Improving government-to-business relationships through data reconciliation and process reengineering

This chapter presents the "Services to Businesses" project, one of the most extensive Italian e-Government initiatives aimed at significantly improving the relationship between businesses and the public administration. Because of a lack of integration between the administration agencies, current government-to-business transactions in Italy suffer from a substantial redundancy, and the information regarding any particular business, held by various agencies, is likely to be duplicated, with no guaranteed consistency among the copies. The project tackles this problem in two ways. First, a service-oriented cooperative architecture has been deployed to enable (1) direct back-office interactions among agencies that can now exchange data about businesses among themselves, using a publish-and-subscribe service; and (2) a small number of front office, one-stop-shop-style portals through which businesses access unified and secure online services offered by agencies. Second, extensive record linkage across several of the agencies' databases has been performed, using an original methodology, to reduce the inconsistencies among partially duplicated information about the businesses. We describe both aspects of this approach and show how it yields better government-to-business relationships and sustained high-quality information.