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Geographical area proposed:
Ukraine, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany,
Italy, France, Great Britain
Objectives and expected achievements
As a result of a geopolitical change in Europe at the end of the eighties, Central and East European countries as well as countries of the FSU (Former Soviet Union) have been undergoing radical political, economical, cultural and social alterations for eight years. These alterations have affected practically all parts of the societies and economies. The transformation to the market economy goes hand in hand with privatization and this is closely related to the formation of small and medium enterprises, whose successful start and further performance depends largely on supply of information. Having this in view, DIEFAUST would help to:
It is important to underline that the Government of Ukraine does realize that the availability of industrial and business information and the ability to make use of it is a condition sine qua non for being in close touch with changes in world markets and technologies, and is one of the major factors which allow the business, industries, banking and trade, without mentioning other domains, to achieve world standards of quantity and quality.
No doubt that in the past many fine and worldwide recognized information centers and libraries have been established and developed in our country. The services of these centers have been, however, primarily focused on the needs of scientists, researchers, university students and sometimes decision makers working for the countries' administrations. There were a few information services offered to entrepreneurs; simply because there were rare in these countries and consequently there was virtually a little need for such services. Mainly for this reason the present information services for SMEs are far from being sufficient and adequate, while the undergoing transition to market economy calls for efficient supply of the latest information on products, raw materials, technologies, market, prices, potential partners, suppliers, laws, regulations, domestic and foreign companies' directories, standards, etc.
This situation has started to present a serious impediment for the transition process of the economy, for the foreign investment and for the development of SMEs for which the availability of the latest technology transfer and innovation information data and information services is vital.
The system-concise definition
The consortium proposal is aimed at designing, developing and establishing an information system/network that would enable the users, at any location of the region, to access and obtain information required to run their businesses in the region or worldwide. This objective is in accordance with the Thematic priority of FP5. To achieve this goal it is, however, not intended to create new centres, the existing information centers and national/global networks could be utilized. In fact, DIEFAUST will be a regional pool of participating countries which will contribute to the system through making available some of their resources to others.
Telecommunication and Internet service providers
The examined countries have developed on a national-wide scale a relatively good telecommunication infrastructure in terms of both analog and digital transmission facilities, i.e. public telephone switching network and X.25 network, respectively. The reliability of public telephone networks is acceptable from the prospective DIEFAUST data transmission point of view. In practice, running SLIP (or PPP) with the speed of 14.4 Kbps or even 28.8 Kbps is feasible in the countries.
The Internet is well rooted in the countries and has already reached various communities outside universities and academia. Bigger and leading businesses are more and more interested in the Internet because it is a fast and inexpensive platform suitable for carrying out an enhanced customer service; marketing and advertising: tracking competitors; and organizing remote collaboration. On the other hand, SMEs rarely use the Internet facilities in their day-to-day work. In fact, the lion's share of them are not aware of the opportunities offered by the Internet, sometimes they even do not know about the existence of the Internet at all. E-mail is the most popular Internet service. WWW is becoming more and more popular.
Expected End-of-Project Situation
The consortium should provide primary, secondary and referral information on industrial, business and related matters, as well as, provide access to various information resources, services and institutions. The information will be available through different forms (hard copies, diskettes, CD-ROM, on-line), and if the requested data is not available, the system should indicate where, how and for how much the data could be obtained.
An organizational pattern of consortium is founded on two pillars, namely
The main access to all DIEFAUST actors (NPC, CL, DIEFAUST users) and data channels between them will be based on the Internet facilities.
Contribution to RTD, Innovation and SME Programme/specific action
An examination of the present information scene from the DIEFAUST standpoint allows one to note the following facts related to the information users and the strategic role of industrial, technology and business information:
DIEFAUST work description
Introduction
At the outset it is good to define the meaning of five important key-terms used throughout this document. Other specific subject terms employed in this writing have their common meaning.
A consortium leader is an Austrian contractor: which will initiate the DIEFAUST project, coordinate its activities, provide the auspices and develop a platform along with a set of basic tools for its execution.
A National Principal Contractor (NPC) is a functional unit within an consortium dealing with industrial, business and related information, which will be a national agent of DIEFAUST. The term "profit center" is used in order to underline the fact that from a financial standpoint the NPC in the countries are expected to run revenue earning operations. However, it has to be noted that generating profit is not the main and only objective of the NPC,
By a Host organization (HO) one understands the organization where a National Profit Center (NPC) of DIEFAUST will be placed. Further on, when we speak about identification of NPCs, we actually mean the identification of HOs where the NPCs will be set up.
Internet Service Providers (ISP) are the organizations that sell or make the Internet services available on the free-of-charge basis by means of their technical and organizational facilities.
The term end-user encompasses intermediate processors/users and ultimate users. Intermediate processors are the organizations which process and disseminate information while ultimate users are either physical persons or organizations which make use of the information. Individual entrepreneurs, and small- and medium size non-information businesses are examples of ultimate users. Unless otherwise specified, in this document the term "end user" will be used to indicate both categories.
Eight countries participated in this project, namely the Czech Republic, Austrian, Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain and Ukraine. The representatives of the countries have prepared country reports (structured according to the same pattern) focused on:
The underlying principle of the DIEFAUST architecture is networking, which means that DIEFAUST is a collection of hardware, software, logistics and, last but not least, human-beings interconnected in various ways; nevertheless the technical component of the network, i.e. hardware, software and telecommunication, are perceived by the user as a single computer. In other words: the network is the computer. As already said, the proposed system will be based on the Internet which ensures the data communication facilities and provides access to the DIEFAUST resources and other resources pointed out by DIEFAUST.
The architecture of DIEFAUST borrows from the concept of open systems which means that computer applications run within the system are vendor independent (in terms of computer platform), scaleable, upgradable and can easily co-operate with other open systems.
The whole working environment within DIEFAUST is based on the concept of Client-Server, which (roughly speaking) means that the user who is working either at the DIEFAUST Web-site and is connected to the Internet is assigned a small piece of computing capabilities specific to the required task and through its "client window" can get access to the server where the actual job - for instance, retrieval - is being done by the server.
From the hardware/software viewpoint DIEFAUST is a multi-user, on-line and, to some extent, real-time heterogeneous system.
The consortium plans to achieve the objectives via principal contractor and National Profit Centers as follows:
Consortium leader
The role of consortium leader is, inter alia,
DIEFAUST will be a gateway to national business information resources by providing the user with referral data indicating these resources and, if requested by the user and physically and legally possible, to switch the user directly to them
National Profit Center
The NPCs will perform the following tasks:
In addition to the above, the NPC should be a provider of the Internet services to SMEs (at a price). The end-user kit will be a part of the offer on the part of the NPC. Various packages should be offered: starting from the simplest one composed of e-mail only, through more advanced Internet facilities such as Gopher, Telnet, FTP up to value-added services such as designing, implementing and running user's Home Pages on the NPC server;
The fact that the NPCs will be able to provide both information services and the Internet services which will give easy access to the former should generate a synergy effect strengthening the two aspects of the offer of NPCs, and will provide a viable background for achieving the self-sustainability of NPCs.
Categories of users
As a result of the consortium will stimulate the capacity of the following categories and types of users to adopt new technologies by establishing their needs and ability for transnational cooperation and partnerships between them:
DIEFAUST is expected to serve primarily private sector agents, in particular SMEs, as well as other institutions, including governmental agencies looking for specific and/or overall service dealing with information on industries, businesses and related issues. In addition, information institutions involved somehow in business, industry and similar matters will be able to make use of DIEFAUST.
The evaluation of users' interest and needs allows one to structure the beneficiaries (users) of DIEFAUST in four categories. To the first category belong the main immediate beneficiaries of DIEFAUST who will be:
A second category of DIEFAUST prospective users, who are truly interested in establishing DIEFAUST as soon as possible, is composed of:
The third class of DIEFAUST users might be called "causal beneficiaries" who are:
And last but not least, there is a special group of DIEFAUST users who are the information officers working in the field of industrial and business information or related fields. A special subcategory of this group will be the staff of DIEFAUST Focal Points at both national and EU levels. It should be noted that the information technology employees and information officers of the National Profit Centers will be supervised by the project international consultants during the project execution. This is a crucial moment of the project logic since the consultants will provide the state-of-the-art expertise and skills to the DIEFAUST national teams and this is how, along with the purchase of computer equipment and software, the transfer of IT technology will be ensured.
Hopefully, some information teams in the countries, not necessarily oriented to business and/or industry information, who are looking for upgrading their work modalities and procedures will consider DIEFAUST as a point of reference thereby they will also become the beneficiaries of the present project.
Types of users
From organizational and financial point of view the users of DIEFAUST can be structured in four groups, namely:
DIEFAUST staff who are the employees of the NPCs , in particular information officers; when working for the DIEFAUST customers they are supposed to carry out records of the work done and the DIEFAUST facilities used for accounting purposes (in order to prepare invoices for the clients).
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