New management models of Public Administration: the Italian experience of E-Government

The revolution into the fields of “information and communication technologies (ICT)” does not influence only the daily life of the people, but it has also a significant impact on the interactions between the public administration and the citizens. From the beginning of the 1990s, public administration (PA) has been confronted by a series of new demands. A great trend towards growing individualisation is growing up, whereby there are increasing demands by individuals on the state, to provide solutions to a variety of problems. At the meantime, in the context of national and international competition, efficient and effective state activity and support for entrepreneurial activities in a region or country are becoming an increasingly decisive factor in location decisions. For some years, the term, “electronic government” (e-government) has been proposed as a way of closing this gap, therefore it can be said that the core of e-government is the execution of administrative processes. Egovernment makes it easier for citizens to become involved in and make their contribution to government-related issues, promising to improve the delivery of many public services, like online transactions and the dissemination of information about the operations carried out by the PA. It may improve the communication between citizens and the government, enabling the former to have a more direct involvement in the decisions that must be made by the latter. Then, it allows to use ICT to offer better services to the citizen. An investment in ICT that only achieves an improvement of PA internal efficiency through increased productivity and a reduction in production costs will be halfway through the achievement of its objective, as that internal efficiency does not help to increase the taxpayer’s satisfaction with the public service received. In short, e-government supplies clear benefits to citizens, thus improving citizens’ perception of the public sector. On the basis of the premise listed above, the aims of the paper are: the analysis of the main roles of public sector in promoting e-government initiatives based on literature review. By this review we will discuss the following topics: the development and introduction stages of an e-government system, its architecture for small and medium public organizations, the classification of egovernment services, and finally the problems arising during the adoption of e-government practices; the review of current trends in e-government development in Italy, by means of a case study-based research (two regions and two municipalities). Specifically, we will first report the state of the art of e-government in the Italian regions, next we will focus, by means of a questionnaire appositely developed, on the situation (both in terms of knowledge and obstacles) of two Italian region and two municipalities; the development of recommendations and guidelines for the evolution of e-government practices in Italy.