The project has dealt with the difficult challenge of making the development of entrepreneurial activities in the Tuscan territory “easy” by transforming the interaction with the Public Administration from a bureaucratic burden to a service offering high added value to the enterprises.
To achieve this goal, we tackled and overcame difficulties of an administrative, technological and cultural nature. In administrative terms, it was necessary to shift from an initial situation of non-homogeneous interpretation of the legislation by the various local administrations of Tuscany to a standardised interpretation and process uniformity.
From the technological point of view it was essential to make tools and standards available that would render all the administrations involved in the single procedure interoperable; where “interoperating” means not only that they “communicate” but that they also use and exchange data structures with a shared and univocally defined meaning.
Finally, in the cultural perspective, it was necessary to overcome the approach that sees the Administration as having the sole role of “guardian” of the work of the enterprise, changing it to being viewed as a subject that provides a support and guidance service especially for those productive activities with high regulatory complexity and significant environmental and social significance.
The Tuscan System of Business Services has solved these challenges by carrying out the normalisation and computerisation, at the level of the entire Tuscan regional territory, of the processes connected to the activities of the Single Contact Point of the Production Activities (SUAP) and proceeding to build a network of services of which the enterprise represents the focal actor.
The actions implemented to achieve these goals included:
– the constituting of a community of subjects – with different technical, legislative and administrative competences – with the objective of defining an engineered model for the construction and development of the single procedure designed to be univocal for the entire territory;
– the development of an articulated and coherent series of service agreements, in both technical and administrative terms, among all the Public Administration bodies operating in Tuscany,
– a procedure for studying and defining an exhaustive, complete and shared ontology of the SUAP domain, via which to describe, structure and normalise both the processes of the administration and the data that are exchanged between the plurality of subjects involved;
– the development of a complete ecosystem of application platforms able to ensure on one hand the maintenance of ontology and its dissemination/sharing throughout the territory, and on the other, to support all the processes related to the supply of the service to the companies, starting from acceptance of the request to the conclusion of the relative administrative procedure;
– the development of application components enabling interaction among the entities and the exchange of structured data according to the defined process rules
– the definition of service performance indicators that are useful for monitoring the administrative efficiency and identifying useful actions for setting up a policy to support economic development;
– the development of application tools dedicated to the monitoring not only of the entire process of harmonisation and dissemination of the engineered process model, but also of the measurement of administrative efficiency in the provision of services to the enterprises.
The beneficiaries of this intervention were on the one hand the enterprises that were able to enjoy the benefits of this simplification and administrative harmonisation and on the other, the Tuscan Public Administration which saw a significant improvement in the effectiveness of its processes together with the dissemination of a heritage of shared knowledge.
Well worth a mention is the level of the service rendered to the users, which was extremely poor from the point of view of its performance via electronic means, as also established by explicit legal provisions.