e-Government as decision support system to improve public services provision

The term e-Government has been used to point out the ICT (Information and CommunicationTechnology) exploitation to improve the public government, and from a more general point of view, theprovision of public services to the population. The scientific community and the practitioners have beenfocusing on how innovative services can be provided to the population by using ICT. We claim that ICT canalso improve the decision making processes involved in the design and management of public services. Theeconomic and social scenario has undergone a lot of changes in the last years and it is still rapidly evolving. Insuch a dynamic context, the decision should be supported by precise and accurate information. The ICTtechnologies allows to achieve a high degree of customization in public services provisioning, thus knowledgeabout the ¿customers¿ is extremely valuable to improve service customization, efficiency, and effectiveness,even in case or reducing budget trends. For example, fine grained knowledge about the job market place hasbeen exploited to improve the provision of requalification courses (policies against unemployment are a hottopic in several government agendas). The knowledge has been used to identify and cluster unemployedpeople according to their skills, to find out positions where shortage of manpower exists and that can beaccessed after requalification, and to precisely shape the requalification paths. Information useful for decisionsupport has been traditionally achieved by means of sample surveys managed by statistical techniques.However administrative archives managed by PAs contain detailed and up to date information about the wholepopulation. Analysis applied to these archives provides very useful information for decision making affectingpublic services. The aim of this paper is to highlight a pregnant relationship concerning -Government dataanalysis that helps e-Government service provision.