Abstract
Beginning in 2009, the Italian legislation proposed a convergent action of “programming” “evaluation” and “transparency” to be applied to the administrative processes. Within this framework, the ICT emerges as a key element in order to put the Reform into practice supporting administrations both in measuring and evaluating performance, and in increasing transparency and accountability. In order to understand the expected effects of ICT use on these relevant aspects of the administrative activities and, more in general, to give an interpretation of the role of the ICT in the reform process, the paper presents the results of a content analysis of 198 documents produced by public organizations for whom the Reform was of immediate application.
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Notes
- 1.
The results (but not the specific contents) of such activities have been presented in First Annual Report (March 2011), by the Commission for evaluation, transparency and integrity in Public Administrations (CIVIT) to the Ministry for the implementation of government programs.
- 2.
For example, in UN Public Administration programs, transparency refers to unfettered access by the public to timely and reliable information on decisions and performance in the public sector. Accountability refers to the obligation on the part of public officials to report on the usage of public resources and answerability for failing to meet stated performance objectives.
- 3.
Actually the Public Administrations with all three documents I on the CiVIT website are 67 but one of them (the University of Florence) had not produced an MESP but a newsletter recalling an older system of evaluation of individual performance so we decided to exclude the University from the analysis.
- 4.
The selected graphic forms identify the common words as “Information System”, “technology”, “intranet”, “web”, “web-portal”, “information”, “ICT”, “IT” and “digital”.
- 5.
All the documents analyzed are in the Italian language and therefore, in the research, we have considered the Italian linguistic root associated with the selected words.
- 6.
For example: ASI stands for Italian Space Agency; ENEA stands for Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development; INGV stands for National Institute in Geophysics and Volcanology; INRIM stands for National Institute for Metrology Research; ISTAT stands for Italian National Institute of Statistics.
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Scarozza, D., Hinna, A., Scravaglieri, S., Trotta, M. (2016). The Value of ICT Applications: Linking Performance, Accountability and Transparency in Public Administrations. In: Ricciardi, F., Harfouche, A. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Organizations and Society. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28907-6_4
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