INPS is one of the largest and most complex social security agencies in Europe. Most workers in Italy are ensure with INPS, which provides over 500 social security and insurance products, through the implementation of laws and regulations governing social security matters.

 

The key figures of the agency highlight the significant role it plays:

INPS has the second largest budget in the country – after the State budget – totaling 545 bn in revenues and expenses.

 

 

To prevent the dissipation of the large amount of information and knowledge needed to solve particularly complex cases, impairing the overall efficiency of its operations, the Agency has decided to consistently improve its work processes, knowledge sharing and personnel training and, therefore, the overall quality of its services, which has led to the design and development of Agorà, the first Government Social Network in Italy.

 

The solution and its benefits

 

Launched in March 2010, the project was completed in October of the same year and immediately made available to over 25,000 INPS employees online. The Social Network is based on three knowledge areas: (i) an institutional area, comprising circular letters, messages, regulations and FAQs; (ii) a multimedia area, supporting interactive training and cooperation, in which the Management Team posts and promotes training tips, web seminars and video exercises; and (iii) a dynamic area, containing content created spontaneously by the employees and addressed to Experts in blogs, forums and wikis.

 

But Agorà is not simply a research and information sharing tool, it is also a contact tool: since its inception it has enabled over 1,600 online meetings and over 19,000 sessions of instant messaging, entailing considerable savings for the Agency on travel and transfer costs, including the opportunity to quickly and dynamically solve any emergency situations, as in the case of the Abruzzo earthquake (Spazio Abruzzo).

 

In the first year alone, Agorà has been used by 5 Central Departments and 6 thematic communities have been launched. The users have spontaneously created over 100 blogs and 50 wikis. The active monitoring of the social network has made it possible to determine which areas were most in need of a dedicated community (this is how the first community, addressing Domestic Work, was created), the contents of which can be consulted as “certified knowledge”, alongside the free access ones.

 

In Agorà, knowledge management takes places through a semantic and ontology-driven engine, a fast and innovatory content searching system based on semantic understanding through ontologies that correctly interpret the meanings of the managed dominion and the questions posed in natural language by the users.

 

 

“Agorà is the result of a synergy between formal organization and informal network. The innovation is not only technical in nature – said Mr. Guido Ceccarelli, who is in charge of the Portals Area (Internet/Intranet/Extranet) and Document Management at the Central Information and Technology Systems Department at INPS – but cultural and organizational as well and, by integrating the traditional Top-Down approach, typical of Government entitles, with the Bottom-Up approach characteristic of the Social and Web 2.0 environments, improves the quality of institutional knowledge, while capitalizing on the Agency’s professional skills and identifying any latent skills as well. In short, we have grasped the opportunities offered by technical development to implement a new model of collaboration, the cornerstone of which lies in the active involvement of all the INPS staff in the production of knowledge and sharing of both individual experiences and solutions to specific needs.”