1-Jun-2006

Free software to end queues at the administration offices

Sergio Montoro in La Pastilla Roja writes:

I have just come back from the inaugural ceremony of Technimap 2006 (mentioned here on 20-May-2006), THE trade fair for the Public Administration in Spain, which this year is breaking all records for public and exhibitor attendance.

The minister, Jordi Sevilla, together with the president of the Parliament of Andalucia, Manuel Chaves, and the mayor of Seville, Alfredo Sánchez Monteseirín, presented the recently opened 060 network as the star of the show. This is an integrated network for public administration and its mission is to provide a single point of access, available 24x7x365, for all interactions of the citizens with the three administrations: central, autonomous and municipal.

Jordi Sevilla announced that the spirit behind the 060 network is that the administration would put itself at the service of the citizen and not the other way around. Although the development of 060 will push the limit of technological complexity, it will require a giant leap in political will and mentality. During the press conference, the phrase, “We are going to end the standard response of, 'Come back tomorrow.'” was repeated a number of times. By chance, a woman who was going to her administration office was told, “Come back tomorrow” because the service had been suspended due to the visit of the minister (such operational problems always occur in any new service).

The project is led by MAP (Ministry of Public Administration). The first pilot started in Seville today and according to the plan it will be rolled out to 7 autonomous communities. We all hope that common sense will prevail in the various autonomous party factions and everyone will gain. Actually it was good to see Chaves and Sánchez Monteseirín with Jordi Sevilla, but it would have been much better to see Esperanza Aguirre and Ruíz Gallardón in the photos.

The publicity leaflet reads as follows: “The 060 network will be built on an innovatory technological platform and the administrative network SARA. The platform will use free software solutions and systems and will be open source: SuSE Linux, Apache, JBoss, Tomcat, OpenLDAP and PostgreSQL. This is expected to reduce maintenance costs by 80% with respect to the current platform. The applications will be developed in J2EE.”

Jordi Sevilla was unable to give a cost for the project. He said, “it will require a lot of effort but it won't be expensive.” I doubt they anyone can guess how much it is going to cost. Developing software is not the same as budgeting for 10Km of motorway and a bridge. My opinion is that it is not important whether they have a perfectly detailed plan or not. The important thing is that they start work on the project because as the minister said, “Now is the time.”