Due to their mission, ICT in-house companies play a delicate and fundamental role in engaging public and private stakeholders, and in facilitating the creation and structuring of effective and transparent collaborations, while respecting roles, to chart sustainable digitisation in a world full of uncertainties.
The active involvement of public stakeholders, mainly members of in-house companies, requires an appealing, somewhat original approach, capable of stimulating interests and providing added value, also in terms of sharing needs, including knowledge and understanding of a new digital world characterised by continuous and frequent changes. In this context, in-house companies have the task, and the responsibility, to identify an increasingly ‘holistic’ approach: technological, regulatory and social capable of providing answers in a world of uncertainties. This is not an easy task, given the acceleration and rapidity of technological changes and, consequently, of products and business models, which make it difficult to establish the lifespan of a new digital service and also its sustainability.
In order to succeed in composing the mosaic, therefore, the involvement of technology producers and service providers is indispensable, within the framework of the continuous technology scouting actions that in-house companies must oversee, in order to try, as far as possible, and compatibly with industrial disclosure constraints, to anticipate the assessment of the characteristics and impacts of new digital products and services. Again with a view to enriching knowledge and anticipating innovations, in-house companies cannot avoid collaborating with research organisations, also in terms of technology transfer projects and the sharing of technological trajectories, with a special focus on sustainable digital solutions with a high innovation potential for public administration services, capable of responding to social and production needs.
Already with these actions, in-house companies weave a network of relationships and contamination of knowledge and act as key players in the identification and definition of innovation ideas in the digital services of public administration by combining demand, in terms of service needs for improving the competitiveness of the territory and the well-being of citizens, with supply, in terms of technologies, business models and sustainability. The role of in-house companies cannot, however, be limited to a simple ‘matching‘ between the demand and supply of technology solutions, but rather an overall and multidisciplinary assessment, appropriate to disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, including aspects of regulatory and economic sustainability considering the demographic scenario, and the skills, both of the civil servants of the public administration itself, and of the citizens, belonging to the various generations, both internal and external users of the public administration.
Now, this first sphere of collaborations requires a structured approach with continuous confrontation and brainstorming based on meetings, certainly not virtual ones, where human relationships and direct interactions demonstrate, in the age of digital and remote operations, all their value in mixing ideas and generating emotions. In-house companies must be the conscious animator and multidisciplinary mediator of these moments that can be declined into thematic communities or working groups or other forms, functional for direct and transparent confrontations, while spreading the culture and awareness of digital sustainability.
Moving on to the other sphere of collaboration and involvement, in-house companies also have the task of facilitating the design and implementation of participatory debate of their public members in the discussion of relevant digital initiatives with the involvement of citizens, businesses, associations and the various stakeholders in the area of competence. This involvement requires diversified forms capable of consciously involving different generations of citizens who live the territory in various ways with different ideas, opinions and convictions.
The research data of theDigital Sustainability Foundation Observatory, and in particular the 2025 ‘Generations’ data, provide an interesting picture of the awareness, competence and behaviour of the different age groups with respect to digital and sustainability, and clearly show how citizens belonging to different generations have different perceptions and attitudes towards digital sustainability issues. In this scenario, the development of public policies and initiatives on digitalisation and sustainability necessarily requires an articulated and considered approach to direct investments, both in order to respond to pressing needs in terms of new digital services, in step with the times, and in terms of building a future, not so far away, with innovative digital services that increasingly represent one of the main factors of competitiveness and attractiveness of the territory.
In-house companies must help to bring young people, school and university students, closer to the world of public administration in the framework of structured collaborations with schools and universities, in terms of internships, work placements and degree and doctoral theses, in order to understand on the one hand the complexity of the ‘administrative machine’ and to stimulate on the other hand their active involvement in the design and realisation of digital solutions for public administration that can change the perspective of services for ‘new’ citizen-users.
Businesses, with their territorial associations, represent a key player in the competitiveness and economic development of the territory, and the in-house companies, as they too are companies, must support their member public administrations in their dialogue and confrontation with the production world, in terms of tools and actions capable of interpreting the ‘digital’ expectations of the production world, and of facilitating the sharing of challenges and possible synergetic paths while respecting roles.
To build and govern the new inclusive digital ecosystems there are no consolidated models, and if they exist they should be completely revised with a creative and multidisciplinary approach capable of combining technology, domain knowledge, regulations and generations, a role that in-house ICTs can and must play with ‘real’ intelligence, transparency and competence. The global changes and challenges we are witnessing, starting with the sovereignty of data and digital services also based on artificial intelligence, require local actions and responses that public administrations must provide, also for the near future, with everyone’s awareness. In this scenario, the first strategic collaboration is between member public administrations and their in-house companies for a ‘sovereignty of ideas’ of innovation and holistic digital transformation.
