News & Views
Business intelligence with an Italian
flavor
 Business
intelligence is important for decision makers in all walks of
life, and especially for those in public service.
“CSI-Piemonte is a public ICT agency, similar to SITA except
that SITA is nationwide, while CSI-Piemonte is regional,” said
Guido Albertini, head of international projects and director of
CSI-Piemonte in Turin, Italy.
He explained that CSI-Piemonte is a consortium of information
systems whose members are mostly public administration agencies.
The organisation is dedicated to providing ICT projects and
services for the province of Turin.
CSI-Piemonte’s system is a ‘systems integrator’ and its purpose
is to develop technical innovations that improve the quality of
public action, simplify public procedures, promote
transformation and participation and all this is done through
ICT. In the process, regional government is modernised, said
Albertino.
“When you have enough data you can provide good intelligence and
statistics to business,” he said.
Albertini explained that CSI-Piemonte’s system collects data
under a variety of disciplines such as environment, health care,
labour, education and human resources. This data is stored in
more than 1000 databases, and then transformed into information
and distributed to analysts and decision makers.
“The history of our decisional systems at CSI-Piemonte is
interesting,” said Albertino. “When we started in the early
1980s business intelligence consisted of having statistics on
the mainframe. In the 1990s static reports became interactive.
Later stand alone applications were introduced and in 2000
client server and web applications were introduced. Since 2005
we are busy with palm service. Who knows what 2010 will bring?”
Since 2005, CSI-Piemonte has begun expanding its international
presence through European Union (EU) programmes and a
co-operation policy with local government. The organisation is
collaborating with the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government. “The
fit between the types of project we do in Turin and the one in
KwaZulu-Natal is extremely good,” said Albertino.
They provide expertise in project office management and while
working towards modernising the office of the Premier. The
project began in February 2007 with the creation of a
centralised data warehouse for the monitoring and reporting
system. This includes census of information systems present in
the province’s departments. In August 2008, support will be
given to SAS (business intelligence software) to implement the
first phase of the project based on the outcomes from the
preparatory phase.
Other international projects currently underway at CSI-Piemonte
are twinning programmes with Tunisia and Poland. This is for the
development of national statistical information systems on data
for SMME’s and a local government budget management system
respectively.
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