desired aims, are the following:

a) integration of the activities in the fields of employment, education and orientation policies;

b) coordination of the activities in the field of employment, social, health and economic policies;

c) institutional collaboration with local authorities, chambers of commerce, industry, handicrafts and agriculture, other public institutions in the area, and the national public institutions with its decentralized administrations.

The Sistema Informativo Lavoro Emilia Romagna (SILER) provides a distributed information system in the whole area, which is governed by Provinces and Regions, shared and open to all public and private institutions (stage I ^ e-gov.)

This orientation has evolved into a proposal for reuse of these solutions with a higher added value for end users (phase II ^ e-gov.) In light of this approach, the criteria for the definition of the requirements of the system have followed 2 main lines: on one hand the adaptation of the modules to the national legislation in the field of employment and, on the other hand, their adaptability to the constraints arising from the specific characteristics of the local labour market and laws.

Description of target users and groups

The main target group is Public Administration, in particular the Region of Emilia-Romagna and the Provinces of Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Forlì-Cesena. The direct users of the system are first of all the employees that work within these administrations, who also have to do with the employment market as a whole. Secondly, citizens and companies can equally take advantage of the system using the services of, for example, orientation, pre-selection, and job-matching.

The later enhancements, which led the system to the actual version and functional richness, has brought new involvement of major public bodies:

• Ministry of Welfare;
• Local Public Health Departments;
• INPS (Italian Department for Work and Pensions).

They all, whenever needed, involved their own private partners.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

Since the beginning of the project, the process of decision making has been shared between the two main stakeholders of the project: the Region of Emilia-Romagna (as the actual provider of the project as a whole) and the nine Provinces (Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Forlì-Cesena, the final users of the service). In fact, even though they are referring to the same national laws in matter of employment, the nine Provinces have adopted different policies and interpretations that need to be applied and integrated into the system. This management approach, based on cooperation and mutual involvement, is aimed to share policies, interpretations and needs and it was essential to create a system that responds to the needs of all the actors involved. The Region, though being the actual and  effective final decision maker, has always engaged the other actors involved in the process of implementation, and this has been a key factor in the success of the project. 

As far as the process of change of the central management is involved, this aspect has been a determinant and essential part of the project itself. As a matter of fact, the technology provided by the system has been the means to introduce new practices, new approaches and innovative procedures. In this context, a concrete and massive strategy of change in management was crucial to the achievement of the results, not only connected with the use of the information system itself, but also as a complete administrative process.

The Region has been providing through the years all the necessary processes of maintenance and evolution actions in order to make the system always up to date with the national and local legislation and to align it as much as possible to the requirements of the Provinces. The system is thus constantly updated and aligned with the evolving transformations of the labour market context.

Finally, this management system has led to an increase in the level of quality of the services supplied by the system itself, both within the back office (activities related to the administration of the Provinces and the Region) as well as within the front office (with the whole range of services supplied to the citizens and the companies).

Technology solution

From the technological point of view, the SILER system has  the following characteristics:

• Web based;
• Java based;
• Interoperability: SOA based, Web Services (WS) standard particularly;
• Relevant use of Open Source software components (growing during the system lifecycle). In particular: Linux; Jboss; Apache.

Technology choice: Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

These assessments are the result of continuous monitoring activities, carried out on a time base.

Following a qualitative assessment, a definitely positive return comes from the SILER system usage. In particular:

• there has been visible improvement in terms of services provided;
• there were clear improvements in terms of services' efficiency (in terms of time savings for operators and users, of ability to respond to a larger amount of requests, etc.);
• the services provided received successful feedback (in terms of number of users).

As an example, the following are two assessed items, giving evidence of some quantitative data:

• as far as the people based services provided by the Employment Service Centers are concerned, an average increase in efficiency has been detected; in particular time saving has been estimated across the following macro-activities:

•        front-office reception and pre-selection;
•       job "search/offer" fulfillment;
•       back office activities.

The increase in efficiency for these macro activities is estimated as follows:

•      +5% front-office reception and pre-selection;
•      +15% job "search/offer" fulfillment;
•      +10% back office activities.

• as far as a specific online service, called "Required Notice" is concerned (it enables companies to make their notification of recruitment, dismissal, etc. as the law requires), today 1 500 subscription from business users are registered,  generating traffic for a daily average amount of 10 000 notices.

The information availability at a local level - as a result of the introduction of the SILER system - has allowed Public Institutions to deliver innovative approaches to policy making and governance in Employment issues, due to its integrated data analysis features both for planning and impact evaluation, not possible previously. (For detailed results and impacts see attachment SIL Analisi ricadute).

Track record of sharing

SILER is part of a project of re-use which intends to implement and develop e-government services that Public Administrations can exploit for free provided by Administrations that have already implemented the services. The purpose of this project is:

• Promote the dissemination of innovative solutions for processes administration and delivery of e-Government to citizens and businesses, with the aim of:

•      improving the quality of interaction between the public administration and its users;
•      increasing the efficiency of public administration in its complex.

 

• Promote the sharing of practices and experiences between public administrations in the use of ICT for the provision of services of e-Government;
• Achieve savings in the process of adoption of innovative solutions for service delivery and economies in the management of such a regime.

Moreover, one of the major technological enhancements of SILER, is the adoption of a new interoperability platform developed in the ICAR Project, an initiative which shares resources from 16 Regional Governments and the Provincia Autonoma of Trento to develop and to deploy a new countrywide standard and platform for interoperability among the Italian Local Governments.

Even from a functional point of view, the SILER system is always evolving, particularly as far as the integration capabilities are concerned; some major on-going enhancements that will be available in a short time are:

• more integration capabilities with ASL and Municipalities legacy systems in order to share more and more information; this will improve and optimize the planning and operational tasks in favour of particular target of workers;
• more integration capabilities with INPS's legacy systems in order to share more information; this could achieve the goal of more efficiency in the public program 'Active Politics for Labour' in favour of workers' income.

 The high level of transferability of the SILER system by Regional Government of Emilia-Romagna has recently been confirmed by its reuse by the Umbria Regional Government and Valle d'Aosta one, according to the "best practices reuse" tender, promoted within the Italian Public Sector.

SILER has been specifically designed to strictly fulfill the national regulatory and legal framework for Labour subject; because of this, it is not internationally reusable.

 Finally, the integration with SARE (Network for Simplification of Administrations) allows the system to be active and functional on a national scale: in fact, SARE collects the communications that companies are due to submit conveying them into SILER and making the system more complete and integrated.

Lessons learnt

The SILER system development has been a unique opportunity to demonstrate that ICT could be considered not only as an enabler but as a real integration driver, always remembering to pay attention to an indispensable organizational effort.

Without such a developed system, it is not possible even to start with the delivery of the very first service for citizens and business, that is the "right to access the information" on labour market and job demand.

One of the major issues faced during the development of SILER, was the need to rightly locate each role, for the different players involved, in the entire organizational scheme of the process; and this, in a very unambiguous and shared way. These different players were used to manage their processes with their own custom tools and practices and each of them believed to own the "reference model".

In brief the project demostrates:

• e-government solutions bring advantages in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, improving the quality of the services on a high impact on the Administrations;
• Co-operation among public administration in the process of decision making makes the decisional process longer but much more efficient in term of implementation.

Scope: Local (city or municipality), Regional (sub-national)