The e-NORMA portal is a comprehensive response to standardization needs related to the functioning of the Polish economy in the conditions of a competitive European market. It is also an attempt to appropriately respond to the challenges facing Polish standardization, resulting from the general EU development strategy, defined in e-Europe programs (e.g., eEurope 2002, eEurope 2005) and others concerning the information society (e.g., IDA and ePoland).
The e-NORMA portal is a complex undertaking, within which the following modules will be built:
– a publicly accessible vertical portal, providing comprehensive standardization support along with access to virtual resources of national and international standards, the main goal of which is to spread standardization knowledge among the Polish public,
– an extranet communication and resource portal, intended for comprehensive support of 5,000 experts and nearly 300 Technical Committees cooperating with the Polish Committee for Standardization (PKN) in the scope of preparing standards and maintaining proper documentation of standardization work and related necessary financial settlements,
– an intranet communication, training, and resource portal intended for comprehensive HR, payroll, training, and financial support for the 300-person staff of PKN,
– a virtual library (resource) of standards, containing national and foreign standards in electronic form, adapted for providing information services and sales via the Internet,
– IT infrastructure, implementing a technically and economically defined level of services in terms of protection of information resources, access security, operational reliability, as well as flexibility and scalability of the technical solution in the face of a dynamically changing environment and information content.
The overarching goal of the project is to develop a system of access for all interested persons and clients, and in particular entrepreneurs, to the information and services of the Polish Committee for Standardization. The level of modern functionality of this solution should enable the effective use of electronic public services in the area of standardization via an Internet platform. The idea behind the e-NORMA portal is that entrepreneurs, thanks to easier access to standards, can produce higher quality products and be more competitive compared to other global manufacturers.
Despite several investments in IT infrastructure made in the years preceding the start of the “e-NORMA Portal” project, the technical and system resources used at the Polish Committee for Standardization were still insufficient. Although information was transmitted using e-mail, a number of activities related to standardization information itself were manual and repetitive. The same information was repeatedly entered into systems that were not logically or technically integrated. This increased the institution’s operating costs and posed a threat to the integrity of the information collected, sold, and made available free of charge by PKN. The exchange of information between individual systems and obtaining cross-sectional complex information was also difficult. Due to the limited bandwidth of the WAN network between regional branches and the headquarters, and the lack of a functioning and satisfactory Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the teletransmission service provider, it was necessary to store local replicas of library information databases in the aforementioned branches. However, the most noticeable was the lack of a complete virtual resource containing all standards in electronic form, enabling the distribution of standards or sharing their fragments in such form.
The article comes from the magazine “e-Fakty” 6/2006.