(versione italiana qua)
The emergency we are living through is bringing to a head a series of issues that were never properly addressed in previous years regarding "digital transformation." This term has for some time become fashionable, especially among politicians, the vast majority of whom have no idea what it actually means or how it is genuinely achieved.
The problem is first and foremost a cultural one, because digital technology is different from all the technologies that preceded it. The revolution brought about by informatics — the science that makes the digital possible — is unlike any previous revolution. "Digital machines" are amplifiers of people's rational cognitive capacities and are therefore radically different from all the machines previously built by human beings, which only augment physical capabilities. After centuries of technological progress, this revolution has swept through society within the short span of two decades — too rapidly for the ruling class to grasp its true scope.
The most important aspect is this: whereas in "physical" automation there is always a human being who remains in command of the machine and helps it interpret the surrounding reality, when "cognitive" automation — that of digital machines — was introduced, the mistaken belief took hold that computing systems could completely replace people and "do everything on their own." This is impossible, because every human being is capable of learning from experience and adapting to changed operational conditions — a general ability that is innate in human beings but entirely unknown to digital machines. Every time something changes, the system needs to be reworked. Since change is the only certainty in life, disasters are guaranteed. Manufacturers of consumer devices — smartphones, for example — get around this through planned obsolescence, which "gently" induces users to replace them every two or three years. But the computing systems that are now indispensable to the functioning of any organisation cannot be renewed in this way.
In the 1990s, the digitisation of public administration concerned mainly internal processes, and so the problems remained on the whole hidden from the general public — one could, so to speak, keep dirty laundry behind closed doors. From the following decade onwards, however, with the pervasive spread of the Web through society, the situation became explosive.
It was not understood that, faced with a revolution of far more dramatic social scope than those brought about by television or the automobile, a serious programme of digital literacy for Italians needed to be launched. Conference after conference was held on the theme of "It's Never Too Late 2.0," without investing real resources in this education — on the assumption that all the necessary information was in any case available online.
A necessary condition for the success of any digital transformation is: "no digitalization without end-user representation." I have written this in English to invoke explicitly one of the eighteenth-century slogans that underpinned the revolution of the English colonies against the mother country: "no taxation without representation." In our context, it means that if the end user is not involved — and on the web the end user is everyone, from the scholar to the factory worker, both united by having been overtaken by a technological revolution that happened too fast for them to assimilate it — the system works badly. I am sure each of us has a favourite example of a web system that demands an enormous amount of patience and self-control to complete operations that, when speaking to a counter clerk, would have been done in half the time and with no stress whatsoever.
The approach that followed was to draw up magnificent plans for the digital "something" — where "something" might be "schools" or "healthcare" or "justice" (or whatever happened to be of interest to the government of the day) — without reflecting that an epochal change of this kind cannot be implemented quickly, because it requires thorough training of people. Only in the films of Matrix does one plug in a cartridge and instantly become an expert: human beings, by contrast, need time to learn, especially when they are simultaneously continuing to do their jobs and live their lives.
It was not understood that before digitising a work process, one must have analysed it in depth and understood how its automation will affect the organisation of work, internal power relationships, and external ones. Instead, the belief took hold that IT services could be outsourced, thereby saving on staffing — only to discover that one ended up spending more to adapt the outsourced services to every minor change in the surrounding reality, changes that any employee or middle manager would have handled in a fraction of the time.
There was not the humility to understand that one had to start from the fundamentals — from those infrastructures that are the equivalent, for an organisation, of what a skeletal or nervous system is for a mammal. I was struck, in these days when we have all been compelled to make intensive use of digital devices and systems, to see that in 2020 the decrees of the President of the Council of Ministers are being circulated via SlideShare, his speeches broadcast on Facebook, and schools conducting lessons on Google and Microsoft platforms — to give just a few examples. I have nothing against digital multinationals, let me be clear: they are companies doing their job. I am not happy, however, about the fact that our politics over the past two decades has been unable to build its own basic infrastructure for a digital country.
There is no point in thinking we can turn back. Society will become increasingly digital. What we can still recover is control over the indispensable infrastructure — which must be in our hands if our country is not to become a colony. The digital is an integral part of our society and must be managed in the national interest. We must also maintain control over citizens' digital data, which in the digital world is the equivalent of the citizens themselves. "What would we call rulers who sold their own citizens to foreign powers?" I asked some time ago. Given that across Europe and beyond there is currently discussion of implementing "individual tracking" measures to monitor the spread of the epidemic, and considering that data is the new oil, it is clear that if we do not want to end up like the Third World countries bled dry by the "seven sisters," we need to change our approach.
And yet this should not be so difficult for those in politics. Technology has always been at the service of politics in order to implement this or that decision. In every era and country, those who have sought to bring technicians into government — presenting them as priests of impartiality — have always in reality sought to strip from the people (the "demos") the power (the "cratos") to hold government to account. They have thus acted in an anti-democratic manner. Digital technology is no exception to this. Computing systems are not inherently neutral. Digital transformation is not an absolute guarantee of efficiency and effectiveness.
Politics must decide how to govern it, in full awareness that epochal changes of this magnitude are not achieved within the few years of a parliamentary term or through unrealistic plans. For this reason, once the emergency has passed, a cross-party agreement on a plan for the country's digital development will be needed — one that commands broad consensus, at least on some fundamental guiding principles. What is required, therefore, are politicians who genuinely care about democracy and the future of our country, who are capable of listening to what technology has to offer, of understanding the possible social impacts, and of forging a synthesis of the needs of different social classes in the interest of all.
I am convinced that in every party there are people of goodwill and great political ability.
--The original version (in italian) has been published by "Key4Biz" on 6 April 2020.
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