5. Centre National de l'Informatique (CNI)
CNI was created in 1975 as a National Centre referring to the Prime Minister.
It is responsible for:
- advising National Departments on Information Technologies;
- developing software projects on demand of the National Departments,
central and local administrations, and public enterprises;
- running a computing centre, based on a Bull DPS8. Although it is mainly
dedicated to administrative data processing, this facility is also available
to public administrations and enterprises;
- providing hardware and software maintenance service to National Departments
and other public users;
- training the personnel of National Departments and other public subjects.
The National Departments and the central administration rely almost exclusively
on CNI for support and expertise in information technology and computing.
As a few examples, the contribution of CNI has included:
- software and data processing needed to support the national economic
and financial planning,
- software and data processing to manage the careers and salaries of
public servants;
- technology and software for data and document exchange inside the public
administration;
- several administrative data bases.
CNI has been quite effective in playing this role, which accounts for
the largest part of its activity. The rest of its activity is essentially
technology acquisition and development. Research, which is limited, is on
the edge of technology development. There are about 20 researchers ( including
PhD students) and the annual budget has been of the order of 100 000 TD
during the recent years. In particular, the CNI has benefited from the help
of the EC in the framework of the programme TEDIS for a project on EDI and
arabisation.
The CNI has good connections with technology sources in France, Belgium
and Canada In turn, institutions in several Arabic, Maghrebian and African
countries rely on CNI as a source of technology.
Areas of technology development include:
- Arabisation of man-machine interfaces and information retrieval systems;
- Videotex development
- Data and document interchange
- Quality issues in software production
- Software engineering. In this area, CNI has co-operated with ENSI in
the development of TASMIN, a tool for defining data and process models
in a graphic environment, within the frame of the method MERISE. This tool
was demonstrated both by ENSI and by CNI.
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