Part 4: Italy’s Digital Transformation Team (2019)

Digital Innovation for Citizens and for the Development of the Country

By Emma Gawen, Public Digital

In 2012 a presidential decree created the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID) to lead the country’s digital transformation. It reports directly to the prime minister and was the only public agency in charge of the digital agenda until 2016, when Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who viewed AgID as underperforming, appointed Diego Piacentini as extraordinary commissioner for the digital agenda. The position was established by decree, and Piacentini was charged with creating a supporting team made of highly qualified technical specialists including computer scientists, engineers, designers, developers, and project managers. This team was named “Team per la Trasformazione Digitale”: Digital Transformation Team (DTT) and had an initial two-year mandate.

DTT did not replace AgID, which still exists and now deals with the more bureaucratic and managerial side of the digital agenda. Rather, DTT works as the country’s “operating system” and has a mandate to:

1. Coordinate government and public-administration stakeholders in the management of existing and future digital programs in an integrated manner, with an agile methodology and an open data approach.
2. Identify new digital and technology transformation initiatives.
3. Become an authoritative center of digital and innovation competence for stakeholders.
4. Create a community of developers and designers to deal with technological challenges; provide information and training on digital innovation; and create a shared wealth of tools and services.
5. Lay a foundation for an evolving architecture.

DTT’s creation was motivated by an acknowledgement that there was a need for more digital talent within the public administration. The state of public digital infrastructure at the time demonstrated a lack of central coordination; programs and funding not aligned and many systems and websites were built with outdated technology, insufficient attention to user experience, poor integration, and a lack of interoperability.

The idea was that hiring qualified people with prior work experience would help to fix these issues by bringing private-sector best practices to the public administration to manage costs and accountability, be more user-centric, and so forth.

After its establishment, DTT took the lead on AgID’s main digital transformation initiatives, which would lead to major improvements. For example, the ANPR (National Resident Population Register) is a single database meant to contain the personal data of Italy’s resident population and of Italian citizens living abroad — but four years after its 2012 launch only one municipality out of 8,000 was using it. DTT reviewed the process and developed a strategic plan that included helping municipalities to fund their migration onto the platform. Today more than 2,300 municipalities (approximately 24 million people’s data) are using the platform and 2,200 more are in the premigration phase.

DTT was legally allowed to continue operating even after its initial mandate had expired. After the 2018 election the new Coalition government appointed Luca Attias as Piacentini’s successor and extended DTT’s mandate until the end of 2019. Legislation passed in February 2019 restructured the mandate and transferred responsibility for the unit to the recently appointed minister of technology innovation and digitization, Paola Pisano.

Furthermore, two new institutions have been established with the objective of replacing the temporary structure of DTT with permanent bodies. The existing DTT will transition to the new Department for Digital Transformation under the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, and pagoPA, a new state-owned enterprise controlled by the minister of economics and finance, will manage a digital payment project also called pagoPA, a public-services app called IO, and the National Digital Platform for Data (PDND). This new company will help Italy achieve universal adoption of digital payments, boost the digitization of public services and further the country’s economic development.

Italy provides a good example of achieving fast results by setting up a temporary digital unit to address current issues while creating the base for a future long-term strategy. The way that DTT was set up meant that at the end of its mandate the administration had flexibility in how to move forward: It could be replaced by a department that would allow Italy to transition to a more permanent solution, the mandate could be extended, or the unit could be closed.

Attraction and Recruitment

To build the Digital Transformation Team, the Italian government launched an open call for talent through public-service job boards. Within the announcement of the creation of DTT is a link for each position with the job’s description, an explanation of duties and responsibilities, a list of key qualifications and skills, and education requirements. Future DTT members were selected through public calls for applications followed by competency-based interviews and assessments of both soft and specialist skills.

They were then hired as full-time external experts within the public administration with short-term contracts of approximately three years, tied to the length of the commissioner’s mandate. The external experts constituting 70 percent of the team.

The commissioner has the authority for to personally recruit and appoint additional specialists. This allows DTT to circumvent the public sector’s formal human-resources processes, which are highly problematic and inadequate for the management of digital teams since they are done through national contests that mostly focus on competency in economic theory and law. In addition the process is inflexible, and test results can take up to five years to be released.

Such an exceptional recruitment process, on the other hand, helps the team to find highly qualified and experienced experts who can have specific duties and responsibilities and/or conduct or participate in specific projects only.

At the moment, the public sector is not able to compete with the private one in terms of salary, which is one of the major challenges in recruiting. For this reason the Digital Transformation Team’s attraction strategy focuses more on ideology than practicality. The call for talent was written by Diego Piacentini himself and specifically addresses potential candidates “who either live in Italy or abroad and have the desire to come back — even if only for a limited period of time and at a compensation level which is most likely much lower than what you are currently making.”

The emphasis is on the prestige of working for government, the complexity and social impact of the work, and the opportunity inherent in its challenging technical problems. The description of the future team members is written in an enthusiastic, motivating and empowering tone to try to strike a chord with potential applicants. The announcement calls for people who “have a desire to make a difference, are used to thinking out of the box, and have the courage to change the status quo.” They should also “know how to work patiently under pressure, be determined, and manage complex situations with enthusiasm,” since their mission will be to “drive Italy into the future.”

Digital Competences and Capabilities

While the general description for team members is written in a relatively informal way, specific roles demand a high level of technical expertise so their descriptions are very detailed. The list of key qualifications required for each role is long and includes the names of specific programs, software, and networks with which candidates should be familiar have experience. In terms of education almost all positions require a degree in computer science or a related quantitative field such as engineering, along with several years of work experience. Potential candidates who do not have a degree can make up for that with more years of work experience.

Such private sector-style requirements, with pay that does not match that of the private sector, could be why DTT has identified too few qualified applicants for technical roles as one of the main challenges in setting up the team. The roles DTT is seeking to fill include:

• government commissioner for the digital agenda
• executive assistant to the government commissioner
• six technical project managers
• international relations expert
• mobile developer
• chief data product manager
• UX designer
• UX/UI development
• cybersecurity expert
• metrics, analytics, and data visualization expert
• data protection officer
• communication, content management, and social media team
• communication and institutional affairs team
• chief product and design officer
• cloud and data-center expert
• big-data engineer
• content designer
• open-source project leader
• software architect
• chief information officer
• technical assistant and coordinator of operations
• chief technology officer for technology and architecture
• full stack developer
• site reliability engineer/DevOps engineer
• developer relations expert
• Italian and EU regulatory affairs expert
• software developer
• service designer
• digital-payments expert

Learning and development

DTT does not have any kind of training, policies, or activities in place to develop and maintain in-house talent or manage careers or to recruit and train young people, since the unit has a time-limited mandate and its team members are already experts, have plenty of prior work experience, and will likely leave the public sector once the mandate ends. It does, however, have two main initiatives to develop digital skills for all public-administration employees.

The first is a course on digital skills for the public administrator run by the Department of Public Administration together with Formez, the department’s agency for public-employee training. The first phase defines the core digital competencies, knowledge, and skills required to actively participate in the digital transformation and engage with the new tools available.

Competencies are grouped as follows:

1. Data, information and electronic documents: how to manage data, information, and IT documents and recognize the potential of open data for administrations, businesses, and citizens.
2. Communication and sharing: how to communicate and share data, information and documents with colleagues, businesses, citizens, and other administrations.
3. Safety: how to protect devices from possible cyber attacks and also protect personal data and privacy in data processing processes.
4. Online Services: how to guarantee the right to use online services by citizens and businesses.
5. Digital transformation: the strategies and emerging technologies for the digital transformation of public administration.

The second phase of this initiative will create an online platform — currently a pilot with a limited number of public administrations — for skills self-assessment to identify specific training needs and recommend customized online training programs to fill competency gaps.

The other initiative is SNA — the Sculoa Nazionale dell’Amministrazione, or Public Administration School for Public Sector Managers. Primarily for directors and middle managers, the school offers eight courses in 17 sessions, of which six are webinars. The courses, offered online as well through moodleNet, an online collaboration platform for educators, are meant to improve digital competencies and innovation policies.

The courses offered by SNA are:

• Basic and advanced Digital Transformation Plan for Public Administration; Enabling Platforms for Digital Transformation in Public Administration; CAD Usability for Public Administration; and Cybersecurity provide context regarding where public administration is heading.
• • Digital Skills; System Engineering for Public Administration; basic and advanced Processes Digitalization, Design of Efficient and Inclusive Services; Items of Digital Security for Final Users provide tools for understanding and action.
• Enabling Technologies for Digital Transformation; Cloud Computing: Rules, Models, and Conditions for Use; and APNR (National Resident Population Register) for Registration Offices Staff teach new technologies.
• Computer Emergency Response Team teaches the role, tools, and activities for a specific project, as does Performance and Digital Competitiveness Check.

Pay and Reward

There is no specific salary policy for the digital team’s members, again due to the short-term contracts and DTT’s temporary nature. However, the prime minister’s decree that created DTT also established special rates of pay for each position, which appear in the job description presented in the open call for talent. For example, a cybersecurity expert can be paid up to €200,000, and a mobile developer up to €150,000. The salary of the team members is overall higher than the average in other parts of public administration.

Culture, Tools, and Physical Workplaces

DTT is based in Rome and has an office that is structured with open and collaboration spaces to stimulate workers and facilitate interactions and teamwork. It operates following the technological and operating principles set up in its manifesto, which prioritizes security, simplification, a data-driven and mobile-first approach, and transparency: “We will be open and vocal about our technical innovations, publishing papers that detail what we built, the decisions we took, the mistakes we made, and the benefits we saw.”

DTT’s members use cloud collaboration tools and platforms such as Slack, Google Suite and GitHub. Team members also access specific software for design and software development. Furthermore, DTT has created Forum and Docs, platforms that allow for open access and consultation of public documents, as well as for comments, discussions, and suggestions on a range of topics regarding digital transformation.

Cutting-edge technologies are not part of the DTT mandate, so there are no projects or initiatives in this area: DTT focuses instead on providing simpler and more efficient services for citizens, businesses, and the public administration.