Broadband private network for Emilia-Romagna's public administration (LEPIDA)

Lepida is a broadband infrastructure, for its most part exploiting fibre optics technology to interconnect over 400 public administrations throughout the Emilia-Romagna Region. Lepida is also the "highway" through which to distribute eGovernment applications to businesses and citizens. The public-private partnership organisation model outsources network deployment and operations to the local public utilities, who provide and maintain network node equipment and deliver network services according to a service level agreement defined and monitored by the public administration. Lepida is intrinsically recognised as a beneficial contribution to government, society and economy at the regional level, since its institutional framework relies on the active involvement of all provincial and municipal administrations, as well as all the utility companies within the region, either as single or aggregate entities. At the national level, the approach of Emilia-Romagna to the development of the networked administration and eGovernment applications has been identified as the example to follow.

Policy Context

This initiative wants to provide an homogeneous development and therefore we introduced and passed a law regulating the infrastructure, its ownership, the role of the various partners and the governance model.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

The investment for Lepida is shared by public administration and private companies, which make use of part of the infrastructure to provide broadband connectivity services to the private market. The public investment has two main targets: - to interconnect all public administration; and - to bring broadband investment to areas where it would not have been considered profitable by the incumbent or other telecom operators based on a pure market-driven perspective, contrasting geographical digital divide. The overall investment for the implementation of the network is over 120 million Euro, 50 of which will come from the public administration. A cost/benefit analysis has shown that the break even point will be reached within 9 years.

Main results, benefits and impacts

This case is well beyond the conceptual and planning phase and has already had a beneficial impact on a significant number of government agencies. As an example, the regional administration provides roughly 140 applications, 120 of which are already available on Lepida. For the remaining 20 regional applications as well as all the applications which are provided by provincial and municipal administrations specific migration plans are under way through the coordination of the Provinces or the Region itself. The main e-Government applications which have been developed in the framework of the 2002-2005 Regional ICT Plan are already distributed through Lepida. It addresses businesses and citizen on-line services applications as well as information flow applications. The following recently developed applications are already delivered through Lepida: - AGRISERVIZI (Services for agricultural companies) - SIL (Labour information system) - SIGMA TER (Cadastre and geographical service) - RILFEDEUR (Detection of urban degradation events) - INTERCENT-ER (eProcurement) - SOLE (health on line) - DOCAREA aims to implement informatics registries across different public administrations and to turn them digital. Other applications which are available on Lepida belong to other domains: - University: two Universities from our region have been connected to Lepida up to now. - Research: the radio-astronomic station "Croce del Nord" (near Bologna) uses Lepida too. - Health care: since February 2005 the first set of connections between regional hospitals and Lepida is on. Already one tele-consultation service is operative among endoscopy specialists living in the area, to ease diagnoses and reporting. - Culture: in 2004 an important soul festival taking place in our mountain area was broadcasted through Lepida in a public space in another town in our region. This year the festival will be broadcasted in many more cities, reaching a wider audience. As far as the longer term sustainability of the case is concerned, the regional administration has focused its attention on three issues: - cost and benefit analysis; - the institutional framework represented by the Regional Law 11, "Regional Development of the Information Society"; - the impact on the wider market of businesses and residents that the utility companies have committed to address through the exploitation of the deployed communication infrastructure.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

The Emilia-Romagna Region is willing to provide other interested administrations with: - the legal and administrative framework which has been developed for the implementation of Lepida, consisting of institutional agreements with public administration at different levels and contractual deployment agreements with the local utility companies; - the technical and organisational framework, consisting of the description of the network architecture, the technical and implementation specifications, the conformance testing specifications and procedures, the criteria for the decision between technology options, the description of the network service requirements and the service level agreements; - a help-desk support for inquiring administrations to be handled primarily via email; - a presentation kit that describes the initiative as a whole providing the required details. In addition, the regional administration declares itself prepared to present the case at sessions organised by the EC to introduce best practices as well as to contribute to and participate in workshops, exhibitions and ad hoc events.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - An initiative aiming at creating a regional infrastructure including more than 400 administrations needs to be thought as a system, to provide a homogeneous development on the whole territory. This is why, after the planning stage, we felt it was important to introduce and then pass a law regulating the infrastructure, its ownership, the role of the various partners and the governance model. As for the governance, the result is a Framework Agreement that defines the initiative's guidelines, the technical and institutional rules for its realisation. Lesson 2 - Could we impact not only the way PAs worked, but also the regional competitiveness as a whole? The need to give Emilia-Romagna the new «highways» that today keep us in touch with the rest of the world and allow for an active role in a global scenario was clear, so Lepida was devised in such a way that, whilst having public administrations as its core business in the first stage, it opens to citizens and business, thanks to the involvement of private investments. A unique scheme has been defined for what relates to the costs sharing between public and private partners, who commit themselves to implementing additional capacity for the private market in line with own business and industrial plan. Besides, the participation of the private partners allows for the development of the broadband infrastructure also in disadvantaged areas where the traditional companies' business model would not consider investments. Lesson 3 - The need of operating in a systemic way was felt also on the technical side, as far as standards were concerned. The solution was found together with all operators involved in the initiative, with the co-ordination of the regional part: in our case standards are driven by the public sector, not dictated by the private one. Scope: Regional (sub-national)