The paper examines the development of e-Government in Italy and its critical aspects. The main obstacles lie both in citizens lagging behind in their digital skills and the fact that the public sector seems unable to fully exploit the benefits of computerization.
ICT use by the public sector is mainly directed at internal processes and less at the provision of services. Moreover, the digitalization process has often overlooked the ‘networking’ capability of public information systems, having effectively been left to the initiative of individual institutions in a framework of weak governance at central level. Digitalization is currently moving towards a top-down approach aiming at solutions extendable over all the public sector. It relies on “system-wide projects”, which are on a national scale, have a large impact on the individual entities’ applications, and fix standards for interoperability among systems.
This process must be accompanied, however, by ‘ownership’ of the implementation by individual entities, which is essential to trigger the management and organizational changes needed to take full advantage of ICT.
