New directions for interoperability in Italy

It’s day 1!

SIMONE PIUNNOItalian Government – Digital Transformation Team - CTO

In 2005, Italy created a national standard for interoperability in the public sector.

• Based on the SOAP protocol• Mandatory “eGov” encapsulation• Mandatory “Domain Port” gateway• National registry for “service agreements”• Naming and semantic rules• Federated identity management

13 years ago this was cutting edge technology but…in 2017 only 200 agencies were onboard andmost local administrations were left behind….

A bit of history: the SPCoop standard

Why thislow adoption?

Classic headwinds:

• Voluntary adoption – no forcing function• Organizational siloes

But also:

• Closed approach – only internal to G2G• Enterprise trust model + encapsulation• Need to sign 1:1 contracts for each integration• Expensive ad-hoc technology• Bottleneck formal qualification process

Learnings from SPCoop low adoption

Meanwhile…

In 2008 the new REST approach becomes more popular than SOAP

In 2018 REST is the de-facto standard in the private market

Meanwhile…

In 2013, as part of the Expo organization in Milan, the e015 project is launched in Lombardia.

• REST-based• Open to private sector

600Members

150APIs

published

77Applications

Why e015 was a success?

• Piggyback on a high priority project• REST is easier, cheaper to implement• Open to private market initiative• Enabler approach: sharing resources• Evangelization program

Airport Mobility Ecosystem

Tourism

Totems

City infomobility

Eventwebsites

Train company

Media & newspapers

Highway company

Let’s makeinteroperability

simpler and open to private sector

Launched in 2017 and signed by Prime Minister

A strategy document for a comprehensive digital transformation.

Interoperability addressed by:• National building blocks

(identity, payments, registries)• Controlled vocabularies• A data analytics framework for cross-agency

dataset manipulation• A new interoperability model

The Three-year plan

The new modelcurrently in public consultation

• Adds REST / OpenAPI• Adopting market standards• Iterative upgrades• A public API catalog• One-click access request

October 2017

Hack.Developers

Biggest hackathon ever organized in Europe- 800 devs- 27 cities- 100 projects

Status

An few public administrations already piloting their API compliant with the new model

Reaction: “about time!”

Currently under discussion:

• Mandatory RFC 5424 / 3339 format for dates• Mandatory Service Management X-RateLimiter

HTTP headers• Mandatory RFC 7807 format for errors• Standardized availability metrics (APDEX?)• RFC7515 signatures and encryption

A set of additional common requirements?

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