The Italian E-Government Action Plan: from Gaining Efficiency to Rethinking Government

In 1997 the publication of the first "Bassanini law" [1] gave rise to a general reform process of the Italian government, mainly based on devolution, restructuring, simplification and on the information/communication technology (ICT) leverage. Our attention is pointed to the last hinge of the Bassanini reform, which introduces the radically new concepts of interconnected administration offices (via an extranet infrastructure called "Rete Nazionale") and of on-line services. We offer an analysis of the Italian e-government action plan [12], evaluating it in the light of a concept introduced by Oliver Williamson [23], the trade-off between efficiency and consensus in the public administration. On this basis, we conjecture that a relatively weak political class should try to seek consensus not only in the traditional ways (which according to Williamson's view may generate "inefficiencies by design"), but also using the ICT leverage to rethink government according to a customer centric vision, which is still lacking in the Italian egovernment action plan. We conclude the discussion outlining interesting new fields of further research, both from the theoretical point of view (the cited framework of analysis is only briefly defined) and from the application side, where the investigation on the organizational impact of new technologies like digital signatures is still at the beginning.