Professors Batini and Viscusi are teaching at the BZU summer school in July

Birzeit University is delighted to announce that Professors Carlo Batini and Gianluigi Viscusi from the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy will be visiting the Institute between the 26th of June and the 3rd of July 2011 and will teaching a course module at BZU summer school. Both are professors of Computer Science at the Department of Information and Communication Systems (DISCO) at the University of Milano-Bicocca and are currently working jointly with Birzeit University on the GovSeer project.

Batini and ViscusiThe course module that Professors Batini and Viscusi will teach is entitled: “Data Governance and Service Strategic Planning”. The overall goal of the course is to introduce to the complexity of strategic planning of public administration information systems (IS) for delivery of administrative services, in countries characterized by different culture, technological readiness, and legal framework. Another goal is to raise awareness on the role of IS modelling in strategic planning in its interaction with socio-economic, organizational, and legal framework analyses. Due to these issues, the course discusses a methodology called eG4M (eGovernment for Mediterranean Countries) in comparison with other approaches to information systems planning and engineering in particular in e-Government. Comparison criteria encompass the objectives considered, the problems addressed, the main concepts introduced, the phases and steps, the target applications. Furthermore, data and information are the fundamental resources managed by public administrations to provide services to users, and data governance represent a critical success factor in service design; data governance is the orchestration of people, processes, and technology to enable an organization to leverage data as an enterprise asset. Several different issues related to data governance will be discussed in the course, namely, data modeling, data architecture evolution, schema integration, schema abstraction, and data quality.

The following is an initial outline of the course module which will be delivered in 5 days:

Day 1 – Strategy modeling and e-government vision elicitation (2 hours)
Day 1 – State of the context reconstruction and quality assessment (2 hours)
Day 2 – Data architectures (4 hours)
Day 3 – Enterprise Information Integration (2 hours)
Day 3 – Schema Integration, schema abstraction, Repositories of conceptual schemas based on the integration/abstraction paradigms (2 hours)
Day 4 – Data quality (4 hours)
Day 5 – Value and technology driven service design (4 hours)