Use Case: E-Government
The main objective of the use case is to investigate the project approach and results in applications that heavily involve eGovernment services to citizens and enterprises.
The fundamental role of SLAs in eGovernment service provisioning has been already recognized in the so called G2G (Government-to-Government) context, i.e., in all those scenarios that involve interoperability and interaction among different bodies of the Public Administration. This is the case, for instance, of the Italian laws and regulations concerning the interoperability within the PA: the “service agreement” is considered the main instrument to “regulate all the aspects of the relationship between service provider and service consumer, including interface, interaction modality, access points, service levels, and security aspects”.
The adoption of SLAs in the context of G2B (Government-to-Business) and, even more, of G2C (Government-to-Citizen) interactions is, on the contrary, still very limited. This is, however, a very challenging application of SLAs, since SLAs in this context have an intrinsic characteristic that makes them different from many other kinds of agreements between providers and consumers of services: the agreement is not based only on market rules, but it is most often driven by a “social” agreement between public bodies and citizens. This kind of agreement is bidirectional: there are services that the government has to provide to people and organizations, as well as duties that citizens and companies must obey to. The same peculiarity exists in the management of violations of agreements from both sides.
Scenarios in this setting involve different categories of actors, including citizens, public organizations, and private companies, require the definition of several different kinds of services and complex SLA among those actors. This is the case, for instance, of services in the health care domain, services for assisting the elderly, social services for helping handicapped people. These services require the establishment of agreements between the government and citizens who have the right to benefit from this kind of services, as well as between the government and different departments in the health care system, e.g., performing periodical medical controls at home. Moreover, in this scenario, there is the need to establish agreements with non-profit organizations and care-givers providing different kinds of social assistance, as well as private companies providing services such as, e.g., transportation, house cleaning, delivery of lunches at home, etc.
The development of the use case will be performed on a platform for the integrated provision of social and health assistance to elderly people at home and in nursing homes. The platform is based on a service oriented infrastructure and covers in an integrated way a wide range of aspects of the provision of social and health assistance:
- For what concerns the patients, the platform manage the definition of specific needs and treatments for each patient, the definition of the modality of application of such treatment (i.e., in a hospital, in a nursing home, or at home; self-managed or assisted; and so on), and the monitoring of the application of treatments.
- For what concerns the structures involved, the platform manages the activities of hospitals, nursing homes and organizations providing home assistance, including administrative and financial interactions among these institutions, monitoring of the treatments done by the personnel working for those structures, and so on.
- Finally, for what concerns the governance of the social system, the platform manages the overall analysis of costs, performance, and quality of the different structures involved and of the system as a whole.
The following output of this work package is now publicly available:
