On May 28, 2013, at the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome, Italy finally seemed ready to enter the future and fill the already evident gap with other European countries. It was in progress Forum PA, an event that since 1990, every spring, under the expert direction of Carlo Mochi Sismondi and Gianni Dominici, takes stock of the public administration.
The previous year the Monti government had created AgiD, the Agency for Digital Italy, with a capital D so that it is not said that digital is not important to us, since they were there they could also put a good point in it exclamation. AgiD was born on the ashes of previous entities, in particular DIgitPA (2009), in turn successor of CNIPA (2003). which took the place of AIPA (1993); not to mention the Agency for the diffusion of innovation technologies, for friends only the Innovation Agency, established in 2006 and also collapsed into Agid in 2012. In short, if there had been a championship for those who create more entities ( useless) to digitize a country we would have won hands down. But with Agid, we said to ourselves, it is finally getting serious.
A senior post office manager, Agostino Ragosa, was sent to direct the newborn agency, who triumphantly entered the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome on 28 May 2013 with the decisive step of the digitizer. He made a presentation of twenty-three slides, including the cover entitled “AgiD strategy for the realization of the Italian digital agenda”. Scrolling through them today you can feel a sense of tenderness: we talk about the importance of digital to grow the economy, the need to have shared technological standards for the so-called interoperability, the urgency of a total coverage of the country with super-fast internet and the goal of making the entire population literate by increasing their digital skills.
Projects include the electronic health record, the single registry, electronic payments, digital justice and the public administration cloud. In short, if one changes the date, he could say that we are talking about the National Recovery and Resilience Plan that has just been approved by the government and Parliament. But eight years have passed. It would be unfair to say that we are still in the state of 2013: that’s not true. But it’s amazing to realize that the goals have been the same for a decade, and the projects too. It seems to live the day of the groundhog in a 1993 film, in which the protagonist wakes up in the morning and always relives the same day.
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