Steering the digital agenda at arm’s length. All wobble, no spin: The contextual lens

Abstract

The paper uses a longitudinal case study of Italy’s digital agency to investigate eGovernment and a subject that hovers at the far edge of the academic radar: agencification, or the setting up of semi-autonomous organisations that operate at arm’s length from the relative ministry. The aim is to make a threefold contribution of international scope and significance to the eGovernment debate by mapping Italy’s chosen path to public-sector innovation. Framing the country’s digital agenda within the larger picture of ongoing New Public Management driven administrative reforms, the authors assess whether mandating an arm’s length body to steer the eGovernment strategies at public-sector macro level has been successful. The structural-instrumental, cultural and environmental lens used to analyse the key contextual factors shows how the continuity and discontinuity that has shadowed Italy’s ICT policies can be blamed on shifts in leadership and diverse ideas of modernization; on the digital agency’s multiple, even conflicting mandates; and on the misalignment of the ‘original agency model’ with the public machinery’s embedded culture.