Reliable Peer-to-Peer Access for Italian Citizens to Digital Government Services on the Internet

In the delivery of e-government services to citizens it should be clear that the viewpoint cannot simply be the standard one of client-supplier commonly used to provide services on the Internet. In a modern society it has rather to be the peer-to-peer approach which is typical of democracies, where institutions are equal to citizens in front of the law. But this is not yet a widely accepted standpoint in digital government efforts going on in many advanced countries in the world. Italian government, in its ever increasing effort to provide citizens with easier access to online government services, has instead adopted and is pursuing this symmetric approach, which is going to represent a fundamental tool in the ongoing march towards e-democracy. In this paper we describe the organizations involved in the process and the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure enabling the effective management of the whole process while ensuring the mandatory security functions in a democratic manner. Organizational complexity lies in the distribution of responsibilities for the management of people’s personal data among the more than 8000 Italian Municipalities and the need of keeping a centralized control on all processes dealing with identity of people. Technical complexity stems from the need of efficiently supporting this distribution of responsibilities while ensuring, at the same time, interoperability of IT-based systems independent of technical choices of the organizations involved, and fulfillment of privacy constraints. The IT architecture defined for this purpose features a clear separation between security services, provided at an infrastructure level, and application services, exposed on the Internet as Web Services.