In the second half of June, the 7th expert conference took place on informatisation of public administration, entitled iDEME (Informatisation from villages to towns) Bratislava 2014, which among other things presented the current trends in the establishment of electronic services of public administration and eGovernment in Slovakia.
As part of the conference, local government representatives voted on the most beneficial projects for their activity, with the project DCOM (Data Centre of Towns and Villages), produced by the consortium of PosAm and Datalan, being recognised among the two most beneficial projects of 2014.
The main objective of the DCOM project is to make e-services more accessible to citizens and to improve their provision significantly on the level of regional and local government. The project includes the creation of a set of software solutions for increasing the work effectiveness of local offices and for making electronic services of local government available to citizens. These solutions will be provided to local governments via the special data centre for towns and villages as “software as a service” (SaaS). The DCOM project also includes the supply of necessary IT equipment for local government offices and its subsequent maintenance, as well as user support. This means the municipalities will have a comprehensive set of services at their disposal, covering their needs and unburdening them from a significant part of caring for IT.
Implementation of the project was launched in the last quarter of 2013 and by the end of the year PosAm had already established the primary data centre. In the first half of 2014, it added also the backup data centre, thereby completing a key part of the technological solution. The first half of the year also saw work completed on the design of the full solution. The sheer scope of the project can be seen in the volume of documentation processed to date, which includes 215 analyses, 2344 use cases, 200 integration interfaces, 1249 diagrams, 682 processes and 360 application services. At the present time, we are already moving forward with work, in stages according to the timetable, on the software solutions and the supply and connection of infrastructures of municipalities is underway. The project will be in its final stage in about one year from now.
Estimates show that within a few years from launch, the services of DCOM will be used by at least a thousand towns and villages. At present, there is already interest from more than 600 of them, inclusive of two whole regions with 120 municipalities.