by Andrea Di Maio | May 9, 2013 | Submit a Comment
Yesterday I attended a Gartner event held in Milan, where the Italian analyst team addressed over 300 executive-level clients on how the so-called nexus of forces, i.e. the confluence of social, cloud, mobile and information (big data) is going to create new business opportunities, disrupt existing business models and challenge the IT department. In one [...]
Category: IT management Tags: Italy, nexus of forces
by Andrea Di Maio | April 22, 2013 | 3 Comments
When people talk about smart cities, there seems to be an implicit assumption that those who get the concept and are able to lead the change must be demographically young. The same applies with other recent technology-driven phenomena, such as open government or government 2.0. Datapaloozas. hackatons, hangouts, unconferences: people who are over 40 can [...]
Category: smart government Tags: Italy, smart city
by Andrea Di Maio | March 1, 2013 | Comments Off
Many commentators have been discussing about the outcome of the last Italian elections, held a few das ago, which resulted in a tie between the two major coalitions (center-left Democratic Party with its allies and center-right People of Freedom) and a surprising success of the new grassroots Five-Star Movement, led by former comedian Beppe Grillo. [...]
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Category: Europe and IT web 2.0 in government Tags: government 2.0, Italy
by Andrea Di Maio | November 19, 2012 | 1 Comment
A few days ago Italian web pundit and entrepreneur Marco Camisani Calzolari published “Escape from Facebook“, which was widely announced on social media and presented, in its Italian version, at the Lower House in Rome. Camisani Calzolari has been recently in the international news for his research on fake followers, which raised substantial interest as [...]
Category: social networks in government Tags: Italy, social media
by Andrea Di Maio | October 5, 2012 | 10 Comments
On October 4th, after great anticipation and endless debates, the Italian Digital Agenda has been approved (see presentation in Italian here). It is part of a Decree about Growth tackling a number of areas that are key to economic development at a critical juncture in the country’s history, with record-high public debt, a deep recession [...]
Category: e-government Europe and IT open government data Tags: Italy
by Andrea Di Maio | September 27, 2012 | 3 Comments
Last Monday I had an inquiry with a small software vendor about a recently approved amendments to the Italian Digital Government Code according to which governments should favor open source vs. proprietary solutions. Article 68 says (see here, in Italian): Proprietary software acquisition is allowed only when a technical and economic evaluation shows that pre-.existing [...]
Category: open source in government smart government Tags: Italy
by Andrea Di Maio | July 30, 2012 | 5 Comments
Over the last few weeks, in my financially beleaguered country, Internet and Web 2.0 experts have been debating about a controversial research on the real nature of Twitter followers. As I wrote at the time, this research is hardly substantiated so far, but the debate took a political spin as its author applied it to [...]
Category: Europe and IT social networks in government Tags: Italy
by Andrea Di Maio | July 23, 2012 | 3 Comments
A while ago I wrote about a research by Italian entrepreneur and contract university professor Marco Camisano Calzlari claiming that a substantial percentage of Twitter followers for some large corporation would be “bots”. There was quite some debate at the time about how founded his results were: looking at the metrics described in his paper, [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Italy, social media, Twitter
by Andrea Di Maio | July 6, 2012 | 2 Comments
This morning I was driving near one of the major processing sites of the garbage collection company in Milan, and a truck came out of the site, without giving any priority to the cars on the main street, including mine. I was driving rather slowly, so I managed to pull the brakes in time to [...]
Category: e-government Tags: Italy, open government
by Andrea Di Maio | June 18, 2012 | 7 Comments
I do live in Italy and I do work for a US company, spending most of my professional time with US colleagues and clients. They are very different countries, with very different histories, attitudes, weight on the international scene, entrepreneurship, levels of corruption and tax evasion, efficiency of machinery of government, and so forth. Yet, [...]
Category: e-government web 2.0 in government Tags: digital society, GSA, Italy, US
