In the epoch when the Planning Studies Centre began to elaborate, with the “ ProgettoQuadro ” (framework project), an accounting Frame of reference for the National Planning, it also began to face the problem of a system of collecting and managing useful data for both the construction and also the management of the accounting Frame itself. This system has been named, since its beginning in the early 1970s, “an Information System for Economic Programming” (Sinprog); and some projects have been elaborated in order to carry out the necessary studies and researches.

However, facing the overflow of Information Technologies (IT) and their application to public administration in particular (so called, e-government), the Centre's project proposed a strict IT adherence to a pre-conditioned construction of an operational planning system; a construction in which the selection or creation of data itself should be constrained instead of unconditioned and chaotic. This represented an excessive limitation and specification of purposes, not compatible with the approximation and simplification of the e-government. In the PA (public administration) an implementation of IT has been preferred, to a large extent, for data collections of any type, which rendered the introduction of an information system, which is calibrated and useful because aimed at operational objectives, more difficult than practicable.

The Planning Studies Centre has never been able to obtain the means and resources to carry out this project. Until 1995, when a CNR committee for IT supplied very modest grants as response to several requests that have constantly been submitted but never been accepted. From here, finally, a first, preliminary research is born, aimed to set up an information system (Sinprog) for planning. This research, given its limited means, has only been brought to a conclusion in 1998, hoping that the CNR committee could prolong its interest. But the general crisis of those institutions in Italy didn't allow any more steps forward.

Here we limit ourselves to reproducing the index and an introduction to the first Research Report of the Centre on the Sinprog research.