One year ago, 12 of January 2015, a new act was published on Gazzetta Ufficiale: “Regole tecniche in materia di formazione, trasmissione, copia, duplicazione, riproduzione e validazione temporale dei documenti informatici nonché di formazione e conservazione dei documenti informatici delle pubbliche amministrazioni”. An incredibly long name that can be summarized easily in “Rules for the digitalization of the Public Administration”. This document states a simple concept: all the PA data now need to be transmitted and archived in digital form, finally saying goodbye to the old fashioned paper. Of course, this includes the communications with citizens.
These ideas are not new: Italian government is discussing this topic since 2005 with the CAD, but since has been published in Gazzetta Ufficiale, now all the Italian administrations have to abide. Basically, from August 12 2016 we can finally abandon faxes, papers and snail mail.
Even if this revolution is coming in just a few weeks, nobody in Italy is discussing the topic. We were expecting an impressive communication campaign aimed to professionals and citizens but institutions are silent. Pretty weird for such an important improvement which could save a lot of time and money for everyone.
What we exactly now? To be fair, nearly nothing. We know that probably we can’t use our Gmail or Yahoo email account and we’ll probably need PEC (Posta Elettronica Certificata – Certified Email), a service you have to pay for since the failure of the free PAC (another kind of certified email system). This means that Italian citizens have to pay to talk with the administrations? Probably yes, but the government has not given a definitive answer on the topic.
The impression is that Italy is still not ready for the digital revolution. And even if this system will start, the communication has been so bad that probably only a few Italians will be informed and they will continue using the old approach, based on paper, while the administration will try to fix a system that won’t probably work as intended, at least in the initial stage.
