Digital transformation and Italy's development

by Enrico Nardelli

(versione italiana qua)

A fundamental and much-debated topic is that of informatics (even if it is now fashionable to say "digital") as an essential tool for restoring competitiveness and efficiency to the country's productive system and its Public Administration. I would like to offer a few reflections on this.

The Public Administration is dramatically behind in its understanding of how informatics can make its operations more efficient and effective. On one hand, there are regulations that are at times excessively rigid in their adherence to form, because they are obsessed with the twin spectre of corruption and waste, when what is actually needed is a radical change of approach — one better suited to the realities of software systems development.

On the other hand, there is a cultural deficit among its managers when it comes to understanding the implications of deploying informatics within organisations. My university colleague Paolo Coppola, in the previous legislature, chaired the parliamentary inquiry commission on the digitalisation of the Public Administration, which revealed during its hearings how many — far too many — ministries and public bodies remain stuck in a vision of informatics as "siloed" automation of individual data-processing functions, disconnected from any overarching, process-oriented view of the relationships between the organisation itself, its interfaces within the PA network, and citizens. All of this is compounded by a "traditional" view of automation, which assumes that once the execution of a function has been handed over to a machine, the problem can be considered solved. With informatics, this is simply not the case: the genuine digitalisation of services is always a work in progress, because reality itself is in constant evolution. But if you do not have in-house the people capable of carrying out this maintenance, if you must continually turn to an outside supplier, costs and timescales balloon to intolerable levels.

Unfortunately, our political class has often paid lip service to the digital agenda, but has never actually brought its influence and weight to bear in order to drive real change. Across the various parties, the tendency is merely to chase whatever terms happen to be most fashionable in the digital sphere — yesterday it was the cloud and big data, today it is artificial intelligence and blockchain — without tackling at its roots an issue that is fundamental to our future. As Morozov wrote brilliantly a few years ago (in The Net Delusion): "for a mass party today, failing to take responsibility for the digital world is tantamount to failing to take responsibility for the future of democracy itself." Now Minister Bongiorno wants to push the accelerator on the digital transformation of the Public Administration, but I fear that appointing generals without equipping them with adequate armies will not get us very far. Without a significant intake of informatics graduates and diploma-holders, efficiency and effectiveness in the Public Administration will not improve.

A parallel attitude — though with different motivations — has been adopted by the productive system. In Italy, this consists essentially of micro and small enterprises, which either do not use digital tools or use them sparingly — not because, as some claim, they are steeped in amoral familism or have failed to grasp the potential competitive advantage, but because overly rigid IT systems would be the quicksand that would swiftly drag them under. The typical Italian entrepreneur — far from stupid, and one who has made flexibility and speed of adaptation their strategic weapon — has sensed this and opted to sit back and watch: primum vivere!

This attitude too stems from a cultural deficit — specifically, from a failure to understand that the only good informatics is "bespoke" informatics that accompanies the company in a flexible way, almost like a person, yet capable of working without tiring and without making mistakes, which is unfortunately what people do. And this cannot be achieved simply by purchasing off-the-shelf solutions, as was the case with previous technological innovations. While entrepreneurs have always been agile in modernising production lines whenever they spotted a market opportunity, in the case of digital automation — grasping the danger of its rigidity — they have prudently sat on the sidelines rather than risk their capital, unwilling to squander financial resources.

This is both a cultural and a political problem. The public spending channelled through the Industry 4.0 initiative is certainly welcome, but if it ends up being used primarily to purchase foreign machinery and solutions, it is hard to see how it can contribute to the country's revival. What is needed is a large-scale programme of support for the training of the active workforce, one that cannot be limited to the end-user digital skills that are necessary but insufficient on their own. The United States understood this very well, going so far as to establish last year the "National Council for the American Worker" with the aim of improving education and professional training for workers, so as to make them competitive in the increasingly digital industrial landscape that awaits us.

The challenge of understanding informatics is grasping that, on their own, hardware and software are only short-term improvements. Over the medium and long term, what is needed are people capable of adapting these digital solutions — which I call "cognitive machines," because they are made up of human intelligence crystallised in the form of a mechanism — to ever-changing surrounding conditions. Business scenarios shift almost weekly; software is not capable of keeping up on its own; people who can do so are indispensable. It is also necessary to incentivise the growth of an Italian informatics sector, capable of developing and evolving solutions that are appropriate for our society.

Will the "politicians of change" actually manage to change the state of things?

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The original version (in italian) has been published by "Agenda Digitale" on 7 March 2019.