Impact

The CO eService is actually increasing the transparency, quality and efficiency in public job-market related services. Simultaneously it is possible to simplify the burden arising from public administration and reduce the digital divide. It achieves full interoperability and complete cooperation between administrations, and simplifies and reorganizes some administrative processes. Since its activation it has managed more than 12 million of electronic communications and this simplification reflects in a public money saving which could reach the amount of about 0,5% italian GPD (Ministry of Labours estimate). Every single electronic communication substitutes at least four past hardcopy communications: before the introduction of the CO eService, every employer had to notify any change in his workforce employment status to different public entities: INAIL, INPS, UTG (i.e. the Territorial Government Office), and local CPI.

At present, every communication is electronically registered once and the registration identification number is shared among the public entities that are due to manage the employment data. Citizen data are inserted only once into the system and public officers belonging to different public entities haven’t got to input the same information several times.

The CO eService had a very high impact on administrative procedures. Nowadays operators don’t have to deal with manual intervention at most stages anymore and they can focus their activities towards value-added services. In turn, the administration is able to provide more productive and less expensive services.

Adopting the CO eService, the Italian Government did a fundamental innovation toward the data redundancy reduction, data sharing and interoperability. By means of special functionalities as the “Cruscotto” (dashboard), the CO eService also offers innovative powerful tools to politicians for a better policy to boost the employment and reduce unemployment, it makes already available innovative real time tools for improving the anticipation and matching of skills and labour market needs. The “Cruscotto” represents a valuable, innovative, effective and powerful Decision Support System (DSS), and politicians can plan actions to boost specific economical sectors according to local industries and services needs and citizens’ background and skills (“new skills for new jobs”). The achieved results boost the further CO eService development, in particular some further modules are managed or are going to be managed soon:
- “Comunicazioni Obbligatorie Gente Di Mare – UNIMARE”, i.e. the CO eService specifically designed to manage the compulsory notifications for maritime workers, started 1st August 2008.
- “Istanze”, i.e. a service to manage the employment of Extra-EU citizens in response to a direct request of a company.

Track record of sharing

The CO eService has the potentiality for the implementation of full interoperability, good governance, improve effectiveness, transparency and provide innovative tools for real time labour market analysis and management. The good practice has been extending to the maritime compulsory communication, in particular the UNIMARE modules have been awarded by the Italian Ministry for Public Administration and Innovation for its efficiency for service improvement and cost savings (http://www.nonsolofannulloni.forumpa.it/100-storie/?id=341; http://www.lavoro.gov.it/Unimare/).

A summary about the efficiency and effectiveness of the CO eService has recently been published by “The European Journal of ePractice” http://www.epracticejournal.eu/document/4975). The paper entitled: “CO eService: the Italian eGovernment revolution for the Compulsory Communication of the employment status” presents the real-time Italian labour market monitoring figures.

The CO eService has been as well recently presented at the Annual congress of the The Public Administration Information Systems Professional Association: (http://www.aniap.ro/) held in Mamaia, Romania 4th – 6th September.

Lessons learnt

In less than a year the CO eService case has demonstrated that actual interoperability for good governance is possible in order to improve the services to citizen and save public money. Furthermore the service provides:
1. Interoperability and burocracy reduction is actually achievable.
2. eGovernment services and in particular CO eService already meets the Lisbon Agenda 2020 raccommendation about “early warning system”
3. ICT can actually contribute to semplify the employment status data management, reduce the public cost for burocracy, provide effective tools for the labour market needs and offer matching.

Every communication is registered once and its ID is shared by both public and private entities which have to manage the employment/unemployment status and related information (e.g. working insurance, retairing contributions, ecc.) and at different level of administrative organization and management.

The centralization of a such data allows developing and exploiting innovative tools for labour market monitoring and the actual photography of citizens’ background and job needs make the politicians able to plan effective education and training policies, and make the skills gap less wide.
The “cumpolsoriety” of the centralization of the information also provides innovative methods to monitor and uncover undeclared/black work and by means of the interoperability features it is possible to develop cross – administration checking (e.g. tax declaration and payement).

The developed architecture is modular and thus the CO eService can easily integrate new services, in order to grow the Labour Service Network. The CO eService good practice can be applied to different labour context and connected to further European Countries in order to develop an innovative labour market intelligent cell, as indicated by the UE initiative “New skills for new jobs”.