The Italian e-Government Plans: Experiences in the Job Marketplace and in Statistical Information Systems

In this paper we present two projects framed in the Italian Plan of e-Government and we merge them into the Employment Information System (EIS) concept. The first project regards the Italian Workfare Information System, formed by a Portal and its related cooperative information system developed to address unemployment. The system guidelines, architecture, and achievements are illustrated, in particular, the organizational and technological choices. Then, the paper outlines the basic issues of a EU-funded project named SEEMP (Single European Employment Marketplace) that aims at opening the Italian Employment network of federated nodes to other European Countries, thus enlarging the virtual Job Marketplace created by the Italian and other Countries Workfares. The second project, called AMeRIcA, develops a Statistical Information System (SIS) out of data coming from Public Administrations administrative archives. Such archives are a rich source of information, but an attempt to use them as sources for statistical analysis reveals errors and incompatibilities, that do not permit to exploit data for a statistical and decision support basis. These errors and incompatibilities are usually undetected during administrative use, since they do not affect their day-by-day use in the Public Administrations; however they need to be fixed before performing any further aggregate analysis. The studies performed to build a SIS in AMeRIcA are presented. In the paper, we focus on commonalities among the projects, which contribute to a unique vision of an EIS, intended as a set of tools and data supporting policies to prevent unemployment.