ISTAT from 2005 has decided to investigate the possibility to adopt SDMX with the aim of:
• reduce the reporting burden towards International Organisations;
• simplify the internal business process concerning the integration of all the
  existing sub information systems.
In order to analyze practically all the issues and acquire the sufficient experience was decide to participate to the Eurostat SODI project. For this purpose an ad-hoc internal working group was constituted.

The main objective was to make the existing short-term statistical database, named ConIstat, SDMX compliant. The basic idea was to build all the necessary software interface in order to provide access to data in SDMX format using a pull approach. In this context a set of software modules were developed. These sets of modules have resulted too tight to the ConIstat database and hardly adaptable to other databases and business processes. So when Istat decided to participate to others Eurostat SDMX projects like “Demography Rapid project” and “Census Hub project”, it was decided to develop a generalised framework useful for different statistical domains. With the know-how already acquired and re-using several software routines previously developed, it was decided to design the SDMX ISTAT Framework directly based on the SDMX information model. The result has been to set up the SDMX environment for the “Demography Rapid project” and “Census Hub project” in a short term and with a little effort in terms of human resources and development costs. Logically, depending on the starting situation, it is possible to decide to use all the building blocks of the Framework (in this case all the business process is covered) or to use some with the scope to integrate them in an already existing business process. Some of the building blocks can, at the moment, already used as API. However the possibility to have all the building blocks re-usable as API will be the main scope of the next developing planning scheduled in 2009. Moreover it will include some specific building blocks that will be used in the “Euro Group Register” project which will handle micro data. Finally it is import to highlight that the SDMX ISTAT Framework is able to automate also the reference metadata workflow and, in particular, is able to handle the Eurostat “Euro Statistical Metadata Structure”.