Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal

An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 59

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An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal Mariagrazia Fugini Politecnico di Milano, Italy Mario Mezzanzanica Università Statale de Milano-Bicocca, Italy

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This paper presents the development of services to citizens and enterprises offered by the Italian Public Administration in order to improve the relationship between governmental organizations and the world of citizens and of enterprises. The application is framed the Italian National for E-Government. In particular, the paper illustrates the project aimed at developing a PORTAL for Services to Employment launched and managed by the Regional Agency for Employment of Regione Lombardia within the Italian e-government plan. Regione Lombardia, a Local Public Administration of Northern Italy around Milan administering about 10 millions citizens, has delegated its “Agency for Employment” in the development of the PORTAL to support the work emarketplace in the regional area. The purpose is to create a virtual electronic market providing active support to job policies, through a “reasoned” matching process involving job requests and offers, on the basis also of statistical data on the employment market trends, also stored in the PORTAL Information System. Active support is provided as a set of web services managed by the Regional Agency for Employment and communicating with local PAs (Provinces, Municipalities, educational and training organizations), with national institutions (Ministries and Agencies for Social Security and Retirement), and with private agencies and companies operating in the work marketplace. Copyright © 2004, Group Inc.Annals Copying or distributing in printTechnology or electronic forms without written by This chapter appearsIdea in the book, of Cases on Information 2004, Volume 6, edited permission of Idea Group Inc. is © prohibited. Mehdi Khosrow-Pour. Copyright 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

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BACKGROUND The publication of the unified law regarding administrative simplification (D.P.R., 2000) has stated the fundamentals for e-government in Italy. In particular, the normative regarding the ‘‘Modalities of submission and subscription of documents and issues’’ of this law states that: “1.All the issues and declarations to be forwarded to the Public Administration (PA) or to delegated entities can be sent also via fax and electronically. 2. The issues and declarations electronically submitted are valid if subscribed via digital signature or when the subscriber has been authenticated by the information system, using the electronic identity card.” This paper presents an application framed in such a new legislative plan, and in particular illustrates the design of an Internet PORTAL to be implemented and managed by the Regional Agency for Employment of “Regione Lombardia,” in the context of the autonomy provided to the Local Public Administrations (LPA), which are entitled to realize their own plans of e-government. Regione Lombardia (a Local Public Administration - LPA administering around 10 millions people in the area of Northern Italy) is guiding a project for the realization of a PORTAL to support the work e-marketplace in the regional area. The purpose is to create a virtual electronic marketplace providing active support to job policies, through a “reasoned” matching process involving job requests and offers. The matching occurs via a web area managed by the Regional Agency for Work and shared with local PAs (Provinces, Municipalities, instruction and educational organization) and with private agencies and companies operating on the market of personnel search and selection. An innovative aspect is the involvement of the market of private companies in the PORTAL, so that the marketplace is able to manage a great deal of offers/requests over the territory and, ultimately, with nationwide visibility. This paper illustrates the guidelines of the e-government plan in Italy, and describes the overall architecture of the PORTAL in its functions regarding both support to administrative operations (such as procedures for workers’ engagement by companies) and Workfair operations (“reasoned” matching between job offers and request and tracking of the work marketplaces trends). Finally, organizational and technical issues of both the project and the final product are discussed.

SETTING THE STAGE The modernization of services to employment, launched in recent years in most European Countries, can be described as the identification of a set of common trends, comprising: • the adoption of policies oriented to the offer of a wide and differentiated set of services; • the adoption of preventive approaches against unemployment; • the trend to an integrated management of measures for active and passive work support policies (incentives/benefits); Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 61

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the decentralization and development of management autonomy of territorial structures providing services to the work market; the focalization around the “user” and the consequent improvement of the level and quality of services.

The legislative reference is the Treaty of Amsterdam (signed October 2, 1997), where a new paragraph on employment was inserted, thus acknowledging the problem of unemployment in the European Union (EU). In particular, Article n. 125 states that “the member States and the EU strive to develop a coordinated strategy supporting employment and the acquisition of competency and qualification of workers; the strategy should be adaptable to the employment market trends and be able to meet the economical changes of the Countries.” As a consequence, the member States are modeling their services to employment according to a “European view,” moving towards an organization oriented to local communities. In such a frame, for the Italian situation we have to consider that until 1997 the employment market had to be compliant with the rules of “mandatory employment” managed by Public Administrations. This system was based on a law dating back to 1949 that prohibited any non-governmental organization to manage the brokerage between offers and requests of subordinated work, even when the mediation was free of charge. Italy was then put in arrears by the EU, since the State monopoly about employment violated various European guidelines 1. Consequently, the first discipline on the employment market was published in the form of a decree-law (December 23, 1997, n° 469) stating: • the transfer, to regional and local Public Administration agencies, of tasks related to employment and active policies for work, with a consequent transfer of personnel and structures from the Ministry of Work to the local agencies; • the definition of criteria and rules for the system of employment; • the possibility for adequate organizational structures to operate as mediators in the offer/request matching activities; • the creation of an Information System for Work as the basic tool for implementing the political and administrative orientations in the area of employment. Coming to the local Public Administration “Regione Lombardia,” we observe that in the area of work and employment, this Regional PA has a sort of privileged status, in that: • in Lombardia, a very active economic system exists that has proved able to overcome the continuous re-organizations needed to face the modifications that occurred since the early 1980s, which have radically modified the aspect of productive activities from the industrial to the tertiary sector; • the unemployment level (4.2%) is around half the average national value (10%), and the global status of the employment market is even close to full employment when considering very specific categories of workers and employees (located mostly at the opposite extremes of the range of skills); • the activity rate is 67%, that is, higher than the European one (65%), and much higher than the Italian rate (55%);

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various experiences have been performed by various Provinces located in the Regional territory, such as the experience of the Province of Milan, to mention one; Milan has tried a direct intervention on the employment market through its own Information System: this bag of expertise has been considered as an endowment in terms of professional skills and tools gained by the PA on the field.

The Region is also characterized by another issue, that is, a massive presence of agency operators active in the employment market as brokers or mediators. These are: 1) companies of “Search & Selection” (more than 200), 2) temporary work recruitment companies and cooperatives (45, many operating through a franchising chain), 3) entitled (publicly funded) subjects (at least three in Lombardia), and 4) companies operating in the outplacement market. Besides these employment market services, Regione Lombardia offers a large variety of not for profit initiatives, promoted by public agencies as well as by private associations, offering reception and welcome services, information and training services, as well as basic education services. Finally, the Region has a large education and training offer that, besides the institutional school system, ranging from public and private centers of professional training to specialization courses offered by University Institutes.

CASE DESCRIPTION The “System for an Integrated access to Work Services in Regione Lombardia” project, which is the focus of this paper, defines a new model of services to the employment market. It is aimed at exploiting and integrating the actions of different public and private actors in the work marketplace. The idea is the implementation of a virtual emarketplace constituted by a network of services offering a large pool of information about work, education, and training in order to allow users to access a large database of work offers and requests, and to interact with the system in a distributed manner and electronically, via the Internet. The financial investment of the project amounts to around 19,000.00 Euros over four years, both for development and management. Tables A.1 and A.2 in the Appendix report a macro decomposition of the basic cost items. The project is currently framed in the National Plan for E-Government in Italy that was launched in 2002 and will base its implementation on existing approaches undertaken at the local levels (e.g., in the Regional Agencies) in various fields of the public sector, such as healthcare, services to citizens and enterprises, mobility, fiscal system and services, and so on. We now briefly illustrate how the “System for and Integrated access to Work Services in Regione Lombardia” project is framed in the E-Government Italian Plan by presenting the basic organization of Italian Public Adminsitration and the main principles of the E-Government Plan.

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The Italian Public Administration and the E-Government Plan The context of Public Administration (PA) in Italy sees a structure based on central State Organizations - Ministries, Regions, Provinces and Municipalities. Moreover, various public structures exist based on different organizational forms (not for profit public organizations, public and private holdings,) that provide public services with particular attention to areas such as healthcare, public utilities, employment market, and social security. In the last few years, many strategic interventions have been performed, both of a political and of a technological type, aimed at delegating most of the functional competences on the theme of the “Welfare State,” previously under the responsibility of Ministries and Regions. Such direction, highly innovative in the Italian context, promotes a federated model of State. Within this changing context, the e-government project has been launched by the Italian Government, containing both national strategic actions and regional federated intervention plans. The strategic action guidelines identify as a primary target the creation of a PA useroriented, where the users are citizens and enterprises, provider of modern services, creator of “public” value, which constitutes a National Information and Service Infrastructure, easy to be exploited. In order to implement such a model, it is first necessary to create a modern network of enabling ICT structures ensuring to the various service primary areas the provisioning of competitive and market services. The employment market described in the paper is one of these relevant areas. The National Information Infrastructure has been defined as a multidimensional mix of public policies, corporate strategies, and advanced computer systems to be defined within the context of the recently constituted Department for Innovation and Technologies to cope with needs for changing public services in the country. In 2002, this Department has started the National E-Government Plan where the local PAs have been invited to present innovation projects in the area of public services. The plan has been launched as a competition regarding best projects with a total funding of 400 millions Euros. The projects span over a 4-year time range. The list of services that will be available in the future thanks to the projects presented and launched in the e-government by local PAs is very rich. Just to give a few figures, we mention that around 18 million citizens in nine regions (over a total of 20 regions exist in Italy with 60 million inhabitants) will be able to choose their doctor via Internet; 14 million citizens in 400 municipalities will be enabled to reserve medical visits and services; 5 million citizens in 310 municipalities will be enabled to request home assistance for seniors; citizens and enterprises in 40 provinces will be authorized to compute local taxation rates via network; in 12 regions it will be possible to perform House Registry views and cadastral plans consultation. Moreover, in 40 provinces, companies will be able to request construction permissions for new edifications and for restructuring; companies in 4 regions, for a coverage of 12 million inhabitants, will be able to communicate via network acts regarding new employment contracts, transformations of employment status or termination of employment contracts, e.g., via web. Finally, the citizens of four regions, i.e., 12 million people, Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

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will be enabled to look for a job (and vice versa offer their competences) through a federated information system. Analogous to what the private market has seen in the new economy with the diffusion of e-business in almost all its forms (e-commerce, online trading, e-banking, private banking, e-insurance, e-finance, e-payment, e-brokerage, e-procurement) (CheckFree Corp et al., n.d.), e-government has been conceived as a tool to define and manage the relationships between citizens and the PA and among PAs through detailed and capillary services, such as: virtual counters, digital signature, and virtual access to e-learning and e-procurement document management.

Strategic Requirements • • • • • •

The basic aims of the Italian E-Government Plan can be stated as follows: improvement of services to citizens; reduction of latency and delays of information circulation times; planning and balancing of the expenses; government of public expenses and management for the “System” financing; improved access to information for Operators, Organizations and Companies; respect of the autonomy of all subjects (Public Organizations and Companies, Healthcare Public Organizations, Citizens).

The plan has various aspects of complexity and innovation, such as, to mention just a few: • the technological contents; • the organizational impact; • the size of the involved user community; • the social value; • the temporal targets; • the novelty in the application of rules regarding the legal subscription of documents. E-government applies to various contexts of the PA, such as those depicted in Table 1. Table 1. PA contexts involved in the E-Government Plan Central Government Organizations Regions Provinces Municipalities Mountain Communities Healthcare Social Affairs Agriculture Transportation Education Retired population Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

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Table 2. Services of the E-Government Plan 1) Administration – Citizen š information and communication š administrative fulfillments š enabling services (Healthcare, Work) Examples: Home rental contributions, oil coupons 2) Administration – Administration š transmission of acts, documents, and information š administrative fulfillments š database integration Examples: Library services, Registry Offices Archives Integration (experimental) 3) Administration – Company š information and communication š administrative fulfillments š enabling services (Healthcare, Unified Counter) Examples: Users of Agricultural Machinery, Unified Counter for Enterprises 4) Infrastructures š transportation š interoperability š security and privacy š support and assistance

Table 2 shows the classification of the main service areas where specific projects have been activated in the E-Government Plan. The strategic requirements able to affect the success of the E-Government Plan can be summarized as follows: • Innovative approach: implement immediately but under a five-ten years vision; • Enlarged distribution of services through a peer-to-peer structure where each node (doctors’ workstations, healthcare organization, or central domains) cooperates at the same level with any other node (domain) in the network; • Integration of pre-existing (legacy) applications; • Opening, intended as portability, of different platforms, and interoperability, intended as the ability for different solutions and products, coming from various providers, to operate in an integrated and cooperative way; • Adherence to the national guidelines of ICT management (for example the National Network of PAs and the Regional Network – RUPA, or the network for the Chambers of Commerce in Italy); • Consistency with the National Card of Services and the Electronic Identity Card Projects; • Perspective of delegation of services to providers able to support and guarantee mission critical applications; • Generalized Infrastructure; • Support to evolution over time, in response to the need for the PA to be positioned in the ICT mainstream. Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

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THE PORTAL APPLICATION WITHIN THE E-GOVERNMENT PROJECT After framing the project “System for an Integrated access to Work Services in Regione Lombardia” within the E-Government, we now describe the Regional project in detail. The Project has designed an Information System and a Web PORTAL integrating the three areas of “work, education, and training.” We will refer to this information system with the term REGIONAL PORTAL FOR WORK, EDUCATION, AND TRAINING or simply PORTAL. The PORTAL provides telephone-based access (call center), consultancy based or guided access via operator (contact center), and Internet (Web) access to all the actors operating in the market of work, in the field of education and in the field of training and specialization. The areas of Work, Education and Training are strictly inter-related. The relationships among these areas are (to mention just a few): • services to students that have completed their education path and have to be inserted into the market place; • services regarding professional and training initiatives, news and information derived from the observation and monitoring of the work market; • interventions to be programmed to re-qualify and re-motivate (often large) groups of long term unemployed.

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Figure 1 shows the PORTAL Home Page. It links the three areas: Training, based on existing tools installed in the Region and in various operators’ sites and using existing applications, Education, where enabled organizations (schools and institutions) publish information and register initiatives, and Work.

Integration is implemented via a unified access and authentication interface: this Home Page is used as the system Front-End, where users register and authenticate. In particular, the Work thematic area is the core subject of this paper. In this area, the PORTAL supports: 1. Administrative functions: these are procedural operations aimed at covering the bureaucratic aspects of the area of work (preparation of documents; flow of procedures that fulfill the administrative tasks of PAs, of citizens, and of companies; management of documental archives; digital signature use; and so on). These functions are very relevant if we consider the volume of data. Addressing just the Province of Milan, an astounding 700,000 letters of “administrative communications” are sent annually from the companies. These letters are necessary to notify of variation in workers’ positions. This large number of letters is tripled when considering the entire region. 2. Advanced Services (also called “added value” services), consisting basically in matching offers and requests of work and in providing informative services in the fields of training, re-qualification, education, and reorientation according to the Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

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Figure 1. The Regional Home Page and its three Thematic Areas

employment market trends. These kind of functions are referred to as the Workfair Services. In this paper, we will consider only briefly the administrative functions and instead will go into detail for what concerns the Advanced Services, both due to the quality of these services, the innovative paradigm of PA-citizen interaction mode they introduce, and due to the advanced technological choices undertaken in the project to implement these services mainly based on Computer Networks and Web Services technologies.

THE WORKFAIR Figure 2 shows the overall architecture of the Regional PORTAL for the Workfair services. It has been designed as a set of sub-systems that consist of the web interface and content management system, the storage system, and the interoperability portion. Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

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The purpose of the PORTAL is to provide a public area where companies can publicize their work offers and where workers can publicize their curricula vitae (CV), their availability, and their preferences. The Offers and Request are the basic data structures of the PORTAL. Data have to be made public in respect of the Italian law on privacy and therefore only some fields of this information can be made public. On these data, the PORTAL provides a service called Offer/Request Matching where a search engine looks for the “best matching” among offers and requests. The purpose is to provide the users, both companies and workers, with a view (called MyPORTAL) of the matching results. This engine implements what is called Workfair, which is the core mission of the PORTAL. Moreover, the PORTAL is intended to support companies and citizens in fulfilling a set of administrative tasks. Sample tasks are the compilation of employment forms and acts. These are executed through a data exchange with all the provinces, 11 in Lombardia, each entitled to register a citizen’s requests of work, with possible data redundancy and duplication and archives. Let us illustrate the three portions of the PORTAL. 1) The content management sub-system acts mainly via a web interface to the PORTAL users and is strictly related to the Application Database (containing Request/Offer data) of the PORTAL. 2) The storage sub-system consists of: a. an application database, containing all internal data, whose purpose is to univocally reference workers in the region in order to avoid redundancy and inconsistencies; b. an index of workers and companies, acting as a registry that uniquely identifies workers enrolled at any Employment Center in a province, and companies registered in the regional territory; c. an interface to a set of databases called Informative Databases, which are statistical archives containing data about regional and national figures regarding employment, statistics about the most requested job types, standard classifications of professions and jobs, and other repertories and indexes to be consulted mainly in data mining mode. 3) The interoperability sub-system manages and integrates the communication towards the Provinces Employment Centers and to other operators acting on the employment market. In particular, the PORTAL is intended to manage an emarketplace by addressing accredited (i.e., publicly funded) and private search and selection agencies. The idea is to make a pool of requests and offers public to PAs and private actors, thus creating a wide and therefore effective Workfair. The interest by private agencies in adhering to the PORTAL consists in receiving the visibility of an enlarged pool of data, while preserving their core business in the form of pre-selections, interviews, and so on. To this aim, basically professional data are published on the PORTAL, while detailed (registry) data are preserved via privacy rules (Commission of the European Communities, 1991) to guarantee the private business. In fact, the actors can publicize Offers and Requests by compiling a minimal set of information to be made public on the PORTAL web; specific data are kept private in the actors’ databases. Another requirement in order to present

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the PORTAL as an attractive initiative for private agencies consists in making the required technological tools and applications minimal and non-invasive for actors wanting to adhere to the initiative. The technology of web services proves very effective in that the code to be installed at local agencies is minimal, easily installable, and easy to be invoked through a peer-to-peer paradigm. Data exchange in the PORTAL environment is achieved through the technology of web services (Casati et al., 2001; Christensen et al., n.d.; Web Services Concepts, n.d.) that have been selected as the basic mechanism of cooperation in the environment of Figure 1. Standard tools coming with a web service environment have been used, such as XML, UDDI, and WSDL, to create the PORTAL registries of services and to communicate in the cooperative environment. Figure 2 shows also the interaction between the PORTAL and the Regional Data Warehouse, which is the Directional Control tool of the Regional structure, to be integrated with the PORTAL by loading data coming from the PORTAL structures.

Figure 2. Architecture of the Workfair Area of the PORTAL

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Security and user profiling are transversal functions that ensure tracing of users and of visits to the PORTAL as well as authentication and access control to the PORTAL. The technology of Single-Sign-On has been selected to perform security functions.

DETAILED ARCHITECTURE The PORTAL, together with the Contact/Call Center, represent an integrated access system to services to employment, as depicted in Figure 3. The integrated access modes substitute the current territorial ATM system. The integration of the two modes (digital and phone-based) does not imply any resource duplication, but rather an optimization of investments and the capability to address a larger audience of organizations and citizens.

Access Modes and Services As an example, the access modes for the Company actor are depicted in Figure 4.

Company The diagram of Figure 4 shows the activities of companies grouped into typologies of communications between the companies and the Employment Centers. These activities that will be managed via the PORTAL functions. Three macro-sections are present: • Communications with the Registry Office, for administrative functions • Employment, for management of data about employees and contracts • Modification of Existing Contract, for administrative communications about variations of employment conditions.

Figure 3. Integrated access modes to the PORTAL

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Figure 4. Activities of Companies

The Company, directly or via the operator of the Employment Center when the PORTAL will be made operative, can access these different areas to respectively: • Communicate registry data of the company (identification data, location data, authorized representative personnel ids, address, and other information required by rules and laws). Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

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Access services related to emplyment, such as consulatation and registration of different employment contract types Modify data regarding employees, hence avoiding forwarding letters and forms to different administrations when varying the employment status of a worker.

As another example, consider the access modes for the Employment Centers actor. The basic services to be provided by the PORTAL to this actor can be listed as follows. a) Employment of workers: this service allows one to obtain, in real time, the status of all the citizens enrolled in the ordinary employment lists (ordinary, agricultural, and so on) in order to have a complete set of the mobility pool. b) Release of certifications and archiving of documents: support to fill in and release of certifications in document format. c) Removal from employment lists: this service is targeted to those who do not want to annually resubmit their enrollment to employment lists since they find alternative solutions, such as the initiation of a professional activity d) Moving to other Employment Centers: in the case of movement to other work sites on the national territory, the company must communicate the transfer of its employee to another Employment Center. This operation causes data duplication over various Centers. e) Management of workers’ CVs and of companies’ archives: This service provides the possibility for companies to perform variations on registry and other data contained in their databases. This section gives the possibility to manage the CV situations of citizens enrolled in the various employment lists. f) Revision of employment status: periodically, the overall unemployment status of all workers on the national territory can be reviewed in order to update statistics. g) Management of law fulfillments: communications needed by Law n. 608/96 (employment/ variation of contracts) are managed through this service that covers all the documentary and postal charge foreseen by the law for the companies in order to communicate each employment status variation. h) Data extraction for statistics: this function is conceived for a correct management and maintenance of the Employment Centers databases and indexing of paper archives.

Operators in the Provincial Employment Centers This third category of actor can access, upon authentication, the function of visualization of data stored in the system, in order to verify the correctness and consistency of data coming via usual transmission channels, such as s-mail or fax. Then, various reporting and statistical activities can be performed regarding the employment market in the territorial area of competency of a Province.

Information Flows and PORTAL Requirements In this section we give examples of information flows for some of the actors described above, in order to derive the functional requirements of the PORTAL. Flows are given in terms of Event (triggering a procedure or action), Problems (existing and to be solved by the introduction of the PORTAL services) and Solutions (in terms of minimal functions, that is, PORTAL application requirements). Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

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Multiple Enrollments of unemployed citizens to various Employment Centers (ECs) Event: an unemployed citizen enrolls to various ECs on the basis of the geographical areas of interest for his/her job search and for his/her training opportunities. Problems: The ECs get that person “in charge” by assigning him/her a unique identification (the Social Security Number). Then, the data are stored in a given geographic area and in the overall system a unique unemployed exists, enrolled to multiple ECs. The system must have a centralized index of workers identifications, and know the physical location of his/her data. Front-end solutions: the EC that undertakes a training action on the worker must be able to communicate this action to all the other ECs where the worker is enrolled, in order to avoid duplication of interventions by other ECs. Back-end solutions: the operator examines the candidate to offer training opportunities for a re-qualification; he/she queries the databases of the other ECs where the candidate worker is enrolled in order to get a complete view of the worker “folder.”

Employment by a Company of an unemployed enrolled in multiple lists Event: A company employs a subject enrolled in various ECS. Problems: The interested EC must automatically cancel the new employee from its local list and must propagate the cancellation to all the ECs where the subject is enrolled. Front-end solutions: the operator of the territorial EC interested by the employment must update a form (called mod.C1), must cancel the person from its lists and must propagate the cancellations to the other ECs. Back-end solutions: The area EC, by querying the folder regarding the newly employed subject, communicates the employment of the person requiring the automatic cancellation of the subject form the other lists.

An example of information flow between the Region and a worker is the following. Event: The worker publishes his/her CV on the PORTAL. Problems: publishing must be anonymous and must contain enough information to enable the application “Offer/Request Matching” to perform an effective matching. It is up to the worker to publish also his/her name after receiving communication from the company/organization interested to his/her work profile. Front-end solutions: the PORTAL supports a standard format for the CV data and allows one to fill it in a guided manner, using a dictionary of professions and competencies stored in the PORTAL. Back-end solutions: The structure of the CV separates registry data from professional data. The professional data of the CV must be accessible from external organizations while personal data are owned by the subject and can be made available only upon explicit authorizations of the owner.

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A second flow regards the communications between Region and Companies. Event: the company publishes a work offer on the PORTAL. Problems: publishing must be anonymous and must contain enough information to enable the application “Offer/Request Matching” to perform an effective matching. Front-end solutions: the PORTAL supports a standard format for the Offer data and allows a company to fill it in a guided manner, using a dictionary of professions and competencies stored in the PORTAL. Back-end solutions: The structure of the Offer separates registry data from professional data. The professional data of the Offer must be accessible form external organizations while other data must be owned by the company and can be made available only upon explicit authorization of the owner.

A third example regards the information flow between the Region and private organizations. Event: the private organization (e.g., a search and selection company) accesses the PORTAL to view and download the CVs of interest or publishes some CV on the PORTAL, maintaining locally the private data of its competence. Problems: the private organization interfaces the PORTAL via Web and must be enabled to use query and browsing services guided and based on relevant selection criteria. Front-end solutions: the PORTAL is endowed with an efficient search engine operating on the CV and Offer data structures. Back-end solutions: Accessible data are only those regarding professional data, while registry data require a specific authorization by the owner. The search engine applies dynamic criteria in order to optimize the searches. The adaptation of criteria occurs along time by having the engine monitoring the access flow and responses.

From these examples, the project has derived a set of requirements for the PORTAL on the various actors. For brevity, we illustrate the functions provided to the company actor in the PORTAL.

Company All the operations can be executed only upon registration in the PORTAL area. This allows the system to execute access control, and to implement user profiling in order to ameliorate the website usability. The services can be listed as follows: a) Offer Management The company can insert, delete, or modify an offer. The Offer is structured in three sections: • Registry Section: this includes identification data about the company (unique identification number, location, branches, address(es), size, sector of operaCopyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 75

tion, name of responsible/contact people, and other data required by rules and laws in the area of Company Registration to Chamber of Commerces, Work Ministry and other Public Administrations at the national level). • Professional Section: this comprises public data useful to perform the matching between CVs and Offers. Fields within this record are, for example, number of required employees, professional profile, age, previous work experiences, references. • Historical Section: this section exists for statistical purposes. For each Offer, the system keeps trace of modifications and of performed accesses. b) Offer Status When an Offer is accepted by a worker, the company can obtain from the PORTAL the identification data of the worker so that he/she can be contacted directly or via the organization representing it (e.g., a private search and selection company). It must be possible to monitor an Offer so as to allow the company to know the number of accesses and examinations of the Offer to produce a vision of the number of workers potentially interested to that Offer. c) Matching similarity among data The system can execute matching algorithms on CVs and Offers and keep feedback on the profiles stored in the PORTAL and also on data “similar” to the searched ones. This similarity mechanism allows Companies to adjust their offers – and workers to adjust their CV - in order to adapt data to the CV/Offers available on the employment market. d) Free search Besides search based on published Offers, a company can browse the PORTAL areas by accessing: • Professional profiles o Type of profession o Specializations o Geographical Area o Age o Educational path • Offers o Type of profession o Geographical Area • Training Opportunities o Type of training o Work area and context o Needed professional/educational qualification In Figure 5, a schema of the query-formatting step for the search is depicted. User profiles are maintained by the system in order to keep track of previous accesses and to optimize the search/matching functions. The storage subsystem manages all the data of the PORTAL; that is, both information inserted directly by the actors using the PORTAL and information made available through the Informative Data Bases, that is, statistical data.

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76 Fugini & Mezzanzanica

Figure 5. Query Formatting for the PORTAL Search Engine

• • •

All data are managed by a relational DBMS that guarantees: Scalability with respect to the quantity of data and accesses; High performance in terms of data access, in particular via Web; An effective management of fault tolerance policies able to guarantee data consistency and availability.

The status and access to data must be compliant with the security policies for both privacy and integrity.

Interfaces of the storage subsystem The interface to the Regional Management and Control Information System is depicted in Figure 2 as a module that feeds the regional Data Warehouse. The basic service offered by the PORTAL consists in visualizing the databases of the Employment Centers of the Provinces to upload the DW with statistical and synthetic data, upon initiation of a web service executing at the PORTAL level on behalf of the “principal.” The interface with the databases of the Information System comprises services of feeding and reporting initiated by the PORTAL (via PORTAL web service) using the data stored in the PORTAL database (Application Database) and using the Registry Index. Vice versa, the Informative Databases are linked to the PORTAL to provide access to the training opportunities.

Application DataBase In this database, all the information owned by the PORTAL and all the necessary meta-data for their management are stored. The basic data structures are the CVs and the offers. Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 77

Moreover, the Application Database contains administrative data used to interact with ECs’ databases and provinces’ databases, as well as security and profiling data.

Registry Indexes This data structure allows the PORTAL to manage the duplication of actors’ data due to the fact that workers and companies, as well as other organizations, can publish data form various access points. For example, a worker can enroll to different ECs or be represented by different agencies. The Registry Index of Workers applies on the regional domain and allows one to: • Inform all the ECs about the position of any worker enrolled in any other center. • Propagate the modifications regarding the unemployment status of a worker on all the provincial centers where the worker is enrolled. To this aim, the Registry Index of Workers does not contain any data but rather only meta-data able to identify items and to consider, as a master copy, one of the copies possibly located in the Centers. The record structure for the Index is as follows: • Worker Name – Managed by procedures of data alignment • Status – this denotes the status of employed, unemployed, looking for a job. This file is managed via an EVENT Management module that updates the field on the basis of status changes occurring in the provinces or in the ECs. • Identification Code – of the worker, such as his/her Social Security Number • Location—this identifies the database where the worker’s data is physically stored. It is a multiple field accessed to produce statistical data for the Informative Databases. • Last Update – this contains information on which entity (Employement Centers, other) has updated the Status field and when. An Index of Companies is used (taking the standard tool that has been developed by the Italian Union of Chambers of Commerce). This index solves the problem of uniquely identifying a Company by using the unique identifiers assigned nation-wide by the Chambers of Commerce in Italy. Since this PORTAL will cooperate with analogous PORTALs of other Italian Regions, the PORTAL will refer also to the National Workers Index, currently storing about 9 million records. The National Index will act as indexed of all the regional portals and will maintain the consistency among data on workers.

Interoperability sub-system This sub-sytem operates at the level of back-end both on the PORTAL and connects the PORTAL to all the actors’ sites. Due to the heterogeneity of platforms used by actors, and in order to create a solution moderately invasive for organizations and for the private market of job operators, the used technology is based on Web Services. The interfaces of each service are given in terms of WSDL specifications. The registration of an actor (e.g., a private Search & Selection Company) to the PORTAL occurs in a private registry implemented according to the UDDI specifications. The Region makes an UDDI registry available, properly Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

78 Fugini & Mezzanzanica

configured to manage all the basic (administrative) services and the added-value services of the Workfair. The Web Services components of the external systems use their WSDL interfaces, personalized locally in accordance with the ICT technology used locally in the systems. Considering the indications of Web Service providers (e.g.,Web Services Concepts, n.d.), the overall view of the Services grouped in the PORTAL Workfair is organized as shown in Figure 6. 1) System management, presentation, administrative, data management and search services are exported at the level of the PORTAL web interface and implement functions such as registration, access control, notification, visualization and maintenance of information for all users. This group of services includes PORTAL administration functions. 2) Access and integration services are in charge of information management, organization of the data flows (workflow management) within the PORTAL, of management of user privileges and security of archves, and content management. 3) To perform the PORTAL tasks, the services exploit specialized sub-services of three types: – information management services, including data search, data aggregation, data mining, and data formatting;

Figure 6. PORTAL Services composing the Wokfair portion

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An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 79

– –

application services, that coordinate the interactions with the system databases; collaboration services, implementing the interoperabiliuty and communication among all the PORTAL components.

We have described the service architecture. Let us now illustrate the functional architecture of the PORTAL. Figure 7 shows how the services of Figure 6 are mapped

Figure 7. PORTAL Functional Architecture

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80 Fugini & Mezzanzanica

into functional modules, where the basic choices, in terms of used technologies and module design, regard the interactions and the communications among the PORTAL components. Most of the functions of interaction between the user and the PORTAL occur via the PORTAL front-end (see Figure 2). The front-end is in charge of the direct interactions with the PORTAL and its services and data. Its functional architecture is depicted in Figure 8. It includes page management functions, for web contents maintenance, frontend services divided in basic services (such as user login and registration, notifications, and subscribing), administrative services, data management services, and advanced services related to the Workfair. These last two function types are detailed in the blocks of Figure 8 in subsequent refinement steps.

Figure 8. Architecture of the PORTAL front-end: detail of functions

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An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 81

The back-end manages the communications to and from the PORTAL, guarantees the correct execution and sequence of operations, and performs the communication with the external databases (located at the ECs and other organizations, such as private operators). In particular, considering the problem of the minimal requirements for companies to join the PORTAL, we observe that the architecture for interoperability identifies a Passive Back-End component located at each organization sharing data with the PORTAL. Such organization must install in its information system only a small portion of the interoperabilty architecture of the PORTAL in order to communicate and share data according to a standard format. This component is called passive since in the web services paradigm it simply replies to events forwarded by the PORTAL web service, and can not initiate a conversation. If the organization wants to submit a request, e.g., for retrieving a CV from the PORTAL database, it can access the front-end as the unique way to communicate actively. Let us consider the complexity of the remote component that needs to be installed at each site that wants to adhere to the PORTAL. Such distributed component has to cooperate via front-end and back-end and has been designed to balance: • performance requirements, that suggest to export most of the services to lower the system workload and limit the communications among the systems; • privacy requirements, that prohibit to replicate data present on the central system to make them available in the local system; • adaptability requirements, that make the architecture compatible with all the system used at the various organizations with no substantial modifications; • minimal modification requirements, that impose to limit the interventions on the applications in the local system. A first level that communicates directly with the back-end of the PORTAL is limited to the search and update services operating locally, thus eliminating the need for presentation and the statistical applications. These are used only by the central systems using the information registered at the PORTAL. The remote services benefit of the statistical data provided by the statistical updates at the central system, but do not participate in their processing, since they do not register any information. A second level comprises the search services that have been locally replicated to lower the PORTAL workload: feedback, ranking and data formatting are still a task of the central system. A third level is the one that needs to be enlarged since, besides the interfaces to the databases and the table, which are present in a limited number on the local system for performance reasons, it contains a module devoted to the mapping between the local data and the data structure located in the PORTAL. It is so possible to use the same methods used at the central system also at the remote site with no need for rewriting but simply exploiting an interface to data, explicitly programmed. The services to be installed on the remote systems are illustrated in Figure 9.

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82 Fugini & Mezzanzanica

Figure 9. Architectural blocks composing the remote component (to be installed at each organization or private company joining the PORTAL)

The Search Engine: Matching CVs and Offers One of the core components of the PORTAL is the Search Engine that executes the match between work Requests and Offers in order to give answers to the e-marketplace for the fulfillment of expectations. An issue of the engine is that it retrieves the best matching results as well as a set of results that partially fulfill the requests. This allows workers and companies to explore a larger set of possibilities and allow the Portal and the Informative Databases to be loaded with the most requested jobs in order to adapt the statistics and the search criteria The search engine is structured according to the flow depicted in Figure 10, with steps for data formatting, data association, similarity evaluation, and registration of user preferences. The Data preparation step in Figure 10 acts on data inserted by users, which are processed to extract basic information and keywords that allow the data to be classified in the Application Database. The purpose is also to set the data into a common format, since they may come from heterogeneous data sources. For example, data may come from a new user who wants to register, and the insertion procedure has to guide the filling of the various fields using standard terms applying to the employment market. The Construction of correspondence matrix step builds a matrix structure supporting the search process according to standard information retrieval principles (Kowalski, 1997). The data classified in the preceding step are now stored in the PORTAL databases according to three basic categories: • curricula • work offers • training opportunities. Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 83

• • • •

Data are analyzed using four classification categories: professions competences educational qualifications geographic area of interest.

The suitable data structure for these codifications is a vector space representing data as a set of terms used for describing them. Each document of the PORTAL has an associated vector where each component is a term, a keyword or a concept used within the document. The module for matrix construction indexes each document in the PORTAL database and assigns values to the vector components using the statistical information derived from the Informative (statistical) Databases and using the feedback mechanism. The Tables of statistical correspondence (see Figure 10) link professions, competence Figure 10. Steps of the search process

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84 Fugini & Mezzanzanica

and educational qualification with the categories of the standard classification. This way, all the knowledge regarding the mechanisms of the employment market is translated into a vector space. The Query formatting step of Figure 10 sets up the queries to be submitted to the system. In particular, in a first stage, the request is analyzed and translated into a vector form, according to the search space format, evaluating the relevance of each item exactly as occurs during the data classification step. Then, the vector is adapted to the characteristics of the submitting user, modifying the values of the single components on the basis of the personal profile derived from the feedback process. The Data search process is the comparison between the vector elements using similarity criteria. Standard mathematical functions are used for the comparison. The result is a list of documents found relevant on the basis of the parameters of the vector space (Berry & Browne, 1999). The Matching step considers that each search in the vector space can involve a large set of information and require long computation times. The matching tables of Figure 10 are used to register the degree of correlation between the CV, the Offers and the training opportunities in order to create a stable association among data to be used frequently in the PORTAL to speed up the search. The Ranking step consists in putting in a ranking order the results of the matching, starting from the “best matching” down to the data having a lower matching degree with the request (also considering similairities). Finally, the Feedback step adapts the search algorithm on the basis of users (or user groups), keeping track of all the operations executed previously and extracting information useful for improving the system performance and the effectiveness of the relevance parameters (Berry & Browne, 1999). Users can refine their search using terms that specialize and restrict or enlarge the search space(Kowalski, 1997). The statistical correspondence tables are updated to keep track of new links and associations together with the updating of personal profiles stored in the PORTAL.

CURRENT CHALLENGES/PROBLEMS FACING THE ORGANIZATION Project Management Issues It is notable to remark that the introduction of an innovation project implies an operative reorganization of the involved service structures with inevitable revisions aimed at limiting the management of management of the structures for programming, planning, and operative control. The organizational structure for the project sees the Councillorship to Work, Education and Training of Regione Lombardia as the Management Entity that assigns to the Regional Agency for Work the task to develop and operatively manage the project. A Committee of Guidance and Control is in charge of assuring the obtainment of targets along time. This Committee continuously monitors the activities of the project to check its effectiveness and to identify improvement actions and intervention strategies. The Committee reviews the deliverables, and makes decisions about contractual and financial aspects, proposals of new services for users, changes to the work plan and Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 85

various aspects, such as possible conflicts between the customer (Agency) and the suppliers A Technical Committee has been nominated to manage the purely technical aspect of the project.

Technological Issues The PORTAL makes use of new networking services that have enabled new types of applications in the field of Information Systems, characterized by several geographically distributed interacting organizations exchanging data through the network and the Web. The used technology for the PORTAL can be classified as belonging to Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS), that is distributed information systems that are employed by users of different organizations under a common goal (Mylopoulos & Papazoglou, 1997). Another core issue considered in the project consists in the realization of e-applications ( Mecella & Pernici, 2001), namely, e-services provided by different organizations on the net. The data exchange and the interleaved execution of processes in such systems bring about issues bound to inter- and intra-organizational structures, to a plurality of actors in the distributed system, and in the heterogeneity of policies existing at the various sites where a distributed process is executed. For CoopIS few requirements and policies are known at design time: at run time, policies need to be negotiated among the cooperating processes or new policies must be added. In these cases, determining the suitable requirements and policies is based on the identification of the “normal” behavior of the system users ( Mukkamala et al., 1999), known as user profiling methods. The need arises to identify, verify, and strengthen the security policies in order to allow the e-applications to securely authenticate each other and to exchange data in a trusted way. The proposals for architectures for new information systems, e.g., e-service and workflow-based, have been fully adopted, as presented in the literature (Mecella & Pernici, 2001; Casati et al., 2001). The concept of cooperative process defines (e.g., in Schuster et al., 2000) as a complex business process involving different organizations. An e-service represents a contract on which an organization involved in the cooperative process agrees. Technological details about the PORTAL are based on the principles discussed here above; the philosophy is that of minimizing the programming efforts, of integrating the exiting legacy applications, and of the possibility of extending the minimal set of functionalities that have been delivered as the core system portions. Personalization options based on users typologies are provided by default in the MyPORTAL philosophy. Moreover, the PORTAL has to interact with National Information Systems (Work and Welfare Ministry, Social Security Institute, Treasury Ministry, and so on) and has to adhere to a set of standard data indexing techniques and standard data circulation and authentication formats (Prins, 2001). The PORTAL includes functions able to monitor the usability of the services (monitoring and feedback functions) and of its contents; a database system, accessible to web contents management authors, allows the web system to interface the whole internal database of published material or, anyway, to fulfill requests of multimedia elements present and stored in the system. The content management system is layered on a technological core based on XML/XSL techniques for data representation and Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

86 Fugini & Mezzanzanica

exchange. The contents repository has full compatibility with relational and XML datatabases. The system allows the PORTAL to interact with external PORTAL considering the conditions of usability (same look & feel and interaction metaphor) and of filtering of the contents on the basis of personalization rules (user roles and profiles). The system is based on the interoperability structures available at the regional level, such as the Regional PA Network. System security and profiling functions are compliant with the standards for handling of personal data prescribed by Law 675/96 on data privacy. Authentication mechanisms of SSO (Single Sign-On) type are prescribed. The whole repository of users is managed by a Directory Server that, queried by the single Access Servers, verifies the user’s privileges during access.

Remarks The PORTAL described in the paper is currently assuming the role of Service Manager within a larger architecture of E-Government. In fact, the 11 Provinces of Lombardia are joint in a project where local databases containing employment data about Companies and Workers are being re-engineered and federated into a global structure that sees the Regional indexes and the Offer/Request matching procedures as the routing elements for maintenance of system integrity in the whole regional e-marketplace. Standard architectures are being enforced to uniform data structures also considering the standard forms about administrative data published by the Welfare Ministry. Electronic signature national rules are being introduced in order to achieve a fully electronic processing of document flows in many sectors of Public Administration with regard to relationships with citizens and enterprises. A first integration of regional PORTALS is being experimented with in some regions and with some offices of the Central Public Administration. A full completion of the e-gov plan is expected in the next four years.

REFERENCES (2000, December 28). Testo unico delle disposizioni legislative e regolamentari in materia di documentation amministrativa, D.P.R., n. 445 Berry, M.W., & Browne, B. (1999). Understanding Search Engines: Mathematical Modeling and Text Retrieval (Software, Environments, Tools). Casati, F., Georgakopoulos, D., & Shan, M.C. (Eds.). (2001). Proceedings of the TES (Technologies for E-services), 2001 Workshop, LNCS 2139. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Casati, F., Sayal, M., & Shan, M.C. (2001). Developing E-Services for composing EServices. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Interlaken, Switzerland: CaiSE 2001. CheckFree Corp et. al. (n.d.). Open Financial Exchange Specification 1.0.2. Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http://www.ofx.net/. Christensen, E., Curbera, F., Meredith, G., & Weerawarana, S. (n.d.). Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1. Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http:// www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-wsdl-20010315.

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An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 87

Commission of the European Communities. (1991, June). Information Technology Security Evaluation Criteria (ITSEC) Provisional Harmonized Criteria, Release 1.2, Directorate-General XIII, Rue de la Loi 200. B-1049, Brussels, Belgium. ISO-IS-7498-2: Information Processing Systems – Open System Interconnections- Basic Reference Model Part 2: Security Architecture. Kowalski, G. (1997). Information Retrieval Systems - Theory and implementation. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Mecella, M., & Pernici, B. (2001). Designing wrapper components for e-Services in integrating heterogeneous systems. VLDB Journal, Special Issue on e-Services. Mukkamala, R., Gagnon, J., & Jajodia, S. (1999). Integrating data mining techniques with intrusion detection methods. In Proceedings of the 12th IFIP 11.3Working Conference on Database Security. Mylopoulos, J., & Papazoglou, M. (Eds.). (1997). Cooperative Information Systems. IEEE Expert Intelligent Systems and their Applications, 12 (5). Prins, J.E.J. (2001). E-Governance. Do digital aids make a difference in policy making? In Designing e-Government. On the Crossroads of Technological Innovation and Institutional Change. Kluwer Law International. Schuster, H., Georgakopoulos, D., Cichocki, A., & Baker, D. (2000). Modeling and composing service-based and reference process-based multi-enterprise processes. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Stockholm, Sweden: CAISE 2000 Web Services Concepts - A Technical Overview. (n.d.). Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http://www.bluestone.com/downloads/pdf/web_services_tech_overview. pdf.

APPENDIX We report some figures regarding the Project. First, in Table A.1 a global overview of the investments is presented. Table A.1. Financial Investments of the Project

“System for an Integrated access to Work Services in Regione Lombardia” Project

Total*

DEVELOPMENT (external costs)

6,480.00

MANAGEMENT (external costs)

9,960.00

CONDUCTION AND MANAGEMENT (internal costs) 2,640.00 Total

19,080.00

* in thousands of Euros Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

88 Fugini & Mezzanzanica

In Table A.2 the cost breakdowns for the project are detailed. Table A.2a YEAR I

Areas of interest

YEAR II

Development

YEAR III YEAR IV

TOTAL

Management

PORTAL Application Data Base DWH Call Center Organization Conduction

3,713

588

516

504

5,321.00

960

276

276

276

1,788.00

780

204

204

222

1,410.00

786

60

60

60

966

1,952

1,824

1,630

1,630

7,036.00

684

625

625

625

2,560.00

Total ( in thousands of Euros)

8,875

3,577

3,311

3,317

19,080

1,500

YEAR II 506 350 2,200

YEAR III 435 267 2,000

YEAR IV 435 267 2,000

Total 1,376.00 884.00 7,700.00

1,500

3,056

2,702

2,702

9,960.00

Table A2.b Areas of interest Management of Technological Infrastructure Functional Information System Management Management of Other Services Total of Management Items (in thousands of Euros)

YEAR I

Table A2.c Basic Cost Items for Developement

25%

15%

60%

Technological Infrastructures

Management Applicative Components Directional Applicative Components

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An Application within the Plan for E-Government: The Workfair Portal 89

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES Maria Grazia Fugini is Professor of Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering in 1987 from Politecnico di Milano and was a visiting fellow at University of Maryland, Technical University of Vienna, and University of Stuttgart. Her interests are in the field of information systems, data security, information retrieval, and software reuse. She is author of several publications on information systems and system security, and is co-author of the book Database Security, Addison Wesley, 1995. She participates in project teams on system security, distributed information systems, and e-government for Public Administrations. Mario Mezzanzanica is a private consultant in the ICT field and has conducted various projects for private and public organizations in the area of systems re-engineering, distributed information systems design and security. He is an Assistant Professor at University of Milano, Faculty of Statistics, where he teaches Information Systems and Datawarehouse courses. He is responsible for teaching and administrative re-organization projects for University of Milano.

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