This is the first of a series of 3 articles exploring the concept of Mobile Government and its potential for improving public services.

The 3 articles are based on a pioneering study on Mobile Services State-of-the-Art in the Italian government sector conducted by our partner Interact Spa, an Italian company focusing on digital innovation and Web 3.0 applications. Through an accurate analysis the study identifies the best practices for Mobile Government and highlights the benefits of adopting a Mobile Web platform to deliver public services and interact with citizens.
Andrea Volpini, interact SpA General Manager and Head of Mobile Strategies, presents the study and explains the approach to Mobile Government that is best effective for Governments needs.

Mobile Government according to Kushchu and Kuscu, 2003:
“A strategy and its implementation involving the utilization of all kinds of wireless and mobile technology, services, applications and devices for improving benefits to the parties involved in e-government including citizens, businesses and all government units”

M-Government or Mobile Government involves delivering public services via mobiles and wireless media.
Today E-Government has become so wide-spread that M-Government is now in the forefront in interacting with citizens (the end-users), enterprises, associations and other institutional bodies acting in the public arena.

With M-Government Public Administrations have an ideal means to realize their mission: to serve and involve citizens within the Communication – Access – Participation vision. Creating new services, cutting costs, increasing efficiency, fostering a rapid growth of user base – these are the key contributions of mobile communication to re-launch and empower public services.

What is the role of public funded research?
There is a very strong need in Europe to revamp the link between Universities, local governments and ICT companies to move M-Government a step further: public funded research has this mission. Joint efforts can bring technology enhancements at the service of citizens more effectively and quickly.
Inn-Gov, an Italian research project launched by the University of Salerno and interact SpA, is an example of efforts in this direction.

The Inn-Gov project
In 2008 interact SpA and the University of Salerno (DIIMA - Department of Information Engineering and Applied Maths) started to work together at Inn-Gov, a research project focusing on M-Government.
The target of the Inn-Gov research project is to supply the guidelines for creating mobile services and develop a prototype of mobile application for a Central Administration. The guidelines are based on the results of the analysis of existing mobile services and discovery of the best practices, and comply with the specific institutional body profiles related to different types of users and services to be delivered.
The prototype focuses on methods and techniques to acquire and reshape existing data sets into Linked Data (structured data meant to be machine-readable and ready for Web 3.0) and how to provide users with meaningful information based on their behaviors (this module takes advantage of semantic-based tools and ontologies).

The analysis of Inn-Gov is based on the Italian Public Administration mobile portals existing in June 2009. The analysis takes into consideration a selected number of portals belonging to different Public Administration typologies and measures them according to a set of parameters which refer to discoverability and accessibility. The analysis uncovers Mobile Services state-of-the-art in order to highlight the salient points of the status quo and begin to trace an optimal path for the creation of PA mobile services.

In the next articles:

• 2. What can M-Gov do for Public Administration today?
• 3. The Italian case: best practices and missing steps to untap the potential of Mobile Government

About InnGov and Interact SpA
Inn-Gov is a research project focusing on M-Government started in 2008 by interact SpA and the Department of Information Engineering and Applied Maths at the University of Salerno (DIIMA). The target of Inn-Gov is to supply the guidelines for creating mobile services and develop a prototype of mobile application for a Central Administration.

Since 2002 R&D on Mobile Services is an integral part of Interact SpA’s own mission. we have developed solutions and followed R&D projects for users on the move together with major technological partners (Ericsson, Nokia and RealNetworks), institutions and Italian Universities (University of Rome La Sapienza, University of Salerno). Our R&D projects are centered on Mobile Internet and Web 3.0, with the aim of helping administrations create and implement new communication models based on technology. More information on http://www.interact.it