The Emilia-Romagna Labour Information System (in italian SILER) 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 also supplies online services for citizens and businesses which prefer to access directly the Internet without intermediaries. Information is provided by a strong interoperability with the legacy systems run by the different players involved in provisioning of employment services.

Policy Context

The initial project was coherent with the spirit of e-Europe 2005, whose aim was to develop at the same time infrastructure and real online services. Besides, one of the priorities was ICT as a tool for the economic development, and in this SILER was surely an important step, easing the relationship between employers and employees. SILER also answers completely to national laws on employment, anticipating some of the technological and organizational solutions. SILER system is now regularly up and running and the policy makers of employment scenario have no alternative tools to be effectively supported in their tasks.

Technology solution

From the technological point of view, SILER system marks itself as for 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). Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Mainly (or only) open standards, Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

As a result from a qualitative assessment, a definitely positive return comes from the SILER system usage. In particular: - there has been visible improvements 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). These assessments are the result of continuous monitoring activities, carried out on a time base. 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 increased 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” fulfilment; back office activities; the increase amount in efficiency for these macro activities is estimated as follows: --- +5% front-office reception and pre-selection; --- +15% job “search/offer” fulfilment; --- +5% back office activities. As far as a specific online service, called “Required Notice" is concerned (it enables companies to make their by-law notification of recruitment, dismissal, etc.), today 1.500 subscription from business users are registered; they are generating traffic for a daily average amount of 10.000 notices. The information availability at a local level – as a result from 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.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - SILER system development has been an unique opportunity to demonstrate that ICT can be considered not only as an enabler but as a real integration driver, always remembering to pay attention to an indispensable organizational effort. Lesson 2 - 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. Lesson 3 - 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”. Scope: Regional (sub-national)