The Government of the Azores will develop the "Digital Autonomy" project, a system for the management of different contents, including collections of museum objects, digitalised books and digital archives, announced Vítor Fraga.

The Regional Secretary for Tourism and Transport spoke Thursday during the ceremony to celebrate a partnership agreement between the GlobalEDA and SAP Multinacional. In his regard, the government official stressed that this project will be developed under a project with a wider scope, the so-called Azores Cloud; the latter comprises "measures to promote a smarter and, above all, citizen-oriented administration."

Vítor Fraga stressed that the Government aims to develop "Digital Autonomy" throughout the year. This is "an innovative project that follows European recommendations and contributes to the development of creative industries, especially in development of contents for the tourism industry."

According to Vítor Fraga, the contents "will be available in multi-platform on the Regional Government Portal in the future the education intranet." There is the possibility of developing these contents in open source software so that our technology-based companies can use these tools to create more applications services in a perspective of generating value and wealth for the Region."

"We will do everything to value, maintain our young people in the Region and improve their skills, thus creating all the conditions so that they can be more competitive in a global world," said the government official.

According to Vítor Fraga, "we are living in a period marked by a constant search for greater efficiency, not just for efficiency from the standpoint of organisational development of companies, but also for a perspective of efficiency towards the provision of a better service to all clients."

Accordingly, the government official emphasised that "organisations and companies should focus on their business and use technology, namely information systems, as active partners to achieve their goals of becoming more competitive."

The Regional Government has been supporting companies with this purpose and will continue to do so, especially through the new incentive system, Competir+. The latter is "available to all entrepreneurs, particularly the subsystem for qualification and innovation, which aims to promote quality and innovation. This goal will be achieved with the production of new goods and services or their improvement, the implementation of new production processes as well as with the introduction of new organisational models or new marketing strategies that will clearly support the progression of companies in the value chain and promote their projection in markets outside the archipelago."

 "In this context, the projects eligible for this programme should have an investment amount between 15 thousand Euros and 500 thousand Euros, with a non-refundable incentive that can reach 50% of eligible costs; the latter can be increased if the projects contribute to the creation of new jobs," added Vítor Fraga.