Certifying performance of cooperative services in a digital government framework

One of the hottest challenges in the digital government arena is the capability of providing good quality services to citizens. The critical issue is that for a given service a citizen usually interacts with a single provider even if service supply and management requires coordination and cooperation among many autonomous organizations. This means that a single user request spreads in the underlying distributed information system and activates a number of information flows among organizations involved, with various roles and responsibility, in service provision. A main issue is how what is going on in the distributed system can be objectively monitored so that the service provider can (i) understand and manage problems in the overall service supply process and (ii) certify quality of provided service. What makes this scenario especially complex is that, beyond technical aspects, any solution that wants to be successful has to comply with requirements of independence and autonomy of the various organizations involved. In this paper we discuss how we tackled and solved this issue in real-world systems defined for the Italian Public Administration and we argue that our solution can provide a reference architecture to deal with this kind of problems..