In the last few years, the Italian Welfare State has suffered from the effects of the serious economic crisis. The crisis has hastened the need to cut down the public expenditures. The current study focuses on the improvement of the effectiveness, the efficiency and the inexpensiveness of those processes related to the management of the tax services provided by medium/large withholding agents. The proposed method aims to improve handling Non-Conformities in a process, by introducing a project plan based on the Axiomatic Design methodology. This method aids in producing a set of robust planning solutions for a wide range of issues. Starting from the reported issues emailed to the Customer Support Service of the process, it is possible to catalogue the encountered issues through an Holistic Non Conformity Reduction approach, so that introduces such a level of abstraction necessary to define Non-Conformities of process in a basic and logical way. Then, we turn to the Axiomatic Design methodology in an iterative way and we find the set of planning solutions, which are more logically suitable to the operating context. In practice, this allows innovative and sustainable clustering approaches, making the development of proactive lessons learned possible. These can be used both in the development and in debugging of the information systems supporting the process management, ensuring an enhanced robustness against the frequent changes related to legislative measures and the forecasts adopted

The main information systems design techniques focus, almost exclusively, on the functional requirements of the system to be implemented. In its standard formulation, axiomatic design has such characteristics. However, in complex operational environments, this can lead to the identification of functionally valid solutions, but do not perfectly adhere to the system’s nonfunctional requirements. In specific operational contexts, particularly in information systems design, neglecting nonfunctional requirements has been identified as a major threat to projects, which can prevent their proper utilization throughout the design process. In this paper, we focus on nonfunctional requirements in axiomatic design, whose impact assessments can only be performed according to a heuristic basis, i.e., by expert judgment. However, the value assignment by experts can lead to a decisional indeterminacy or cognitive bias. To overcome these limitations, we propose the adoption of a methodological approach based on a reinterpretation of the information axiom of axiomatic design in terms of a multi-criteria decision problem. This approach allows the formal inclusion of nonfunctional requirements in the design process, which can be accomplished by setting them as evaluation attributes to achieve the robust design solution. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to evaluate alternative design solutions based on the information theory of entropy, which then comply with the nonfunctional requirements. We illustrate our approach by a case study, which implements the process of managing patients in home care and compare it with the mathematical-based analytic hierarchy process method proposed in the literature. According to our method, the robust solution is computed in just a single step saving significant computational cost with respect to the iterative-based analytic hierarchy process method. In this perspective, the proposed approach can support information systems designers in decision making as it allows to select the most suitable solution for the context in which it must operate.

In recent years the Italian tax system has been affected by significant changes. Important legislative reforms have revolutionized the relationship between citizens and public administration. These changes tried to simplify the relationship between citizens and public administration, reducing the burden of bureaucracy on the lives of citizens and businesses. To simplify the completion of income statement taxpayers, the Italian Revenue Agency started to use precompiled statement from 2015. However, many manual actions are still necessary to correct or complete the statement. This paper focuses on the improvement of compilation and control of income certifications in order to reduce non-compliance poured into precompiled statements. The proposed method aims to improve the process by introducing a robust procedure based on Axiomatic Design that is able to quantify the information content of a software project by measuring the information content through the Function Point technique. The developed approach will be able to prevent the generation of non-compliances. In this way, to identify possible critical situations in a proactive way and to avoid classes of non-conformities, it will be possible to optimize the data compilation process to verify compliance with the technical specifications of the Italian Revenue Agency. The goal of the proposed approach is to simplify the collection of fiscal data and create a clearer path for taxpayers

Nowadays, information systems are evolving towards increasingly interconnected, smart, and self-adaptive models. This transformation has led to the representation of the systems themselves in terms of natural ecosystems. Similar to the natural environment, the virtual world can be threatened by specific forms of pollution, such as illegitimate access to the system, unwanted changes to data, and loss of information, which affect the only resource it possesses, i.e., data. In order to provide proactive protection of data integrity and confidentiality, in this paper we consider the well-known principles of privacy by design and privacy by default in the design phase of system development. To this end, we propose an approach based on axiomatic design, which allows us to implement these two principles through an appropriate reinterpretation of the information axiom, in terms of privacy impact assessment. We illustrate our approach by a case study, which implements the process of managing patients in home care. However, the proposed method can be applied to processing systems that provide services. The main result achieved is to select the most digitally sustainable design solution, i.e., the one that best prevents the threats mentioned above.

In this second part, the essay focuses on a real case about the functional decomposition of the application, already dealt in Part 1. The real case described here is about the system design process for the 2016 tax return certification compilation. The input elements of this functional decomposition process are the compilation instructions, the project constraints and the clusters of non-conformity. The proposed method enables to select, on each analysis level, the robust decomposition among the possible substantial decompositions, such as the configuration with the minimum data content. The measure of the system's data content was determined using the technique of function point. The aim is to provide software designers with a robust logical design of the system, in order to respect the fiscal deadlines, satisfying the user's requirements and guarantee a solution of the problems in the operating environment. The proposed application has a strong pro-active value, as it leads to the development of ad hoc solutions, avoiding the implementation of unnecessary data entry that does not provide any benefit neither for the taxpayer, nor to the withholding agent. This approach also allows having the necessary technical documentation at hand, to plan and monitor the implementation of the time of action, thus facilitating the system adaptation in the years to come

In recent years remote patient monitoring systems, which are conceived to monitor patient and store the recorded data, employ Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). In health care systems, if on the one hand the SOA features allow enriching the offer of services to patients and their families, on the other hand the problem arises of selecting the most appropriate set of web services for homogeneous groups of users or for each individual clinical case. In this paper, we propose a methodology based on the Axiomatic Design for the composition and selection of web services, which are based on the case stories studied, built using semi-structured interviews to different stakeholders involved in the care process. The proposed methodology detects in a systematic way all functional requirements by taking into account the different stakeholders involved in the process and their interactions. Thus, it identifies the interested actors for a specific health protocol, and consider all information to be exchanged and the Web Services to be implemented. The development of this methodology opens interesting scenarios even in areas not currently affected by such systems, such as health and safety at work for monitoring patients with chronic illnesses or for their work reintegration following acute clinical events. A specific case study is considered in order to illustrate the proposed approach.