ICONS home > Project Documents > D35
For a presentation click here (PowerPoint, 275KB) and for Methodology part click here (PowerPoint, 175KB).
The Structural Fund projects represent a vital opportunity for the new Member States to join the European Community in May 2004 to close the social and economic gap between these countries and the European Community. The challenge recognized by all new member State Governments is to create conditions for best possible use of the funds made available to them by the EC. This implies creating adequate management structures to monitor and audit the SF project as well as setting up stringent standards for project proposal eligibility. The latter requirements may lead to the situation that many project proposals will be rejected on the grounds of non-compliance with the SF regulations or due to their generally poor documentation quality. Such situations, if frequent, may lead to low utilisation of available financial means, thus hampering the social and economic equalisation processes.
All NAS countries are eligible for structural fund projects under the Objective 1. In order to assure the use of structural funds to stay within the European Commission's objectives appropriate management structures are being set up in the new Member Stated (i.e. the NAS countries). Appropriate management institutions are currently being set up in all NAS countries under the guidance of the National Development Plans agreed upon during the adhesion negotiations. The challenge is the number of different SF project types (priorities) and the large number of organisations that are authorised to submit project proposals. In Poland alone an estimated number of 3500 organisations may propose projects to be potentially funded by the structural funds. The budget allocated to these projects in years 2004-2006 amounts to 13.8 billion Euro.
The goal of the Structural Fund Project Knowledge Portal is to support organizations and individuals involved in the SF project proposal development processes to achieve the highest possible number of high quality eligible project proposals meeting the stringent EC criteria.
In view of the past experience of such accessing countries as Spain, Portugal, and Greece, meeting an acceptable threshold of the structural fund usage, in particular during the initial period, is a difficult, if not impossible, task. Even small improvements in project proposal development processes resulting from application of the advanced knowledge management techniques and methodologies will have a substantial economic impact on the regional development of the NAS countries. Indeed a 1% improvement in the structural fund project proposal acceptance level would mean additional 138 million Euro to be invested in the Polish regional economy alone in years 2004-2006. The figure for all new Member countries for the period 2004-2006 amounts to 30 billion Euro. Hence, the potential value of a 1% improvement of the SF project acceptance rate increases to 300 million Euro. Considering the varied and rather low level of the regional and local government agencies and organizations involved in the structural fund planning and project development processes, one can reasonably expect a higher improvement rate. Clearly the above figures exemplify a strong economic motivation of the NAS countries to invest in ICT solutions pertaining not only to monitoring of the SF projects but also to improvements of quality and acceptance rate of the SF project proposals.
The conceptual design covers all principal features of a knowledge management application specifying the Knowledge Services to be made available to system users in order to meet the functional requirements defined in the presented SFP KP system terms of reference. A cross-reference between the proposed knowledge services and the ICONS platform knowledge management features is made in order to present the relevance of the designed demonstration application to demonstration of the key features of the development platform (ICONS).
The system Knowledge Schema presents all principal knowledge management paradigms to be used within the system and relate them to the system functionality expressed in terms of the Knowledge Services.
Finally, an overview of the knowledge management application development methodology is presented representing the current view of the ICONS consortium members on the application development life-cycle and developer roles to be applied for such development projects.
We believe that the SFP KP system prototype represents a substantial commercial development potential, in particular due to the fact, that it will be demonstrable in the midst of all New Member States preparations to best exploit the available structural funds.