SIM: a working example of an e-government service infrastructure for mountain communities

We present an information technology (IT) based infrastructure providing e-government services to. people living in mountain areas. Such a system, SIM -"Sistema Informativo della Montagna", provides to citizens in these areas services in the cadastral sector in the labour and pension sectors, and services related to public registries for personal data. SIM is an example of a general distributed IT infrastructure, introduced in Arcieri et al. (2001), able to integrate and to make heterogeneous information systems interoperable, while providing good performance levels. SIM is currently being used in about one thousand operating centers, serving ten millions inhabitants and about half of the Italian municipalities and it is currently being designed its extension to the whole Italian territory. Design and development of SIM have been conducted by the Italian Ministry for Agriculture and Forest Policies within an overall initiative, coordinated by the "Coordinamento dei Progetti Intersettoriali" of AIPA, the Italian Authority for Information Technology in Public Administration, aiming at developing inter-organization cooperative information systems supporting e-government actions