The need for due diligence… While events on open government and smart cities continue to be held, the true fact of Italian public administrations is neglected: that, apart from some obvious best practices, they are neither smart nor open.
It must be recognized that in recent years significant progress has been made in the work of making the public machine more efficient, but not enough to reverse the trend of its performance and, consequently, the perception of public opinion.
What has increased, however, is the confusion. Transparency compass, digital agenda, e-government, open-data: these are terms widely used by Municipalities, Regions and Ministries. Trendy terms, which every PA wants to exhibit on their website. But a city, before being smart, must be a city and a ministry, before being open, must be government. Outside the perimeter of insiders, citizens, who are users and financiers of the Public Administration, no longer trust slogans: to be convinced that the PA is really changing, they must experience it concretely in the direct contacts they have with the court on a daily basis, the ASL, the school.
To govern the PA innovation process, first of all, it is necessary to rewind the tape and understand what has not worked so far, in the perpetual path of Italian reform. What was wrong and what is still wrong?
Surely it is wrong to keep listing problems: with different levels of information and awareness, we all know what is wrong with administrations.
Just as it is wrong to keep saying what should be done without doing it. Academic conferences and televised debates are crowded with enlightened speakers who dispense miraculous solutions against waste and inefficiency: the problem is that these are mostly solutions whose implementation is downloaded onto third parties, sometimes precisely onto those political and administrative elites who are part of the problem to solve.
Finally, it is wrong to continue to invoke the umpteenth new law: there are already too many of those approved over time, some very useful but of which the majority of public opinion is unaware of their existence. What is needed, then, to put an end to repeated mistakes and effectively turn towards innovation in the Public Administration?
First of all, attention needs to be shifted from what to do for the PAs to knowing the PAs. Nobody invests in a company without first due diligence of the same, so as to verify if and where it is necessary to intervene to restructure. Why shouldn't the concept apply to the PAs, which manage public money?
Yet, to date no institution or body, public or private, has an exact picture of the PA universe. An immense and heterogeneous universe. The only photograph available is the fragmentary one that emerges from the data of the Mef, the Ministry of the Interior, the Court of Auditors, Istat and other databases, but these are mostly partial aspects (for example, the budgets): no one covers the entire world of Public Administration with all its activities.
The first step to take, therefore, is to collect a complete picture of information, starting from the reading and analysis of documents, data and information on the thousands of administrations that make up the Italian public system. It is a long and tiring road, often devoid of media attention, but unavoidable: it is for taxpayers who aspire to see their money well spent, for citizens who ask for good services, for companies aiming to grow, for the country that wants to modernize and develop. The PA due diligence tool already exists: it is called Public Rating and was created by Fondazione Etica
Spending public money better means improving the performance of public institutions and making them regain credibility and authority: this is also how the climate of growing distrust of citizens towards the institutions is fought and meaning is given back to the word participation and to very popular terms such as cohesion and civic engagement.
