Remote Signatures for e‐Government: The Case of Municipal Certification in Italy
Michele Martoni and Monica Palmirani University of Bologna, CIRSFID, Bologna, Italy monica. palmirani @ unibo. it michele. martoni @ unibo. it
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: electronic signature, digital signature, legal XML document, digital seal, e‐government
1. Introduction
Normative provisions on innovation and simplification in administrative activity have prompted several government bodies to computerize the services they provide for citizens. One notable example is the City of Ravenna, which is computerizing and moving online its structures and services so as to implement an e‐ Government platform. Add to that the aforementioned Digital Agenda for Europe( COM / 2010 / 0245), recently implemented by the Italian government, too. The city, following the passage of Decree Law No. 5 / 2012, thus devoted itself to the work of the Italian Digital Agenda Steering Committee. With these premises in the background, the City of Ravenna has resolved to carry out a project aimed at issuing online registry office certificates that can be printed as legally binding hardcopy documents. The challenge was to deliver online registry office certificates, all the while enabling paper circulation among those public administrative offices in the territory that were not ready for digitalization workflow and interoperability.
2. Critical highlights
Several critical issues came up in reaching the dual goal of innovating while preserving the paper tradition. The first issue that came up, the focus of the present contribution, was that of the way in which to have the mayor or the registry officer digitally sign registry office certificates. Specifically, the need emerged to implement a remote‐signature system on a mass scale, that is, through an automated process. Indeed, as anyone will appreciate, it wouldn’ t have been feasible to set up a service where the mayor or the registry officer would sign registry office certificates in real time( on request), for that would require him or her to be on hand around the clock, just as it would have been anachronistic and out of the question to build into the system time or space constraints even more stringent than those which currently frame conventional services. In light of that need, it proved necessary to study the relevant rules and regulations, whose analysis is laid out in what follows.
The second question was that of an electronic document’ s lifecycle and legal standing if it should move to a different support and rendering( XML transformation, PDF, etc.), as from an electronic or a digitally signed document to a paper one, so this is an issue carrying implications for the possible use of digital‐seal technologies [ Palmirani( 2011)]. The third issue was how to preserve the original format of the digital document( as signed by the competent person) even when the document is transformed by the rendering process.
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