The Modernization of Public Administration: The Impact of Public Employment on Digital Innovation in Italy

ABSTRACT

In Italy, despite many regulations disciplining e-government in PA, public services have not yet reached a good level of digitalization. Our research shows that one of the causes lies in the restrictive public employment policies that have changed the structure of public administration personnel. The research finds the existence of a causal link between some structural characteristics of the civil service and the level of e-government in local public administrations. These result highlight the need for an organizational transformation of local administrations, in terms of both rethinking the composition of staff and strengthening the technical knowledge of bureaucratic roles.

KEYWORDS:

• Public employment policy
• digital innovation
• e-government
• local administrations
• civil servants

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The aim of AIPA was to implement cross-sectoral projects and to draw up a three-year plan for the digitization of all public administrations, but it was never achieved. There were many obstacles: the innovation strategies drawn up were vague or at times too detailed; there was no system for monitoring and evaluating the projects carried out by the individual bureaucracies; there was no reliable organizational interface in each ministry.

2. The plan aimed to channel efforts to improve the quality of public service by using a network to interconnect local and state information systems and to implement online public services.

3. On the subject of the skills of Italian civil servants, empirical research is very limited and relates, almost exclusively, to case studies concerning the central administration. Only recently, following the approval of the NRRP, the Civil Service Department has activated some tools ‒ including the syllabus for the new skills of public administrations (an online training platform) and the protocol between the Civil Service and Italian Universities that allows all civil servants to benefit from an incentive for access to degree, postgraduate and Master’s courses ‒ which are still in the experimental phase and therefore do not allow the impact on the skills of public administrations to be measured.

4. The focus on skills is supported by many studies that underline their importance in the citizen-public administration relationship (Güemes & Resina, 2019; Marinică, 2020). They give emphasis to IT skills of civil servants on the one hand contribute to providing services that enable citizens’ needs to be met more effectively and quickly, thus increasing their trust in public administrations; on the other hand, they operate in an open and transparent system in which the citizen is not treated exclusively as a legal subject, but as a user.