Process management for autarchies using free software

The e-ASLA project, acronym for “e-Administration for Small Local Authorities”, is part of the INTERREG III Initiative, European Southwest B side, financed by the ERDF programme (European Regional Development Fund) and follows the philosophy of the open source software development.
The consortium of the project is made of ten partners, both user and technological, from three European countries – Spain, France and Portugal.

In Portugal, the technological partner and national coordinator is INESC Porto and the user partners are the autarchies of Mondim de Basto, Castelo de Paiva and Alandroal as well as the Associação de Municípios do Norte Alentejano. It’s a project with application in small cities (less than 20.000 inhabitants) and whose main objectives are:

• The definition of an e-ASLA framework that enables the integration of open and commercial source code, in order to support the administrative processes;

• The introduction of a “services and knowledge supplier”, exploring the idea of “scale economy”, with the objective of sharing the existing resources in associations or other entities;

• The creation of a collaboration network for small local administrations that makes it possible to maintain and stimulate the results of this project;

• The execution of the project and  prototype with a multilingual perspective as promotor of knowledge share and transfer in Europe.

The peculiarity of this project lies in the fact that these autarchies are characterized by the lack of human, technological and financial resources, stopping them from following the evolution in terms of Information and Communication Technologies. With the adoption of the solution envisaged in e-ASLA, these autarchies will be able to work in a business process-oriented basis. They will be more rigorous in the management of the execution of the activities and they will have access to new components to be developed by other autarchies that use the e-ASLA framework. They will be able to share resources within a group of autarchies or for an association, if they wish to do so.

The project comprehends several phases among which the identification and characterization of the autarchies’ business processes, the identification of the needs of adaptation between distinct autarchy processes, the identification and assessment (Benchmarking) of generic and specific open source solutions for autarchies, the development of a functional prototype and the installation for validation in the user partners of the three countries involved.
The solution is being developed under the concept of a framework that offers a set of fundamental applications for the business process-based functioning.

It’s a framework that will include a business process management system, a process modeler, a content and collaborative work management system that will enable the implementation of the autarchies’ external and internal portals and facilitate the update of contents, galvanizing the interaction with the citizens and collaborators. The framework will also enable the integration of new components. The whole process and the interaction with other specific or open source commercial systems or applications are well defined.

The project started in February 2005 and it will end in June 2007. The evolution of the project and the publication of results are available in www.e-asla.org.

Project: e-ASLA - e-Administration for Small Local Authorities
Entity:
e-ASLA consortium financed by the INTERREG III-B Sudoe programme
Manager:
Rui Barros, project manager in INESC Porto
Implementation:
Fev/2005 - Jun/2007
Development:
The consortium’s technological partners
Partners of development:
UPM, UCLM, Feval and INESC Porto
Contacts:
E-mail: e-asla.gestao@inescporto.pt / Tel.: 222 094 199

IGOV Central Portal, 23rd May 2006
Rui Barros, Project Manager in INESC Porto

23rd May 2006