Hic manebimus optime (attributed by Livy to a centurion after the sack of Rome)
The first impression, just starting my journey as Councilor, was the lack of visions and interventions on participation, communication and digital inclusion as well as the lack of schedules relating to contracts.
The first data that immediately showed the situation of the level of innovation of the Capitoline Administration was the balance sheet of the then Technological Innovation Department (now Digital Transformation Department) of Rome Capital and the analysis of the trend of the related expenditure from 2010 to 2016. (year of my inauguration). The situation was clearly difficult given that starting from more than 93 million euros of ICT budget in 2010, in 2016 they had dropped to less than 64 million euros. A cut of 30% in 6 years is really a very strong signal of evident and serious economic difficulties and of little attention and understanding of the fact that if you want to make digital transformation it is necessary to foresee investments at least in the short / medium term.
In this context, in my Three-Year ICT Plan, we read: “given, moreover, the concomitance of the completion of some significant tender procedures for the assignment of IT services to support particularly relevant aspects, such as Territory, Document Management, Accounting and Personnel, School Services, it was necessary to proceed in 2016 with technical extensions, which excluded the possibility of evolutionary changes in the IT services offered for tender and the rationalization and integration of IT systems and archives. In other words, the value of ICT expenditure in 2016 corresponds to a management of mere maintenance, for which it can be considered a sort of minimum threshold, below which it becomes critical to guarantee the operational continuity of the infrastructures necessary for the realization of administrative services important for internal users, citizens, tourists and businesses. In order to keep expenditure as low as possible, the supply and maintenance contracts for application systems (software, hardware and telephony) and licenses have been reformulated. In particular, a definition of the service has been passed from the “lump sum” to the “pay-as-you-go” mode, so as to manage the evolutionary maintenance costs in a controlled manner, with obvious repercussions on the possibility of managing development projects. On the basis of the timescales defined in the 2016-2018 Three-Year Plan, structural interventions on information and infrastructural systems were planned in the long term, always with a view to rationalizing spending and improving the efficiency of the systems. ” (Three-year plan for IT in the Public Administration 2020-2022)
And now my first defeat.
Visiting the different departments and / or the offices of the Departments, I have often seen the rack (cabinets and accessories for servers and networking) open, that is, accessible to anyone and therefore bearers of potential IT security risks. We have therefore, together with the Department, verified the need to reclaim and secure 560 rack cabinets (in Roma Capitale there are about 1500) located in the more than 170 offices of the Administration. I anticipate here that these activities were (and still are) aimed not only at improving IT security, but also at achieving the management objective “Adaptation of the TLC (telecommunications) rooms of Rome Capital” present in the Executive Management Plan 2019-2021 approved by Capitoline Council with Resolution no. 56 of 2 April 2019. In order not to burden a single budget, we verified the major intervention priorities by reshaping the project in two phases: the first for an amount of about € 700,000 involved relevant offices of the Administration and the second for an equal amount for just over a million euros. My defeat was in not being able to budget what is necessary for the safety of rack cabinets, but I trust that in the future this will be considered a priority given the great importance of digital transformation and cybersecurity that our country is also facing. grasping.
Returning to the initial situation, other important gaps have been identified by making a first assessment on hardware and software in the various Departments (thanks to meetings with all the Assessors and related managers and technicians). In particular, in addition to the lack of dedicated applications, we noted the lack of interdepartmental collaboration and lack of interaction between Departments which is instead essential to reduce work by silos and avoid the purchase of the same software by different entities of the Administration.
We also detected an internal digital divide, too few ICT-expert employees and no specific attention to the adoption of open source software as regulated by the Digital Administration Code (CAD), but we will come back to this later.
Other elements on the starting situation are related to open data and open source found in conditions that do not exactly comply with current legislation. The Open Data portal had to be restructured to “make data from the Administration and, in general, about Rome, accessible and reusable; make the main data of the Administration understandable for citizens; promote the reuse of data for the realization of services by companies; promote the involvement of city-users and, in general, of stakeholders, in identifying the data to be opened. ” (Source: The Rome Capital Open Data Guidelines).
Then there were no guidelines on open source and above all the regulation on architectural standards and IT equipment for staff was dated 1994 (a date much earlier than the Digital Administration Code which for years has required the PA to preferably adopt open source solutions).
The most striking discovery on the lack of programming was made to the registry services that used a software (for registry, electoral, marital status) purchased with a tender in 1983 and renewed contract with the same supplier for more than 30 years (in which 9 Mayors and 5 commissioners). Obviously, I asked for a tender to be held and, against all odds, another company won (after more than 30 years I believe that the company had to know every single bit of that application inside out and consequently it had to be very easy for them. win the tender and also make a very convenient economic offer) and the company holding the previous contract closed its Italian office one year after the tender. I leave the conclusions to the readers, but I would add that starting from 2020 the Capitoline Administration is saving about 7 million a year on the registry software.
Finally a funny anecdote. The day before the council, each councilor received an e-mail with all the documents attached. Excellent isn’t it? Yes, except that on the morning of the Giunta I found all the printed documents on the desk and as soon as I arrived at the Giunta I found all the printed documents again: a copy for each member of the Giunta! In summary, a small tree was cut down every council to print hundreds of sheets and these documents were printed by an external company that personally delivered them to all the Departments (scattered throughout the city): in addition to the tree also pollution and additional traffic.
What have I done? I closed the contract with the external company and bought a tablet for each member of the council, for a saving of about 450,000 euros a year (the scanning, photocopy and delivery of documents cost so much). And for those who preferred printed resolutions, I suggested BYOP: Bring Your Own Paper.
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