The Strategic Telematics Strategies in the City of Rome

At a two-year distance from the first report it is now possible to affirm that Rome is an important player in the information society. In this period the city has seen the development of a significant set of telematic activities as result of the strategic approach used to face the challenge and make the most of the opportunities offered by new technologies. The Municipality of Rome has steered local players, both from a political and business point of view, along the path to the information society and the motto 'learning by doing' has yielded positive effects and will continue to be the basis of the City of Rome’s strategies. The aim of this second report is to update the systematic overview of the most important current telematic strategic developments in the Municipality of Rome. As always, it focuses on the two faces of the innovation challenge: on the one hand, the changes facing the internal operation of the Rome Municipality and, on the other, the changes facing the relationship between the local authority and the community and citizens. The report is a contribution to the information-gathering activities of the European ETHOS project and is also expected to provide a further input for the strategy-formulation process of the City of Rome. The structure of the report is in 5 sections. Following the introductory section, Section 1 provides a picture of the ICT, legal and strategic framework at European and Italian level and the relationships with public administration services; Section 2 is a survey on the broad social, economic and ICT environment of the City of Rome. Section 3 looks in detail at the Municipality’s internal re-organisation of systems and services giving a look at the telematics infrastructure and applications currently under development following the guidelines provided both at European and national level. This section also focuses on technological innovation strategies in which the Eurolaboratorio plays the role of promoter, both internally and outside the administration. Section 4 describes the Municipality’s international activities, in particular its role in the Telecities consortium with the aim to exploit the effective and potential economic and social impact of innovation keeping in mind that the entire experience started only very recently. Section 5 presents a conclusion and the future directions of development of Rome’s telematics strategies.