Suggestions to bridge the digital skills gap and overcome the Italian ‘digital emergency'

This paper focuses on the Italian public administration that, with its more than 10,000 inefficient data centers, employs at least 30,000 people who are tasked with the maintenance and technological updating of these obsolete infrastructure and with the upkeeping applications (often outdated and on which much more people work) that run on these infrastructures. Yet, there is no measure to empower or even hire Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Cloud Computing Architects, Data Scientists and so on. In the specific case of the Italian public sector, despite Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is rapidly changing our planet, there is a significant ICT specialists' shortage; the situation is common to other countries but in Italy it is particularly severe due, not only, to the lack of skills but also to the abundance of useless and wrong ones. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the 'Italian digital emergency' with a specific focus on the public sector and suggest a way to improve the situation in Italy but also in other similar countries through innovative ways of recruiting and training, and with structural reforms, for instance, in the system of education.