Developing municipal e-Government in Italy: The City of Alfa case

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the new trends in the public administration's way of doing government business. Specifically, it takes stock of the various actions developed to modernize the administrative and management structures of public companies (PA) and their outcomes. The modernization effort is the result of two macro actions: public administration reforms and the successive pervasion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The e-Government process is driven by ICTs and the search for a new way to govern. Given that many aspects of the reforms highlight the PA's multifaceted nature, the outcome of the phenomenon also needs to be defined and studied by taking into account how it straddles the technological, organizational, managerial, informatics, relational and cultural dimensions. The paper analyzes a case study of e-Government implementation in a mid-sized municipality in Northern Italy; the aim is to understand how Italy's new reforms and the advent of ICTs have shaped the City of Alfa's route to change. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.