The Italian e-government experience: setting up the ICT infrastructure and regulating central and local action

Introducing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the public administration has been for a long time a clear priority both for the Italian Government and for the Italian Parliament. Achieving this goal proved (and still proves) to be a very complex and challenging task. A major problem, as was clear from the beginning, was that several administrations were already undertaking individual actions in this direction, and there was a total lack of coordination, leading rapidly towards incompatibility. This could have finally prevented any further successful effort of integration. On the other hand, the decentralisation process, as we shall discuss later in more detail, granted the local administration a good deal of autonomy, and thus prevented a direct intervention of the central Government. Over a time of more than fifteen years, this strategy has indeed proved to be quite successful, and has brought to coherent implementation of e-government across the country. Moreover, thanks to the regulations issued by the central ICT authority (AIPA and CNIPA), Italy has attained a leading role in Europe in several relevant fields as digital signature, electronic id card and certified e-mail, and replacing paper with digital and intelligent documents. In this chapter we shall analyse the problem in detail, and we shall discuss the main decisions and the related regulatory actions taken by the Government. Moreover, although the innovation process is still far from its end, we also discuss some interesting results of this policy of coordination and indirect action, notably the five year plan launched in 2001 to promote e-government in local administrations.