Remote Signatures for e‐Government: The Case of Municipal Certification in Italy

Italian e‐Government projects since 2000 have been functional to implementing at the national level the objectives set out in the Lisbon Agenda, eEurope 2002, eEurope 2004, i2010, and the European Digital Agenda. The European context has to be gauged to the peculiarities of the Italian administrative system. The latter suffers from structural weaknesses, scattered and fragmented interventions, poor rationalization of public spending, working conditions often undermined by external factors, and difficult social situations. So innovation in the Italian public sector is not merely the sum of all smart technological factors but is rather achieved by integrating organizational processes and traditional best practices, which often need to be redesigned in light of the possibilities afforded by new tools, and it must also be supported by a strong regulatory framework. Several municipalities (such as Ravenna) are pursuing the objective of computerizing and automating their services with a view to implementing e‐Government services, and in a scenario where not all the administrative government agencies are at the same level of innovation, traditional and paper services need to be managed in combination with paperless e‐services. This work focuses on how online registry office certificatess, can be issued and delivered, how these documents should be presented to other administrative government agencies that rely on paper, and how they can be made to have legal validity using a digital seal. We will key in on five critical questions that came up in the course of implementation.