"Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you bringing? Where are you going? A Fiorino!" We all remember the scene from the movie Non ci resta che piangere with Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni. At every movement of the two poor travelers, intent on crossing the border of the Florentine Seignory, an upstanding guard kept mechanically asking the same things over and over again, blocking them.
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Luca Attias, Extraordinary Commissioner for the Implementation of the Digital Agenda, Presidency of the Council of Ministers, uses this metaphor to describe the immobility caused by bureaucracy, which does not meet the demands of citizens, which digitization can remedy instead.
"One of the key issues in the failure of digital in the public sphere -explains Luca Attias - has been determined by the absence of continuity and political opposition that leads to erasing the work of the previous government just because a different political force is succeeding it. In addition to this there is another aspect to consider, time: digital change, especially in large infrastructures, requires it because it is not only a technological process, but also a cultural process!"
We need to overcome resistance to change and acquire a culture that allows us to deeply understand the logic of new technologies, an evolved culture, which we can call digital maturity!
Avoiding fragmentation and waste due to lack of interoperability is vital. This is why digitization of processes within the Public Administration is a priority, think of the inordinate use of different applications that is made in Public Administrations in Italy, each intent on building its own silos of information.
"8,000 municipalities, 8,000 different information systems," Luca Attias continues, "performing the same functions in slightly different ways. Application censuses in Italy have never arrived at an exact number, but we are talking about millions of applications, an insane number!"
Hundreds of thousands of people from the public administration and the supply chain that revolves around being, unnecessarily and in some cases unknowingly harmful, work on all these applications. "In Italy we are asking computer protocol technicians to become experts in a function of the Public Administration by distorting their profession and preventing them from seeing themselves again in the market, because if they lose their jobs then they are forced to do some other thing."
Jobs such as Search Engine Optimization, Chief Data Officer, Data Driven Decision, Big Data Expert, e-Commerce Specialist, Social Media Manager, CyberSecurity, Chief Information Office, and Web Analytics Manager, to name a few, must stop being niche.
The issue related to digital must become a priority on the Italian political, public and media agenda
"The digitization process," concludes the Extraordinary Commissioner for the Implementation of the Digital Agenda, "can win other issues as well. Today a country's civilization is also measured by the degree of digitization achieved. In fact, I have theorized, garnering more than a few critics, that the proper digitization of a country can also help fight corruption. If you compare the indices of the Trasparency International Ranching, which photographs corruption in the world (Italy is in 53rd position), with those of the Digital Economic Society Index the ranking is practically the same!"
We can reflect on these insights as citizens, as employees or as entrepreneurs, because the perspective is broad. Digitization can also give continuity and transparency to our companies or the companies we work for, simplify our daily work routines, and automate first-level operations, increasing competitiveness and helping us catch up with the standards of countries other than our own.