Abstract

The concept of e-government came to the fore at the end of the 1990s, and was adopted by the governments of all advanced countries. The Italian government published and financed its first e-government plan in June 2000. In reality, it was precisely at the end of the 1990s that the spread of the Internet led to technological breakthroughs that consolidated the possibility of delivering services not only to government agency employees, but also to outside users and this meant that e-government had to go beyond the first phase of networking the services of individual agencies. What was required was the greater integration of the information systems of multiple agencies. Integrating agency data and services was a clear objective from the start and so the legislative, technological and technical requisites for bringing it about were identified, and the necessary infrastructural services were partially developed.