(by Mauro Nicastri, President of AIDR) In a recent interview, given to a national newspaper, the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte clarified that in the projects that will be financed by the Recovery Fund <the lion's share will go to the green and digital. Many projects have been designed to strengthen the productive fabric, with particular regard to medium and small businesses: huge resources will enter the “transition 4.0” program which will make our businesses more digital, greener, more innovative.>>
Italy suffers from a serious digital gap both in relation to the G20 countries and to the other countries of the European Union. Being competitive in digital today means being competitive in every economic and social sector.
Over the past year, all EU countries have improved their digital performance. THE Scandinavian countries achieved the highest scores in DESI 2020 and are among the world leaders in digitization. Italy is one of the few other European countries that is suffering a considerable delay in investments in digital technology which is significantly causing its companies to lose competitiveness.
Il DESI report - Integration of digital technology by companies - highlighted that the vast majority of Italian SMEs do not take advantage of the opportunities reserved by advanced services in the digital field, with only 17% of them using cloud services and only 12% analysis of big data.
The new National Transition Plan 4.0 which will be largely financed with the Italian Recovery Fund foresees investments of approximately 24 billion euro and will see the incentive of private investments in the technological field among its main objectives.
It is now of vital importance, for the future of our country, to invest in digital platforms enabling the demand for online services such as healthcare, school, justice, tourism, agriculture, electronic payments and launch acceleration programs for digital skills, smart working, public digital identity service (SPID), digital security for the PA and businesses.
We need to quickly draw up a technological roadmap to plan the future of our country. It is no longer conceivable to attempt to chase the progress and opportunities offered by technological innovation and digital in general.
It is necessary to foresee future scenarios, and to invest in good time in the realization of technological infrastructures and in the formation of human capital. The current emergency situation, which has further highlighted the weaknesses of the Italian system, does not allow us to waste any more time behind parochial and workshop logics; the future of our children is at stake now, and whoever has the responsibility to lead our country, even making use of the best intellectual resources in the field, must have the courage to carry out their decisions without compromise.