Performance management in public administration: an Italian overview

The starting point of the Digital Era Governance inspired by the assumption that the policy outcomes generate a change in a public management regime in the past is, for a large part, shaped mainly by the introduction of IT technologies. According to the authors, IT changes did not affect directly the public policy, but their impact trigger a series of consequences and changes inside public organizations and civil society that force the public management to respond to these changes.

IT changes have mainly a double effect: a change in the technology inside the public agencies and secondly on the information in civil society. As a result, subsequent transformation will occur in the organization of the public service and in the behavior of the civil society. The final result is a policy outcome affected by all these factors. Innovations as emails, websites, social networks, database management system, electronic invoice are examples of changes that have molded later the behavior of society, as buying clothes online. The authors identified three main outcomes from the impact of the digital era, one correlated to fix the disaggregation principle brought from the NPM principles, and two new concepts generated from these new opportunities:

• Reintegration: as the disaggregation created multiple hierarchy entity leaving the task to build a complete package of service to the citizens, the reintegration of the agency under a central government that guarantee co-ordination is fundamental to exploit digital era opportunity. The main advantages of the reintegration are to reach a higher level of coordination among bodies, squeezing administrative cost concentrating some functions in specific units and a creation of back-office departments that will support the new functionality of the digital era

• Need based holism: the process of restructuring the organization and setting different units, according with need-based, citizen-based or services based. The mission is to offer to the citizens a service “end-to-end”, making the whole procedure as simple as possible and cutting unnecessary cost. To this purpose longer administrative body has to be created, being flexible and responsive to the changes. Exploiting interactive and “ask once” information seeking and connecting different database is essential to improve more quality of service delivery.

• Digitization changes: more radical approach as to be introduced to the organization of the public administration, making the functionalities and advantages of IT in the middle. Spreading electronic services delivery for most paper-based work, centralizing by the state IT procurement, introducing of computerized system as “zero touch technology”, reducing intermediation bodies trough enhancing the potential of the web and supporting self-management needs of citizens with help desk systems. The ultimate goal is to create an isocratic administration and open book government where the business and citizen have direct relationship with government, self-managing their own activities and with the possibilities to monitor in any moment their own tax, medical and whatever situation. The government is not engaged anymore to deliver the services but, instead, has to support self-initiatives pursued by citizens.