Policy Making and the Digitalization of the Public Sector. Actors and Strategies in Italy

The digital transformation of the public sector is one of the biggest chal-lenges for contemporary governments and administrations. There is no area of public policy in which policymakers avoid promising enhanced effectiveness and efficiency due to digitalization. At the same time, the diffusion of digital services in the private sector, such as banking and payments, is raising citizens’ and businesses’ expectations for cheaper, fairer, and safer services. Academics, intellectuals, and pundits puzzle over the opportunities for more rational decision-making: The large quantity of granular information and the increasing capacity to compute them feeds the hope (but also fear in some cases) for policy design that can be perfectly calibrated on the needs of beneficiaries. In this sense, digital transformation is a process that aims to produce a paradigmatic change in the way governmental activities have been structured and worked since their inception. However significant the cross-country variance may be, large and siloed organizations based on standardization of procedures represent a model of success because such a structure travelled around the world and resisted over decades. Nonethe-less, changes did take place and pulled public sector organizations in different directions. Bureaucracies have integrated (but not dissolved) professionalism as governments have undertaken complex and case-specific decision-making. Moreover, public administrations have progres-sively lost their direct connection with national governments. Agencies, regional and local bureaucratic structures, public-private partnerships, vii viii INTRODUCTION quangos, and third-sector organizations constitute a constellation of actors that public policy scholars and administrations are already familiar with, as they are stably part of policy processes. Besides, administrations flourished also beyond national states. International organizations have large apparatuses; the same goes for the European Union. Hence, bureau-cracy, as a model, is trapped by its success. On the one hand, it provides control through standardization of procedures and such control also grants efficiency. Conversely, replicating such a model in any circumstance produces incoherence and entropy. Policymakers and academics have always looked at machines as a solu-tion to the problems of bureaucracy. Cybernetic at the beginning, then Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and currently Artificial Intelligence (AI) have framed a significant part of the discourse about improving administrative processes. Digital technologies may refine coordination mechanisms based on standardization, which bureaucracies already do relatively well. At the same time, they enhance the capacity to store and process information to support decision-making; in some cases, machines will also provide substitutes for decisions currently assigned to professionals. It is no surprise that, in Europe, a significant share of the Next Generation EU fund has been directed to this area, and national governments have channelled such resources to support old and new projects in this area. Policymakers and stakeholders have ideas precise enough about what should be reformed in the way administrations work, and technolo-gists know precisely what digital artifacts could complement humans in decision-making. There is plenty of elaboration about administrations as to what they will look like when the potential of digital technolo-gies is deployed. However, how public sector digitalization should be designed to effectively realize our image of the future is not a fashionable topic in the literature, and few studies have tried to analyse the imple-mentation processes needed to get there. This gap is, to some extent, surprising because scholars who addressed the issue showed how techno-logical change in government (as for any kind of organization) is not a linear process in which machines substitute humans, hopefully doing the same job more efficiently and effectively. However, introducing ICTs in public institutions and public administrations or supporting public poli-cies is complex and sometimes contentious. Also, practitioners, when they elaborate on their work to the public, often reveal that the main and most important task in digitalizing a given area of public administration was not INTRODUCTION ix about technology but concerned with reorganizing workflows, recruiting competent personnel, harmonizing operational rules, compromising with governments, regulatory agencies, and business companies. Our book engages with this topic from the angle of public policy. Namely, the book focuses on the nexus between policy design and imple-mentation to uncover conditions and mechanisms usable by policymakers to develop sound strategies for the public sector and public policy digital-ization. The scholarly attention on the implications of digital technologies on the political sphere is today at the highest level in decades, but the attention is often directed to describing the usability of ICT solutions in the different steps of the policy process or for different policy sectors; instead, the processes by which these technologies are adapted to concrete purposes and their impacts in terms of administrative and policy change is still an understudied subject. The book is divided into two parts. The first is theoretical and struc-tured in two chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on public sector reforms and governance from the angle of digitalization, thus empha-sizing how the trade-off between specialization and coordination has been framed over time and how digitalization restructures such prob-lems. Chapter 2 develops the conceptual lenses that will be used to analyse processes of administrative and policy changes based on digital-ization. More specifically, the chapter discusses the concepts of policy innovation and governance. Relying on public policy literature, we singled out the dilemmas that policymakers usually face when he/she aims to introduce a non-incremental change. Namely, we built on the literature on Digital Service Teams (DSTs) (Mergel 2019) and specified expecta-tions about policy strategies for successful digitalization. Moreover, we outline expectations about the role of the context in which digitaliza-tion operates, operationalizing such dimensions in terms of organizational interdependencies (Di Giulio and Vecchi 2023a). The second part of the book is an empirical investigation of public sector digitalization, to represent through empirical evidence how the theoretical concepts defined in the first part are helpful in both descriptive and prescriptive terms. Chapter 3 discusses the research design under-pinning the empirical research. Chapters 4 and 5 analyse digitalization programs designed and implemented in Italy. The empirical investigation is based on a case selection that take into consideration both country and program-levels. In chapter 4, the unit of analysis is the national strategy for digital transformation. The chapter traces the national policy from x INTRODUCTION 1992 to the present—conversely, Chapter 5 analyses five digitalization programs. The case selection reflects organizational features consistent with theoretical assumptions and related expectations. From the tech-nological point of view, the cases analysed do not cover what Dunleavy and Margetts (2023) called the “third wave” of Digital Era Governance, understood as the advanced application of data analysis and robotics to public policy purposes. Instead, we focused on the design and implemen-tation of administrative data at national, sub-national, and sectoral levels. Although such empirical references may appear out fashioned in the wake of the contemporary debate on AI and its applications, these latter are still scattered and residual (albeit relevant) if compared to the universe of organizations and policies that compose the public sector. Conversely, this book documents how policymakers still struggle to carry out digital inno-vations that more likely belong to older phases of digitalization but that are nonetheless crucial as basis to develop more advanced socio-technical assemblages. More importantly, the policy successes we reported are partial under two respects. To begin with, they are not irreversible; conversely, we show how successful implementation of digital transformation is a trial-and-error process that may take more than a decade to bring about working arrangements, and once this occurs it will not last forever without a constant adaptation and entrenchment to prevent dismantling attempts. Besides, the cases analysed are positive outliers and do not represent average public sector organizations or policies. Large and relevant areas of Italy’s administration such as health care or justice are still at the earlier stages of digitalization and could benefit from the most recent innova-tions only if the administrative data generated by their activity will be properly generated and their organization would adapt accordingly. In this sense, Italy is fascinating because, among other EU countries, it can be considered a least likely case for success. However, policies aimed at digitalizing the public sector, at different levels and with different scope, eventually became effective. Hence, our case selection privileged cases in which the eventual success was the final outcome of a process punctuated by backlashes and failure. Such within-case variation of the outcome helps in isolating the role of actor’s learning and its impact on implementation strategies.