Italian Portal of Chambers of Commerce

Acronym of the case:

IPCC

Web address of the case:

http://www.cameradicommercio.it

Country of the case:

Italy

City/region:

national

Posting Date:

10 December 2009

Last Edited Date:

28 December 2009

Author:

valentina di michele (retecamere)

Service Oriented Architecture | E-Government Service Directory | cross-level government cooperation

Type of initiative

Strategic initiative

Case Abstract

The re-engineered National portal of CCs www.cameradicommercio.it was released on 03 November 2008 by Retecamere, Italian Chambers of Commerce (CCs) network Consulting Agency. The portal is the gateway to access information and services provided by the network of CCs, main actors in local economies and representatives of all Italian companies.The portal provides users with an additional channel to find information and on-line assistance on administrative and promotion services to support the growth of Italian enterprises and market regulation services for the general interests of the production system and market development throughout the territory.The portal uses web2.0 functions to make the Italian sector of CCs more efficient and largely participated through a user-friendly architecture based on flexible semantic techniques.By surfing the website per business category or per subject, users can find information, subscribe to conferences and events, download documents, receive the general or customized newsletter and customized on-line assistance.

The portal includes several Web2.0 features, such as as feedbacks and content share through the main social networks, and it is connected to a Customer Relationship Management System (Ciao Impresa). The portal content is available for mobile phones.

The main benefits are:

More focused online-requests and less work for conventional CCs desks;
CCs are closer to stakeholders;
clients can easily and quickly reach all the information and services provided by CCs also through mobile phone;
stronger fidelity bond with users, as they access time after time the Assistenz@ online help-desk.

Impact:

The statistic results from January to May 2009 show a total of 15 million visits, 1m visitors of the portal and 9 136 of mobile version, and 8 640 requests to Assistenz@ online help desk, for total savings of â‚¬86.400 per year (estimated on a 5-month basis).In October 2008 (before the launch) visits were around 715 000, compared to 3.1m in November 2008 (after the launch). The portal is on 1st position on Google ranking as for the keywords related to chambers of commerce.Since the portal provides free-of-charge information and services, the evaluation of statistics is fundamental also to calculate cost savings and return on investment.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Sector

Internal market | Local/Regional Community Development

Start date - End date

January 2008 (Ongoing)

Date operational

November 2008

Target Users

Administrative | Business (self-employed) | Business (industry) | Business (SME) | Intermediaries

Target Users Description

The target users of the CCs portal are all the actors of the Italian economic system both public and private, including aspiring entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, students, consumers and public administration (among such organisations the Chambers of Commerce play a major role).
As a subscription to CCs is mandatory for Italian entrepreneurs who wants to start or modify a business activity and access to all administrative services, the size of entrepreneurs target group might include all the ventures registered (around 6m units).
Even though it is manifest that only a small part of the registered units access the web, the mark-up is still broad-spectrum, also due to the usable interface and the ease-of-use of navigation mode.
Aspiring entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs belong to a larger economic system (which includes also banks, other governmental bodies and world of work), which need information on administrative services offered by CCs, as business start-up, management and development.
The Public Administration target group includes Central and Local public bodies, trade unions, CCs network members and EU, which need information on CCsâ€™ institutional activity. The size of the former target group can be measured only on the number of bodies involved (around 5.000).
Apart from those larger target groups, a minor part is composed by school and cultural system members (teachers, students and other operators), citizens and immigrants, that need general information on all the services, studies and other activities offered by the CCs (such as databases, info on promotion and internationalisation policies etc).

Scope

Local (city or municipality) | National | Regional (sub-national)

Status

Operation

Language(s)

Italian

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The main ICT innovation in public administration in the last years has been the development of electronic one-stop shops, i.e. single access points to many related transactions and services, required in a particular event of businesses, while they are offered by several different public organisations. In view of one-stop portals, www.cameradicommercio.it was developed and organised according to the assumption that customers are aware of their needs, but are unaware of the administrative procedures and the public authorities responsible for handling their requests.
The portal www.cameradicommercio.it is aligned to National and EU policies on e-government and e-participation, as an attempted to organise public services around people life-events and so-called business episodes through the provision of a single access to services and information supplied by CCs network regardless the service provider.
The portal gathers all the information flow and on-line services in a very innovative approach rooted in the â€œe-Gov 2012â€ plan, as it enhances the inclusion of all the stakeholder community in the information society and centres its architecture on final users also to overcome the lack of â€œawarenessâ€ of the available initiatives related to the interaction between citizen/enterprises and Public Authority websites stressed on the â€œInformation Society Indicatorsâ€ published by the Italian Government in 2005.
The portal is aligned to the â€œe-Gov 2012 planâ€ as it achieves bureaucratic simplification, efficient and transparent communication responding to the needs of citizens or enterprises, and provides modern services ensuring ease of access and interaction through a set of high-quality services, delivered with innovative methods to user-customers by a unified access point.
Since the website has been launched only 7 months ago, no report on its benefit is available yet and results have been pointed out during PA Official Meetings.
As a 3 layer interoperable system (as in IDABC - European Interoperability Framework), the portal ensures subsidiarity, accessibility, multilateral and multichannel solutions, open source solutions, privacy and the use of open standards.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Inclusive services of general interest

Overall Implementation approach

Public administration

Technology choice

Open source software

Funding source

Public funding national

Project size

Implementation: €49-299,000

Yearly cost:

€49-299,000

Implementation and Management Approach

www.cameradicommercio.it has been fully planned, realised and driven by Retecamere (Italian Chambers of Commerce network Consulting Agency). The project has involved the network of CCs through an awareness campaign and the implementation of ad-hoc channels to grant a daily-updated information flow.
Two groups coordinate the development of the portal: the Governance Committee and the editorial staff. The Governance committee is composed by representatives of the Union of Chambers of Commerce and Chambers of Commerce members. It supervises the general portal management, the editorial line, programming and other evolution proposals.
As part of a consortium, each Chamber has guaranteed its support to the new initiative, publishing portal banners and creating a network of cross-links.
To fully provide information and support to the Italian businesses, the new portal is available on three different channels: the traditional web site, the mobile site for smart and mobile phone, and CRM system, which transfers news and information to the registered users/businesses and acquires new contacts.
The portal is virtually divided in two different spaces: a public area, offering information in a read-only modality, and an interactive area, where users can receive tailor-made information and request assistance to experts working in the editorial staff. The editorial staff is composed by 10 people working full-time on portal contents and technological aspects.
The general management of the project (including a three levels management such as content, ICT and human resources) is based on workflow patterns, ranging from simple to complex constructs.
In our experience and after modelling the control flow of some important events in general management (i.e. business episodes or editorial staff management) we conclude that they tend to follow a small number of verifiable workflow patterns we included in a very operative though low-key risk management plan.
The technology of the portal of Chambers of Commerce is based on semantic techniques fed by a highly specialized thesaurus of over 810 primary concepts monthly updated. Data exchange is operated through XML standard mark-up. Being ontologyâ€™s on an on-going state of development and in-depth research, the system is constantly integrated with newer solutions to be implemented in 8-12 months.

Technology solution

The portal has been developed on a Three-Tier architecture, an evolution of traditional client/server architecture which includes a middleware for data transfer from client to database layer.
The Three-Tier architecture features the following layers:

presentation: user interface capturing data and displaying results;
middleware: transmitting user requests to data archive layer and reporting results;
data archive.

The system project was carried out by using Rational Rose tool, a widespread commercial CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) based on UML language, in a view of workflow modelling through UML diagrams. In addition to Rational Rose (which supports Booch '93 and OMT annotations and generates code for Object Oriented languages as C#, Java, Ada, C++, etc.), the site was developed with LAMP opensource, linux, apache php, ajax and mysql.
The portal also features an authenticated system to Assistenz@ online help desk and CRM, which allows to obtain customised information and personal feeds.
www.cameradicommercio.it also supports applications for mobile and smart phones.

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