The “Comunicazioni Obbligatorie – CO” (Italian for “Compulsory Communication”) is an innovative Italian e-service to simplify, centralize, and guarantee the interoperability of information about the employment/ unemployment status of citizens (Italians, EU and extra-EU citizens) in Italy: more than 30 million communications. Since the 1st of March 2008, every single public and private employer must use the CO electronic service to notify any employee team variation. The communication is a real time process and notified to both public and private entities which manage information about employment status (e.g. employers, the Italian National Social Security Service - INPS, the Italian National Insurance at Work Service - INAIL, National Welfare Service, etc.)

Until the deployment of the CO e-service, most notifications required manual intervention at most stages. Since it has been activated, the CO e-service has processed over 380,000 user registrations, 10 million CO-notifications.

This innovative e-service reduces the famous Italian “burocratization”: most of the information and data are safely web shared (interoperability) and paper-documents are no longer needed. In accordance with the “strategic lines towards the achievement of the national eGovernment System”, the CO service improves the Public Administration’s efficiency; achieves full interoperability and complete cooperation between administrations; enhances the transparency, quality and efficiency of public administration and simplifies and reorganizes some administrative processes. In turn the CO service also enables public subjects to discover and suppress the “undeclared/ black work” for a better economical public governance.

The opportunity to access the actual and complete data of the Italian labour market represents a valuable Decision Support System (DSS) tool for politicians; in fact, it provides an extraordinary wealth of objective data about the labour market in real-time for a better and more effective planning of employment active policies. This article provides a general overview of the key actions towards CO Service development.