The European Digital Agenda and the Impact of ICT on Public Administrations and Small and Medium Enterprises* Flavio Corradini, Barbara Re Computer Science Division, University of Camerino 62032 Camerino, Italy flavio.corradini@unicam.it, barbara.re@unicam.it that in most of the cases are enabled thanks to public- private partnership. Last but not least, to develop and Abstract to maintain ICT skills in the workforce is a prerequisite for a continuous development. Since several years, the importance of Infor- Many countries worldwide are investing in the digi- mation and Communication Technologies has tal sector to strengthen the current infrastructure and been well recognized by public and private or- make the real adoption possible. In Europe the “Eu- ganizations all around the world. However, its rope 2020 Strategy” underlines the role of Information fully adoption, that is possible in almost ev- and Communication technology to promote smart, ery sector of economic and social activities, sustainable and inclusive economy [EU10b]. Unlock- remains a big challenge. In Europe, Mem- ing the ICT growth potential in Europe enables ICT to ber States put digital transformation in the be a new engine for the growth [DvW13]. Among the middle of the political agenda. In this paper seven flagship initiatives Europe promotes the “Dig- we intend to review and discuss the progress ital Agenda for Europe” [EU10a]. It aims to deliver of the Italian and Albanian digital economies. sustainable economy and social benefits to a digital With the aim of advertise digital transforma- single market based on fast and ultra-fast broadband tion best practices, we also present project and interoperable applications. All European coun- experiences confirming the impact of Infor- tries adopted such an agenda. In Italy the government mation and Communication Technologies on is implementing a national plan for ultra-broadband Public Administration and Small and Medium development that moves forward the digital divide Enterprise. problem [oED11]. This comes together with a national strategy for digital growth, pushing the role of tech- 1 Introduction nology in any fields of the society and stressing the importance of knowledge driven economy [dCdM15]. All sectors of modern society have been deeply influ- In parallel, Albania’s government proposed a cross- enced by Information and Communication Technolo- cutting Strategy “Digital Agenda of Albania 2015- gies (ICT). The current ICT development process en- 2020” [CoMA14]. Following the European guidelines ables a relatively simple diffusion of digital services. major priorities of this strategy are improvement of Nevertheless, a different perception is evident when national infrastructure and development of electronic their real adoption is considered. To exploit the digi- services. talization potentiality, bottlenecks need to be removed and an adequate environment has to be created. Fi- In this paper, we give an overview of the cur- nancial conditions have to support digital investments rent development state of digital economy in Italy and Albania by means of some relevant data. Stress- * This is an invited paper. ing the role of Public Administration and Small and In: A. Editor, B. Coeditor (eds.): Proceedings of the XYZ Medium Enterprise we also present two project expe- Workshop, Location, Country, DD-MMM-YYYY, published at riences: Open City Platform (OCP) and Private As- http://ceur-ws.org sisted House (PAss). The OCP project contributes in the area of Smart Government exploiting the po- • Policy for the development of electronic communi- tentialities of Cloud Computing [AFG+ 10]. The PAss cations in all sectors (health, education, environ- project contributes in the area of Smart Living (Ambi- ment, agriculture, tourism, culture, energy, trans- ent Assisted Living) showing the importance of cross- port, etc) sector cooperation among enterprises [GBMP13]. The rest of this paper is organized as follow. Section • Establishment of the National Geospatial Data 2 gives an overview of the Digital Agenda, and the Infrastructure impact of ICT on on PAs and SMIs. Section 3 and Among others, Albanian strategy is be based on 4 present the mentioned projects experiences related some guide principles, following we report some of to Ambient Assisted Living and Smart Government, them: people come first, Individual empowerment, ac- respectively. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper. cess to services delivered by the government, national integration of ICT resources, transborder and regional 2 The Role of ICT cooperation and beyond, trust and security of infor- 2.1 Digital Agenda in Italy mation networks, effectiveness and efficiency, quality of digital contents, Private-Public Cooperation Part- In Italy the implementation of European Digital nership, and technological neutrality. Agenda passes through a national plan for ultra- broadband development [oED11]. It confirms the es- 2.3 ICT Overall Impact sential role of telecommunications for the develop- ment and competitiveness of all other digital services ICT is an important sector for Europe since it plays a [dCdM15]. It represents the key factor to ensure fundamental role in the growth and potential employ- greater impact from the implementation of the cross ment in the sector itself, and at the same time it also and digital platforms and infrastructure architectures. promotes the growth in other business sectors as well This plan was proposed together with a national strat- as in the Public Administrations. In 2011 a study done egy for digital growth organized in three main pil- by the Management Academy for ICT Executives un- lars. The first one refers to enabling infrastructure, derlined the importance of ICT investment. It could the second consists of enabling platforms and then the save the public administration up to 43 billion euro, third one refers to an acceleration program. In partic- and impact on GDP with an increase in from 0.4% to ular, Italy’s national strategy for digital growth passes 0.9% [MA11]. through: Even if the ICT sector was affected, as well as other sectors, by the economic crisis the share of value added • Digital market and investments: improving in- by the ICT sector as a percentage of the GDP has re- teroperability, fostering e-commerce, harmonizing mained stable at around 4% in 2011 and 2012, driv- fiscal policies ing over 17% of the total Business Expenditure on Research and Development (BERD). The positive ef- • Internet governance and consumers’ trust: in- fect of information and communication technologies on creasing safety and security Research & Innova- market performance has been confirmed by empirical tion: releasing the innovative potential through studies [DGK03] [MKG04]. They underline how ICT new models of digital manufacturing and startups impacts in terms of productivity, profitability, market value and market share. They also state that pro- • E-government and digital infrastructure: mod- cess efficiency, service quality, cost savings, organiza- ernising the public sector and the digital network, tion and process flexibility and customer satisfaction Big Data and Cloud Computing can be improved by means of ICT. Referring to the number of IT companies Italy is 2.2 Digital Agenda in Albanian with 97.000 active companies, which are employing Albania government proposed a cross-cutting Strat- 390.000 people on second place in Europa behind UK. egy “Digital Agenda of Albania 2015-2020” [CoMA14]. In Albania there are more than 1.800 companies and Following the European guidelines the major priorities over 8.000 professionals that operate in the IT in- of this strategy are improvement of national infrastruc- dustry. The main business activity is located in the ture and development of electronic services. More in greater area of the capital cities. In Albania, Tirana details the priorities are: hosts 47% of the ICT companies. In Italy, Rome shares together with Milan the highest concentration of ICT • Policies for the development of electronic gover- companies in the country. Approximately 20% of all nance and delivery of interactive public services employees works alone in Rome in the ICT sector. for citizens and business More general, according to the “Measuring the Infor- mation Society Report - 2015” provided by ITU1 it is cloud computing are guaranteed for Public Adminis- possible to observe a continuous growth regarding the tration. They are cost reduction, efficiency, flexibility ICT development index, in particular Albania ranks and speed of service delivery, easier maintenance of 94th and Italy ranks 38th. Comparing the percentage technological infrastructure [Cat10]. More in general of households with computer in Albania and Italy we this allows the national government to make available have 28,21% and 73,98% respectivelly, and considering a set of shared resources avoiding unnecessary infras- the percentage of households with Internet access we tructure duplication, freeing up physical space and re- have 25,94% and 72,61%. sources that can be invested to create new growth op- Last but not least, the diffusion of ICT contributes portunities. to take advantage of open government data, and pub- Other important contributions of the OCP project lic sector information in general. McKinsey estimates refers to the openness and transparency [Gen95]. global economic value of open data as USD 3.2 Trillion. Openness is broader than transparency. The first one covers active cooperation and communication between 3 The Open City Platforms Public Administrations, while the latter refers to the access to Public Administrations data and services. 3.1 Overview OCP contributes to both of them. Indeed, interop- The OCP project2 funded by the Italian Ministry of erability is a key issue solved by the project both at Education and Research within the call “Smart Cities technical and semantic level. Also transparency is sup- and Communities and social innovation” is 42 months ported by OCP by means of an open service approach. long (from January 2014 to June 2017). It is a research Considering open data as snapshot of data from appli- and development project and it involves: 2 public re- cations they usually represent a copy of information in search centers (INFN and University of Camerino) and a precise time slot; we state that open data updating is 18 companies with the support of some Italian pub- an issue. Indeed, the main disadvantages of open data lic administrations (3 regions, 16 municipalities, and refer to the lack of real time access of original data, the 4 municipalities aggregations). Potentially, OCP im- capability to update they in a fully automatic man- pacts on more than 9.000.000 people living in the ter- ner and finally the possibility to give meaning to the ritory of the involved regions. data. Solve such issues means evolve the concept of The OCP project implements a Smart Government3 open data toward open services. This is what OCP solution for Public Administration taking advantage support. of the cloud computing technologies to close the gap between availability and use of digital services. In par- 3.3 OCP Main Components ticular, the project objectives are following reported. The OCP project objectives refers to the design and development of a fully interoperable cloud stack char- • Design and Development a fully integrated and acterized by the following main components. interoperable cloud stack (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). • Design an innovative organizational models sup- • OCP extends the well known IaaS platform, such porting the provisioning of cloud based services as OpenStack4 for the retrieval of resources (net- by local governments to citizens, businesses and work, computing and storage). In particular, other Public Administrations. the extension provides a mediation layer between OCP and the underlying IaaS infrastructures in • Promote the diffusion of open-source technologies order to avoid differences in the type and terms in Public Administrations. of services provided by SaaS and PaaS layers in OCP. 3.2 OCP Challenges • OCP supports a specialized PaaS interoperabil- The project contributes giving input toward Pub- ity solution to orchestrate different PaaS platform lic Administration innovation. Through the develop- and related functionality. Considered platforms ment of the OCP platform some of the benefits of are Cloudify5 and WSO26 . 1 http://www.itu.int/ 2 http://www.opencityplatform.eu/ (in Italian) • OCP extends the PaaS platform to support e- 3 Smart Government refers to “the implementation of a set government reusable components, such as multi- of business processes and underlying information technology ca- channel support, big data Management, cartog- pabilities that enable information to flow seamlessly across gov- ernment agencies and programs to become intuitive in providing 4 https://www.openstack.org/ high quality citizen services across all government programs and 5 https://getcloudify.org/ activity domains” [Rub14]. 6 http://wso2.com/ raphy management, payment gateway. They en- 4 The PAss Project able the development of digital service at the SaaS 4.1 Overview level. The PAss project10 funded by Marche Region was 24 • OCP implements a scalable, federation-ready and months long (from February 2012 to February 2014). multi-monitoring infrastructure between the IaaS, It involved 12 companies (1 big, 3 medium, 5 small, Paas and SaaS layers based on Zabbix7 . It ex- and 3 micro), two institutions for technology transfer, poses consumption metrics which can be used and the University of Camerino. both for resource usage supervision and for in- The Pass project implements an Ambient Assisted terfacing to existing billing systems. Living11 solution for people ageing well in their pri- • OCP supports a federated identity management vate homes. In particular, the project objectives are for both authentication and authorization. It is following reported. based on OpenAM8 a web-based suitable to pro- • Design an innovative care model. vide authentication methods and Single Sign On functionalities. This is in line with the national • Promote the user-centered technology develop- guidelines given by AGID and the SPID frame- ment in the field of smart house. work (in italian “Sistema Pubblico di Identitá Digitale”). • Design and development of an integration plat- form for the governance of smart home. • OCP implements a citizen’s Marketplace. It is a common place in which providers of public • Design and development of smart objects. services or open data/services (e.g., municipal- ities, public companies, universities or research • Design and development of an invisible and adapt- institutes), but also citizens willing to propose able sensors solution. services, can exhibit their applications in cross- • Improve of knowledge asset for orienting the PAss selling and trusted mode. care model. • OCP implements a services’ Marketplace that en- The project contributed giving input toward inno- ables companies (and service creators in general) vation to industrial operators in the economic mar- to easily activate new cloud digital services based ket involving several sectors. In particular, involved on those provided by Public Administration. It sectors were health, construction, and manufacturing. also enables the deployments and use of services The project introduced services and products with a across regions and at national-level. positive impact on the relationship between economic • OCP proposes an Open Service infrastructure growth and employment. Also trans-sectors develop- based on SPOD9 . It is set of open-source tools ment was promoted. New competences raised acquir- which help to implement open data and support ing multi-disciplinary skills. two way interactions (instead of importing static datasets) by means of open services. Semantic 4.2 PAss Challenges enrichment of data is also supported. The project contributes to answer open challenges in the area of Ambient Assisted Living, with the care Finally, OCP implements a methodology for assess- model, the integration platform and a set of smart- ment of the potentiality of porting services towards the objects. All of them are are distinctive aspects of a OCP cloud. This permits to analyze the impact of the smart home12 . potential software transformation. To do that eight The PAss care model supports a deep understand- different parameters are considered, that are: work- ing of end users including specific groups, like elderly load, loose coupling, number of layers, distribution, people, disabled, disabled elderly people, living alone, database, component type, multi-tenancy and security 10 http://www.projectpass.eu (in Italian) [CAPS15]. 11 Ambient Assisted Living can be defined as “the use of in- All components and methodology are under valida- formation and communication technologies in a person’s daily tion into practice through the organization of testing living and working environment to enable them to stay active environments involving resources of Public Adminis- longer, remain socially connected and live independently into trations supporting the project. old age” (www.aal-europe.eu) [MFRR15] 12 Smart home is “an application of ubiquitous computing that 7 https://www.zabbix.com/ is able to provide user context-aware automated or assistive ser- 8 https://forgerock.org/openam/ vices in the form of ambient intelligence, remote home control 9 http://www.opendata.statportal.it/ or home automation” [ARA12]. or with a caregiver. Overall, the care model introduces home by means of the Home Gateway. flexibility considering the diversity that evolves during the time. When people get older they change physi- 4.4 Smart Objects cally, emotionally, mentally and so they have different In the following we present some of the Smart Ob- needs according the level of sickness and health. jects that are designed and developed in the project. The PAss integration platform combines together Smart Objects are objects able to interact with the heterogeneous solutions (home automation and tele- surrounding environment and with other objects in care) creating a common platform to exchange in- order to coordinate the execution of complex actions formation between multi-vendors and multi-purposes [KKFS10]. They are interconnected each other and smart-objects. This gives an answer to inter- supported by the PAss integration platform thanks to compatibility issues and solves problems that may the use of standard interfaces. arise when different protocols have to be supported. Indeed, the PAss integration platform can be deployed • Interior Smart Door - It is a door that can be in existing homes and it can interoperate with the ex- opened in two directions, the door control is au- isting infrastructure. Even if several standards related tomatically supported by an electric motor even to assistive technology already exist, the situation is if it can also actuated manually. still really complex. For many relevant topics, there are no standards, or standards with no market accep- • Smart Window - It is a window characterized by tance. a triple-glass with double cavities. The internal The smart objects designed and developed during space is filled with a gas, while the external con- the PAss project are able to populate the domestic en- tains a liquid shielding. At the base of the frame vironments with non-invasive sensors. Generally, sen- there is a micro-pump able to push the liquid in- sors are prone to environmental noise, and to improve side the cavity when it is necessary to regulate the sensing performance a cross-check validation is needed. light in the house. Smart objects proposed in the project represent a so- lution to this problem improving the number and the • Smart Armchair - It is an armchair equipped with types of input sensors without impacting on the living sensors for monitoring personal health parameters environment. such as pressure, weight, blood sugar and blood oxygen saturation. 4.3 PAss Integration Platform • Wearable Smart Sensors - It consists of wear- able multi-sensor able to measure simultaneously: The PAss integration platform is based on a concep- heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, tual model that is a generalization of the software and activities, acceleration and posture. It makes pos- hardware components. Relevant aspects are the use of sible to have a complete monitoring of the people an Home Gateway for the local control of the house during daily activities. together with the integration of a Telemedicine Plat- form. • Smart Panel - It is an interactive panel equipped The Home Gateway is the core component of the with configurable buttons used to control func- smart home, since it is responsible to run the PAss tionalities of the home. integration platform implementing the business logic for the local management of the house. It includes a 5 Concluding Remarks message broker toward smart objects and it is also re- sponsible to store data and to log the messages passing. Starting from Digital Agenda, national plans related Its functionalities are exposed by means of a user in- to digital development are implemented all around Eu- terface. The Telemedicine Platform is an organized, rope as well as in Albania. They prove the role given secure, and highly regulated system for practicing to ICT by governments recognizing ICT as an engine medicine remotely, tracking health data, sharing med- for the development of the modern society. However, ical records among physicians. It has an independent ICT potentialities are not fully exploited. communication channel toward health dedicated cen- In the paper we discussed the importance of ICT for ters and it enables remote visit through high-resolution modern society and we present its benefits by means of video. Both Home Gateway and Telemedicine Plat- project experiences concerning Ambient Assisted Liv- form communicate with the Cloud Center that ing and Smart Government. The projects confirmed allows storage, normalization and analysis of data. some recent technological trends. 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