Implementation and Management Approach

The implementation and management approach of this case is structured and empowered as follows: Anusca, the platform owner, which works together with the two primary bodies, namely the Administration Committee and  Technical Board Committee; additionally there are executive functions of the Platform Director, CRM Manager (relationship with the Citizens), and a Quality Control Manager. The project realization is therefore supervised by an Administrative Committee, chaired by the representative of the Anusca, which has full executive responsibility towards the case. In this way effective coordination and decision-making are ensured by continuous dialogue, full participation of members' representatives and coordination among them. The operational functional responsible are enabled to manage and resolve possible legal and technical discrepancy as far as different performance results. This organization ensures the successful achievement of identifying citizens' priorities and sharing common vision and indicates the key components andsuccess factors.

To enforce the management and the implementation of the ECRN Bologna case strategy, the Administrative Committee has to deal with the overall Municipality organisation; form one side we have therefore the Platform management director of the ECRN office, and centrally we have a "super-parts" advisory team, which includes a main coordinator (coming from ANUSCA, theplatform holder) and a number of delegates for solving different legal and possibleadministrative problems.The system testing has been performed by the project team in an offline environment the project Committees have discussed the needs and understood the wishes of the CRM Manger and then realized this transparent mechanism of document exchange.

Technology solution

The ECRN allows the Citizens Registry of the European administrations to exchange civil status documents in a fast, secure and certified way.

Electronic technology is one of the main elements to achieve this objective; a new technical infrastructure, integrating already tested software components, constitutes the enabling platform for:

• exchanging documents in electronic way,
• knowing who to address them to,
• knowing for certain who is sending them,
• being sure about their integrity,

and, in particular, for:

• Allowing authorized people only to do all that.

This infrastructure is denominated ECRN Platform,characterized by a multitier architecture in which the presentation, the application processing and the data management are logically separate layers.

The ECRN Platform allows the PA's officers, having as a main functions focused the documents exchange previously described, to manage the whole platform and to monitor it. The whole set of these application functions constitutes the ECRN Service, available to the Users through a standard web browser.

The only access point to the ECRN Service is thus the ECRN Web Application whose characteristics are described in this document.

Specifically, the ECRN Platform has to be considered as a combination of different elements, different layers interworking and interacting with the external components.

The Front Office layer is the one that interacts directly with the user: in the ECRN pilot version this consists of the web application used by the PA officers for accessing ECRN functionalities.

The Business Logic layer provides upper layer with the basic interfaces to access the lower layers functionalities. Moreover it provides some basic functionality by itself, such as sending data to the users endpoints (e.g. post a document into consignee FTP server).

The Data Layer allows the interaction with the ECRN registries, performing different types of queries. The Integration Layer integrates external components and different libraries creating a set of common interfaces accessible by the Business Logic Layer: in the concrete implementation that is realized with an ESB (Service Mix) and makes use of JBI technology.

There are two main external components that play an important role in the ECRN platform: the Central Authentication Service (CAS), which provides the user authentication service (by communicating with the Presentation Layer and the Credential Registry) and CryptoServer, who exposes the security functionalities (e.g. digital signature, encryption, certificate validation etc.). CryptoServer is integrated in the platform through the Integration Layer, but it is also directly accessed by the CAS in order to verify authentication credentials.

The system is fully based on existing technologies and foresees a central tool box the different layers relay on. Should the EC decide to adopt a common standard for one of them, the system will ease detach the actual layer and replace it with the one proposed by the European standard, without affecting
neither the efficiency nor the functionalities of the system itself.