Each August, Italy’s Ministry of Education faces the daunting task of reviewing employment applications and assigning teachers to some 40,000 schools across the country.
Moving from paper to digital
The process included gathering hundreds of teachers in regional meetings to make those assignments in person.
This complex program became even more challenging in 2020 when Italy was under lockdown mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19. With help from DXC Technology, the ministry reengineered and automated processes for recruiting the country’s teachers, saving hundreds of thousands of hours of manual work.
“We worked hand in hand with DXC to help reengineer the entire process in a very short period of time.”
Gianna Barbieri Director General for Information Systems and Statistics, Ministry of Education
The Ministry of Education matches teachers to the best-fitting roles using a complex system of rankings that considers competencies and years of experience. The process started with a paper form where teachers list the 1 to 20 schools they’d like to work in.
“Teachers are one of our country’s greatest resources, and finding the most qualified teachers and assigning them to the right schools is essential to achieving the best educational outcomes for our students,” says Gianna Barbieri, director general for Information Systems and Statistics at the Ministry of Education.
Entering all that information into a database is a big job, which had to be completed quickly and accurately. In the summer of 2020, the COVID crisis presented the Ministry of Education with a compelling reason to digitise and standardise the process. But time was short. The ministry had only 2 months to complete the massive project before Italy’s new school year began in September.
“Digitising the process enabled us to achieve modernisation goals that had been discussed for many years. DXC was a true partner in this effort, showing us how to make the impossible possible for our teachers and students.”
Gianna Barbieri Director General for Information Systems and Statistics, Ministry of Education
Reengineering the process
DXC Technology became a member of the ministry’s steering committee in mid-June 2020, and the ministry chose DXC to review teacher recruitment and assignments, reengineer the process and ultimately replace the paper forms and regional meetings with online services.
“We worked hand in hand with DXC to help reengineer the entire process in a very short period of time,” Barbieri says.
The DXC team recommended digitising and redesigning the process for greater effectiveness and efficiency. Paper was replaced with a web app that teachers can use on a PC, tablet or smartphone. Selected components of the system were deployed in the Italian public sector community cloud.
DXC had to ensure that the app was secure and protected teachers’ privacy. In addition, it had to comply with the European Union’s strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to ensure that the data is secure and used only for the intended purpose.
To that end, the team decided to implement digital IDs that teachers can use to verify and authenticate their dentities.
Because the digital IDs are issued by either the federal government though certified Identity providers or a private ID number assigned by the Ministry of Education, the team had to integrate two systems separately.
Value delivered
Completed in less than 2 months
To get all this work done quickly, DXC applied Agile development techniques and organised the project into blocks, which were then developed by separate teams working in parallel. Once all the blocks were completed, they were built into a comprehensive app, somewhat like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The work was completed, tested and implemented in less than 2 months. When the school year began, teachers were in place.
DXC estimates that reengineering and automating the teacher recruitment and assignment process saves each school 2 to 3 weeks of work. System-wide, that’s a savings of 400,000 work hours.
DXC hopes to enhance the system with advanced customer services technologies, including chatbots that use machine learning to manage questions from teachers about the process. Another plan calls for extending the system to other workers in the educational system, such as secretaries and non-teaching staff.
“Digitising the process enabled us to achieve modernisation goals that had been discussed for many years,” Barbieri says. “DXC was a true partner in this effort, showing us how to make the impossible possible for our teachers and students.”