Detection Systems: a way to improve the quality of the Italian Public Administration

The Italian Ministry of Public Administration and Innovation is running a pilot project entitled ?Mettiamoci la Faccia? (literally ?Let?s put a face on it?). The campaign is designed to assess organizational performance in Public Administration, through interactive interfaces and the use of emoticons. The aims is improving the quality of services of PA with the help of citizens and have a brief description of the user perception in order to act promptly. This paper describes a software application, developed by the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the Italian National Research Council in Pisa, which enables a monitoring of Public Administration services, by means of emoticons. This involves the objective assessment of performance, results and of the quality of services offered (i.e. customer satisfaction). Furthermore, the system enables the generation and automatic forwarding of statistical data on the services monitored to the Department of Public Functions of the Ministry of Public Administration and Innovation, which allows a real time and comprehensive assessment of their quality. The software, based on a web application and distributed with a GPL GNU licence, enables a survey of customer satisfaction which is both cost-effective and easy to use. In fact, it can be used via web browser and only requires a computer with low computing power and a touch screen.