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International Conference on ICT in Organizations
Italy’s and Lebanon’s One-Stop Business Shops
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International Conference on ICT in Organizations, Paris 215
ONE-STOP GOVERNMENT IN ITALY AND THE LEBANON:
WHEN THE LAW ALONE IS NO SILVER BULLET
Complete Research
Castelnovo, Walter, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy, walter.castelnovo@uninsubria.it
Sorrentino, Maddalena, University of Milan, Milan, Italy, maddalena.sorrentino@unimi.it
Fakhoury, Rania, Grenoble Ecole de Management, Grenoble, France,
rania.fakhoury@grenoble-em.com
De Marco, Marco, Uninettuno, Roma, Italy, marco.demarco@uninettunouniversity.net
Abstract
The paper investigates the implementation of One-stop government in Italy and the Lebanon. The
Italian government’s One-Stop Business Shop (‘SUAP’) programme is first analyzed to discover why
it has taken 12 years of legislation to get Italy’s municipalities fully on board, and whether it has
returned the expected benefits by effectively lightening the administrative load that drags on the
competitiveness of the country’s business sector. The critical discussion of the “innovation by law”
approach identifies the stumbling blocks that have deterred the Italian government from achieving its
mission to set up the One-Stop Business Shops and to deliver e-government. On the other hand, the
Lebanese case study shows that legislation is not the only factor that drives innovation, given that
several projects, the One-Stop Shop included, were implemented without it.
Keywords: e-government, one-stop shop, e-services, digital agenda
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1 Introduction
Keen to harness the many benefits generated by One-Stop Government for citizens, business and the
public sector itself, the past twenty years have seen governments the world over put it at the top of
their policymaking agendas (Wimmer and Tambouris, 2002; Scott, 2004; Janssen and Joha, 2006).
The rush to define ‘one-stop government’ was led by the supranational organizations (UN, 2003;
OECD, 2006; 2010a; World Bank, 2009) and the large consulting firms (e.g., Accenture, 2009; PwC,
2012; Deloitte, 2012), while the e-government scholars see the one-stop solution as the hub and
spokes of each e-government system (Wimmer, 2002a; 2002b; Glassey, 2004; Bannister, 2005;
Tambouris and Wimmer, 2005; Skaggs, Poe and Stevens, 2006; Gouscos, Kalikakis, Legal and
Papadopoulou, 2007; Verdegem and Hauttekeete, 2008; Howard, 2014).
One-stop government is a concept that translates into a variety of shapes and sizes but implementation
usually comprises:
the bundling and/or integration of public services (Kubicek and Hangen, 2000) that can be accessed
from a single point of contact, although they can be delivered by different public authorities that
have competences on them (Wimmer, 2002a, Ricciardi, Rossignoli and De Marco, 2013);
the re-design of the services architecture and the service delivery so that users are able to access the
services in a well-structured and well understandable manner, meeting their perspectives and needs
(Wimmer, 2002a);
the availability of a multiplicity of delivery channels, including the online channel that makes the
services available 24 hours a day (Dias and Rafael, 2007; Hogrebe, Kruse and Nüttgens, 2008).
More recently, the topic has fallen under the scrutiny of the Information Systems scholars, who are
especially interested in key conceptual aspects such as:
public agency interoperability/integration to support the execution of inter-organizational
workflows, as required by the single-point-of-contact idea itself (Charih and Robert, 2004; West,
2004; Guijarro, 2006; Colarullo, Di Mascio and Virili, 2006; Bekkers, 2007; Vaast and Binz-
Scharf, 2008);
the study of inter-organizational transformation/innovation processes and reengineering process
models from the perspective of inter-organizational cooperation between different public agencies
(Ongaro, 2004; Kraemer and King, 2006; Mele, 2008; Leeuw and Leeuw, 2012; Hansson, Norn
and Vad, 2014);
the study of business and service delivery models, particularly in terms of the single point of
contact’s delivery of online services (Janssen, Kuk and Wagenaar, 2008; Schellong, 2009;
Kohlborn, Weiss, Poeppelbuss, Korthaus and Fielt, 2010; Peters, Kohlborn, Korthaus, Fielt and
Ramsden, 2011).
The simplification of administrative procedures, single points of contact (SPC) and online services are
the three distinct features that make one-stop government particularly conducive to not only
smoothing business-government relations, but also easing the bureaucratic millstone that crushes
business (Ongaro, 2004; Colarullo, Di Mascio and Virili, 2006).
Take the example of enterprises in countries like Italy and Lebanon, where highly fragmented
government systems force them on a daunting race from one type of government agency to another in
order to comply with the many, often idiosyncratic legal requirements for business start-up, change of
activity and closure (Mola and Carugati, 2012). Naturally, this is a huge obstacle to the
competitiveness of both the businesses and the national economy, stunting competitive growth across
the board.
Italy’s and Lebanon’s One-Stop Business Shops
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It is now recognized that leaner administrative procedures are the categorical imperative for new
business development and economic growth. Indeed, administrative simplification remains a key
priority for many countries in both the developed and the developing world (OECD 2009a), and is
usually achieved by streamlining procedures and the setting up of One-Stop Shops, either physical or
online (or a combination of both) (OECD 2009b).
This qualitative paper investigates the approaches taken by both a developed country, Italy, and a
developing country, Lebanon, to implement the One-Stop Shop model and thus simplify the
relationship between government and business. However, the two countries differ vastly not only in
terms of government and economic systems, but also in terms of e-government development status
(the 2014 UN E-Government Survey ranks Italy at 23 and Lebanon at 89).
The approach of Italy to the One-Stop Business Shop (in Italian, Sportello Unico per le Attività
Produttive or ‘SUAP’) began with the enactment of Law 447 in 1998, better known as the SUAP law,
the specific aim of which was to simplify the authorization process for the start-up, change of activity
and closure of a business. Law 447 mandated that each municipality set up a SUAP to deal with the
tasks therein defined and to put in place the relative technological and organizational innovation
processes. However, the lacklustre response to Law 447, mainly due to many municipalities lack of
resources and skills, meant the Italian government had to intervene several times to impose
increasingly tougher rules in order to get them fully on board the SUAP programme. In fact, it took as
much as 12 years of lawmaking, ending with Law 160/2010, to get the municipalities to deliver a full
menu of online business services as a typical e-Government service.
The Lebanese government embarked on its One-Stop Shop (OSS) programme in 2002 with a two-
point agenda: (i) to assist investors in obtaining the permits required for industrial, tourism and real
estate projects and to assist people in obtaining their residence and work permits, as well as to fulfil
other similar formalities; and (ii) to inform and guide investors through the legal and administrative
framework, the financing options and choice of location.
However, administrative reform is hard to implement in the absence of overarching political reforms
or in circumstances where political support is limited and political uncertainty rife, as attested by the
launch of the EU-funded ARLA (Administrative Reform for the Lebanese Administration) programme
in 2003. However, in 2005, the Lebanese citizens lost a certain degree of control when Lebanon was
caught up in regional instability and political unrest, mainly as a result of the crisis that hit its Middle
Eastern neighbours, the effect of which has stalled the approval and/or implementation of many policy
programmes and the relative legislation, especially those related to administrative simplification and
reform.
The article maps the diverse challenges faced by both Italy and Lebanon in setting up their One-Stop
Business Shops and offers a timely reflection on their current state of play. The Italian SUAP
programme and the Lebanese OSS programme share the same goal, that of reducing the administrative
burdens on enterprises by simplifying procedures and establishing a Single Point of Contact (SPC),
i.e., one sole platform from which the enterprises can conduct all their government business. In Italy,
the SUAP is now up and running as a typical e-government service, enabling enterprises to
communicate with the authorities through exclusively the online channel. On the other hand, the
Lebanese OSS is still struggling to hit target. Therefore, while the current divergence in the status of
the SUAP and the OSS prevents us from making a full comparison of the two approaches, we believe
the insights and weaknesses highlighted by the Italian case analysis can usefully guide the Lebanese
OSS implementers through the rocky terrain that leads to the virtualization of the OSS.
Now that the SPCs are effectively on stream in Italy, the paper can attempt an ex-post assessment in
order to understand whether the diverse SUAP interventions have succeeded, which, to the best of our
knowledge, has not yet been done. Given the aim of the paper, the scope of the analysis will be
delineated by the factors that can help us respond to two interrelated research questions:
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1. Has the SUAP programme lightened the administrative millstone that crushes Italy’s businesses,
thus helping the country to reboot the economy and increase its competitive status?
2. “Is the exclusively legislative approach a true driver of innovation?”
The Introduction is followed by Section 2, which first sets out the approaches taken by the Italian and
the Lebanese governments to implement the One-stop Shop model and then outlines a reference
framework against which to gauge the development of both the Italian SUAP and the Lebanese OSS.
Section 3 discusses the outcome of the now fully operational SUAP programme, using secondary data
sources to assess whether it has reduced the administrative burdens on businesses and, if so, whether it
has thus achieved its mission to reboot the growth and competitiveness of the Italian economy. This
same section also discusses the SUAP programme’s “innovation by law” approach, which we believe
is the main reason for the lacklustre results. Section 4 presents the study’s conclusions and discusses
how the lessons learned from the Italian case can help to guide OSS implementation in Lebanon.
2 One-stop Shops: Background
2.1 The case of Italy
Located in Southern Europe, Italy is a peninsular with the Adriatic Sea on one side and the
Mediterranean Sea on the other that spans 324,000 sq. km. Italy has a population of almost 60 million
and is the third-largest economy in the euro-zone with a GDP of 2.071 USD trillion (2013).
Law 447/98 or the SUAP law was launched by the Italian government in 1998 as part of its framework
policy to spur the country-wide adoption of e-government and to simplify relations between
government and business, giving each municipality the option of setting up a One-Stop Business Shop
(the SUAP) either independently or jointly with other municipalities (through inter-municipal
cooperation) provided that only one single organization was responsible for handling the relevant
administrative procedures from start to finish.
Prior to Law 447/98, the Italian municipalities were free to apply the procedures, forms and tariffs of
their choice. This legacy system meant that those business owners operating in complex and/or
sensitive sectors had to plough through an obstacle course where the barriers were the different public
offices and their idiosyncratic procedures, and which translated into yet more red tape and even higher
costs (Forti, 2000). The One-Stop Business Shop thus was tasked with streamlining the entire business
authorization/licensing/permit process by coordinating all the public agencies involved (e.g., local
healthcare authorities, fire brigade, provincial and regional governments, regional environment
authorities) and ensuring the entrepreneurs a single point of contact (SPC) from which to start the
process of compliance and permits needed to start-up, change the activity or close a business.
It was then necessary to reduce the business authorization timeframe, which Law 340/2000 did by
deregulating and abrogating specific laws on matters that now came under the jurisdiction of the
SUAP. Nevertheless, the implementation of the One-Stop Business Shops continued to stall, forcing
the Italian government to add yet another layer of legislation with Law 229/2003, which introduced
the standard practice of “tacit consent” or what is called the ‘Statement of Business Start-up’ (in
Italian ‘DIA’ or ‘Denuncia d’Inizio Attività’). In theory, the law slashed the lengthy wait for
authorizations, permits or licenses by giving the business owner a way to commence activity right
away through submission of the DIA to the One-Stop Business Shop.
Law 40/2007 further simplified government-business relations by introducing the Single Statement
(Comunicazione Unica or ‘CU’) in 2007 to enable a new business to not only register their company
online with the Register of Companies kept by the local Chamber of Commerce, but also making
electronic transmission mandatory for the public agencies tasked with expediting any other document
and information flows. While this law has solely an indirect impact on the One-Stop Business Shop, it
Italy’s and Lebanon’s One-Stop Business Shops
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has been a major factor in embedding the principle that a business should use exclusively electronic
means to interact with the PA.
Law 133/2008 further refined the SUAP model, fully incorporating the online principle into the One-
Stop Business Shop by mandating that it put the entire range of business information and services
online and launch an e-business application function. Law 133/2008 also recognized the European
Directive 2006/123/EC (the “Services Directive”), paving the way for the enactment of Law 160 in
2010 and the launch of the website www.impresainungiorno.gov as the Single Point of Contact (SPC),
one sole online platform where business users can both retrieve information and expedite
administrative procedures.
The government’s final touchdown in the SUAP series was Law 160/2010, which issued the basic
technological requirements needed by the One-Stop Business Shops to obtain SPC accreditation, i.e.,
fully operating virtualization status. Law 160/2010 also warded off any further delays in the
government’s mission to establish the One-Stop Business Shop by mandating that any municipality
unable to satisfy said requirements must delegate the running of the One-Stop Business Shop to the
local Chamber of Commerce, regardless of whether or not it had signed a voluntary agreement. The
deadline set for the One-Stop Business Shops to obtain SPC accreditation was 1 January 2011.
The additional legislation enacted since 1998 mainly served to make the Italian One-Stop Business
Shop more technology driven and to transform it, ultimately, into a virtual service centre, i.e., a
computerized and connected unit that delivers government information and services to business users
via the new digital technologies, internet and new media.
2.2 The case of Lebanon
The Lebanese Republic is a relatively small strip of land measuring 10,452 sq. km, located on the
eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea in Southwest Asia; in 2010, the population of Lebanon stood at
4.23 million, although more than 10 million Lebanese live abroad. The Lebanese economy is largely
service-driven, the chief earners being tourism (mainly visitors from the Arab countries and Lebanese
expats) and the banking sector; in 2013 the country had an estimated GDP of 44,352 USD trillion.
The Lebanese Government has made several attempts in the past fifteen years (1998-2012) to
introduce a One-stop Shop programme as part of its PA reform package, working with the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative
Reform (OMSAR) to develop in 2001 the “Strategy for the Reform and Development of Public
Administration in Lebanon” (OMSAR 2001); in 2002 the “e-government strategy” (OMSAR 2002b);
and in 2003 the “National e-Strategy” (OMSAR 2003b) in a concerted effort to "move the economy
and society of Lebanon towards a Knowledge Based Society in the shortest possible time while at the
same time addressing related challenges and opportunities that Lebanon is facing".
The municipal one-stop shop programme was adopted by OMSAR in September 2001 as part of the
“Strategy for the Reform and Development of Public Administration in Lebanon” with the goal of
simplifying citizen administrative procedures (OMSAR 2001). The e-government strategy document
was approved by the Ministerial ICT Committee in December 2002 but not by the Council of
Ministers. The first milestone the one-stop shop programme needs to achieve is to reduce bureaucracy
and modernize service delivery, while the ultimate objective is to deliver more streamlined e-
government services that both lighten the red tape for citizens and make the country more attractive to
investors. The Lebanese government wanted to make the municipalities responsible for kicking off its
digital agenda and facilitating relations with the citizenry. A full review of first the e-government
strategy and then the Strategy for the Reform and Development of Public Administration in Lebanon
was made in 2008 and 2011, respectively, but again failed to receive the blessing of the Council of
Ministers (OMSAR 2011; OMSAR 2008). In addition, as part of both those strategic review processes
the OSS programme also was reassessed and its importance highlighted.
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On 21 January 2002, OMSAR launched a one-stop information shop consisting of a phone helpline
(1700) and the website www.informs.gov.lb (OMSAR 2002a). In 2003, OMSAR launched a
programme to streamline the administrative procedures of the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) in
order to “win back the confidence of its citizens and to ensure that its administration and procedures
meet the highest standards of integrity, and in order to debureaucratize the government administration
through the simplification of work” (OMSAR 2003a). The certification and license issuing operations
of the One-Stop Shop were supported by application software, albeit in vain as the OSS never saw the
light of day, hindered mainly by the country’s general political situation.
Decree No. 106 of 9/9/2004, confirmed by the Prime Minister’s circular No. 10/2010 of 11/3/2010,
assigns OMSAR with the priority task of reviewing and simplifying the administrative procedures of
the Ministry of Economy and Trade, the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Ministry of Agriculture, the
Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Public Health, and the Ministry of the
Environment, fast-tracking the setting up of an OSS at each of these ministries as the main priority. A
Memorandum of Understanding was then signed by OMSAR with four of those ministries in January
2011 for the setting up and management of the OSS, giving it the mission of simplifying, reviewing
and mapping all the identified procedures, or of suggesting alternative solutions for simplification. The
Lebanese OSS programme is designed to create a standard model with standard procedures accessible
from a single platform that enables the governmental agencies to deal with the requests of a large
number of citizens. The main role of each ministry’s OSS is to put their human resources to effective
use to facilitate the processing of specific government transactions and thus reduce the overall
timeframe and the waiting lists. Despite these good intentions, the several pitfalls (mostly
administrative and technical) encountered by the various ministries mean that by 2012 only the
Ministry of Tourism had managed to implement its OSS, mainly delivering services to exclusively
business users but without having managed to simplify the procedures.
The OSS project was proposed by OMSAR in 2002 and subsequently implemented without the need
for legislation at the OMSAR office and at the Ministry of Tourism, albeit, in this latter’s case, without
the simplification or automation of any of the procedures, given that the discussions to standardize,
simplify and automate the entry and operational regulatory procedures that impact the private sector
have been dragging on since 2011. So, to date, the project has merely facilitated the application
process for tourist permits for businesses such as hotels, restaurants, swimming pools and car rental
agencies.
Lebanon’s attempt to introduce “Legislation in the areas of Digital Signature Act, Intellectual Property
& Copyright Act and the Consumer Protection Act” and e-procurement is stuck fast in a legislative
bottleneck that began back in 2003 (OMSAR 2003b). In fact, although the relevant proposals have
now been definitively written into law, they still need to get through Parliament. For example, the
electronic transaction law introduced in 2002 remains at a standstill as far as both the government and
parliament are concerned 12 years later, in 2014, while the electronic content law, dubbed as e-
legislation, should have been enacted by mid-2005 (OMSAR 2003a).
Overall, Lebanon is having trouble getting over its digital agenda teething problems, mainly due to the
long delays in enacting the much-needed ICT laws (OMSAR 2008). Nonetheless, the lack of
appropriate legislation has not stopped the OSS and similar projects from getting off the ground.
2.3 A reference framework for One-Stop Shop development
The above case studies show that the Italian SUAP and the Lebanese OSS are at quite different
development stages, which makes it hard to fully compare the two cases. However, if we use the One-
Stop E-Government reference framework defined in (Hogrebe, Kruse and Nüttgens, 2008), it is
possible to gauge their progress according to the different stages identified by the model.
Italy’s and Lebanon’s One-Stop Business Shops
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Figure 1. One-Stop E-Government Reference Framework (Hogrebe, Kruse and Nüttgens, 2008)
The first major challenge addressed by the One-Stop Business Shops in both Italy and in Lebanon was
to bundle the different services provided by the public agencies (Step 1 of Figure 1). The programmes
implemented by the governments of each country in the past few years then took the One-stop Shop to
Step 2 of the development path, when it became a service center.
The top quadrants shown in Figure 1, above, outline the two successive stages in which the public
agencies proceed to “virtualize” their service delivery activities. In Italy, the issue of digital inter-
agency communications and workflows was not addressed until the launch of the 2003-2008 Italian
National Action Plan for E-Government, which provided the municipalities with the funding and
support needed to transform the SUAPs into virtual portals. To transform the SUAP into a virtual
service centre (Step 2 of Figure 1), most of the funded projects had the objective of laying the
technological foundations needed for electronic inter-agency communications and workflows, even
when these did not explicitly include the implementation of business e-services. In fact, that particular
goal was only achieved after Law 160/2010 made the electronic submission of all business
authorization applications mandatory, signalling the end of the lengthy process of change that called
for Italy’s municipalities to set up a virtualized SUAP.
Unlike the Italian SUAP, the Lebanese OSS has remained at Step 1 (Quadrant 2) of Figure 1,
achieving that preliminary status only after surpassing many challenges. In fact, the inter-agency
agreement between, principally, the Ministry of Tourism and the Municipality of Beirut has not yet
been signed.
3 Assessing the Italian SUAP programme
Given that more than three years have passed since the last SUAP law was enacted (Law 160/2010),
thus ending a long and drawn out legislative journey that began with Law 447 in 1998, it should be
possible to assess whether the programme and the chosen implementation methods have effectively
achieved the desired innovation benefits. Accordingly, this section investigates the impact of the
SUAP programme on the Italian municipalities; above all, it analyzes whether they have been able to
comply with all the requirements laid down by the various laws issued from 1998 to 2010. We then
seek to respond to the paper’s first research question by assessing whether it has achieved its goal to
reduce the administrative burdens on enterprises and, thus, whether it has created the conditions
needed to reboot economic growth and competitiveness in Italy.
On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, the implementation delays suffered by the Lebanese OSS
programme mean that is as yet too early to make even a preliminary assessment of whether it has
succeeded in delivering the expected benefits. It is therefore impossible to directly compare the
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outcomes and impacts of the respective administrative simplification programmes on the economic
systems of Italy and Lebanon. Nevertheless, since the Lebanese OSS seems to be pursuing the same
development path as the Italian SUAP, we believe the Lebanese implementers can use the insights and
weaknesses highlighted by the Italian case analysis offered here to chart a smoother path to the
virtualization of the OSS in Lebanon.
3.1 Method
From the methodological perspective, mapping the diverse challenges faced by Italy and Lebanon to
set up their One-Stop Business Shops needs to take account of the fact that the two country’s e-
government agendas - and, hence, the quantity, robustness and degree of empirical detail of the
outcomes of the respective reform programmes - are at different stages of development and
implementation and, thus, are not comparable. As a result, the following qualitative analysis concerns
solely the SUAP programme.
The analysis method chosen is based on a ‘whole-of-system’ approach to evaluation and on the use of
secondary data sources in the evaluation (Arnold, 2004; Esteves and Rhoda, 2006; Grimsley, Meehan
and Gupta, 2006; Srivastava and Teo, 2007; Castelnovo, 2013; Castelnovo and Riccio, 2013).
The “whole-of-system” approach to the ex-post evaluation of an innovation programme takes account
of whether and to what extent it has helped to generate appreciable benefits for the entire system that
implemented it, and not only at the level of the system components (subsystems) directly involved in
its implementation. The “whole-of-system” approach is usually adopted when the strategic goals of
government’s innovation initiatives are seen to “go beyond efficiency, effectiveness and economy, and
include political and social objectives such as trust in government, social inclusion, community
regeneration, community wellbeing and sustainability” (Grimsley and Meehan, 2007, p. 134). This
approach calls for shifting the focus of the evaluation from inputs and outputs to outcomes and
impacts that are not normally indicated as the direct objectives of an initiative, but rather as societal
objectives to which a successful initiative should contribute, such as economic growth, jobs,
democracy, inclusion, quality of life, etc.” (Verleye, 2010).
From that perspective a “whole-of-system” evaluation can be likened to an assessment of impact,
seeing that both approaches use “information on the overall impact of a program, as opposed to
specific case studies or anecdotes, which can give only partial information and may not be
representative of overall program impacts” (Gertler et al. 2011, p. 4).
System-level evaluation usually is resource and data-intensive, requiring time-series data that are not
always available and that would cost too much to gather directly (Gupta, 2007). The use of secondary
data sources for the ex-post evaluation of government’s innovation initiatives can sensibly reduce the
evaluation costs since it can use already available data. As well as reducing the costs for data
collection, there are other advantages to using secondary data sources, such as ease of reproducibility,
ability to generalize the results arising from larger datasets, reliability of the data deriving from their
having been compiled by trustworthy organizations, taking into account suitable procedures for
ensuring reliability and validity (Srivastava and Teo, 2007; 2010).
3.2 Impact of the SUAP programme on the Italian municipalities
There is no question that the diverse laws enacted by the Italian Government in the 12 years from 1998
to 2010 have increased the number of municipal One-Stop Business Shops, although Law 160/2010
was the key turning point, propelling approximately 94.5% of Italian municipalities to implement a
SUAP by June 2013, whether managed by the municipality itself, through inter-municipal cooperation
agreements, or by the local Chamber of Commerce. In fact, Law 160 provided the vital catalyst by
requiring the SUAP to obtain national SPC accreditation and legally forcing the municipality to
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transfer the management (but not the cost) of the SUAP to the local Chamber of Commerce if it failed
to meet the 1 January 2011 deadline.
Indeed, the boost in performance was clearly thanks to this latter obligation, given that a good 2951
(75% micro municipalities with 5000 residents or less) of Italy’s 8092 municipalities had delegated
SUAP management to the Chambers of Commerce by June 2013. On the other hand, 4698
municipalities gained SPC-accreditation for their SUAP, while 443 had still not set one up (MISE,
2013).
Paradoxically, however, although 5718 municipalities had set up a SUAP by October 2007, the
number of SPC-accredited SUAPs at June 2013 was lower than before Law 160/2010 came into force,
which means that about 18% of the One-Stop Business Shops set up prior to 2010 lacked the basic
technological requisites needed for SPC accreditation. That and the fact that 443 municipalities (5.5%
of the total) had not yet managed to comply with the law and actually set up a SUAP is a clear sign of
the hurdles faced by even the most willing councils. But it is the micro municipalities that face the
biggest obstacles to implementing and running the SUAP, whether directly or through inter-municipal
cooperation. Indeed, 44% of Italy’s 5693 micro municipalities have either failed to set up a SUAP or
have had to delegate it to the local Chamber of Commerce (ANCI-IFEL 2013).
So what is stopping the small municipalities from setting up self-managed One-stop Business Shops?
Firstly, the smaller municipalities rarely have either the resources or the skills needed to set up and run
this kind of services unit, an issue that was evident from the outset of the SUAP programme but which
has worsened over the years with the major spending cuts decreed by the Italian government as part of
its crisis recovery package. Secondly, the law has made the One-stop Business Shop responsible for
coordinating multiple governmental agencies over which it has no authority, hence, to comply with its
legal obligations the SUAP has no choice but to rely solely on the good will and cooperation of these
agencies. In the words of Lanzara (Contini and Lanzara, 2009, p. 34), legal procedures must be able to
travel across administrative bodies and ICT infrastructures ‘without raising exceptions of sorts or
problems of recognition, legitimacy, accountability or validity’.
Further, the smaller municipalities do not have the negotiating power needed to implement third-party
agreements for sharing the inter-organizational workflow, even though these are essential to its proper
functioning. This perceived difficulty, and the fact that the penalties for non-compliance were only
introduced in 2010 with Law 160, has further discouraged the smaller municipalities from setting up a
One-Stop Business Shop.
Therefore, the engine of radical change was Law 160/2010 with its proviso that the local Chambers of
Commerce step in as the alternative managers of the One-Stop Business Shop, thus enabling
especially the smaller municipalities to fulfil the obligation that was almost impossible to achieve with
their few resources. In fact, prior to Law 160, many of the micro-municipalities had no option but to
continue to apply their non-formalized and paper-based procedures for the start-up, change of activity
and closure of a business.
3.3 Impact on businesses
The Italian economy had a serious deficit problem in the global competitive arena long before the
economic downturn of 2007-2008 that brought it practically to its knees. The finger of blame points
squarely at the structural properties of Italy’s socio-economic system, where business and industry are
shackled by legislative overkill and the public administration is obsessed with bureaucratization. The
Italian government launched the SUAP programme in 1998 to address this problem as part of its wider
digital agenda. After a journey of transformation lasting more than 13 years, we believe it is now time
to investigate whether the SUAP programme has achieved its objective of structural reform to boost
the economy. Tables 1 and 2, below, show Italy’s ranking in two well-known international surveys in
the period in which the SUAP programme was expected to start generating benefits:
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World Bank Ease of Doing Business Index - EDBI (www.doingbusiness.org/rankings), which
measures a country’s capability to create a business-friendly environment with better, usually
simpler, regulations for businesses ;
World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index - GCI (www.weforum.org/issues/global-
competitiveness?), which ranks the institutions, policies, and factors that enable a country to sustain
current and medium-term levels of economic prosperity.
Ease of Doing Business Index 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Ease of doing business 74 78 80 87 73 65
Starting Business 53 75 68 77 84 90
Dealing with Construction permits 83 85 92 96 101 112
Table 1 – Italy’s ranking in the World Bank Ease of Doing Business Index
Global Competitiveness Index 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Global Competitiveness Index (rank) 48 48 43 42 49
Institutions pillar 97 92 88 97 102
Table 2 – Italy’s ranking in the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index
The low rankings recorded by the two indices shown in Tables 1 and 2, above, are a clear indication
that the SUAP programme has not as yet enabled Italy’s local governments to provide more effective
services to support competitiveness and economic growth, despite the decisive push given by Law
160/2010 that drove most Italian municipalities to set up a SUAP. Indeed, the trend tracked by both
indices suggests more of a decline as opposed to an improvement in the municipal indicators (i.e., the
“institutions pillar” in GCI, and “starting a business” and “dealing with construction permits” in
EDBI).
In fact, the SUAP programme alone has done nothing to help matters as far as Italy’s competitive
deficit is concerned, given that, as reported in (PromoPa, 2013) it has failed to both cut the cost of
dealing with the public administration for businesses (especially SMMEs), which on average spent
23.9 man-days on bureaucratic requirements in 2007 rising to 30.2 in 2013, and raise the business
users’ level of overall satisfaction with the public administration (on a scale 1-10, 4.9 in 2007 versus
4.0 in 2013).
Denting that performance even more, the Italian SMMEs continue to rate the weight of bureaucracy
and administrative burdens a major risk factor to survival, ranking it 8.5 on a scale of 1-10 (PromoPa,
2013), suggesting that the SUAP programme has been a total flop in detangling the red tape process.
3.4 Lessons learned from the Italian case
As observed by Rebora (2012), any attempt by Italy to reform its Public Administration has erred
heavily on the regulatory side, ignoring the most fundamental question of all: whether the public
organizations are actually equipped with the capabilities and/or the funds needed to comply effectively
with the new legislation and, if not, how to first address this aspect. In fact, because policy makers
assume that the collective interest’s chief concern is the decision-making process, they tend to dismiss
the policy implementation process as a given, seeing it as a “technical” phase and, thus, as neutral and
devoid of discretionary power, which, of course, is not the case at all (Sorrentino and Passerini, 2010).
Instead of using legislation to create the conditions for innovation and, thus, as an enabler, the single-
minded approach to reform taken by all the Italian governments for the past 20-25 years has been
‘innovation by law’. This use of a specific legislative framework to impose change explains the
snowball effect triggered by the failure of the first SUAP policy intervention. In fact, the belief that the
law alone would generate the desired results and benefits was sorely tried when the government was
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11 International Conference on ICT in Organizations, Paris 2015
forced to enact not one, all-encompassing law but several laws, which served only to further tighten
the rules and, in the event of non-compliance, subjected the already financially pressed municipalities
to higher and higher penalties. The SUAP programme also shows how the ‘innovation by law’
approach can spark the path dependency syndrome, given the cultural and institutional attitudes that
dominate the Italian administrative landscape (Sorrentino and De Marco, 2013, Zardini, Rossignoli,
Mola and De Marco, 2014).
As seen in Sections 3.2 and 3.3, above, the SUAP programme has yet to produce the expected
benefits. That translates into a negative response to our first research question, “Has the SUAP
programme lightened the administrative millstone that crushes Italy’s businesses, thus helping the
country to reboot the economy and increase its competitive status?” which leads us to ask why it has
failed, and what is the lesson to be learned?
Implementation of the SUAP programme suffered all the start-up problems common to ICT-based
innovation processes (Luna-Reyes, Melloulib and Bertot, 2013). However, the aim here is not to
analyze the critical success/fail factors of innovation processes, which are already well known and
well covered in the literature, but to analyze two of the SUAP programme’s most critical aspects,
which we believe are the main culprits of the poor results achieved so far: (i) Italy’s exclusively
“innovation by law” approach to PA reform; and (ii) the risk of over-estimating the effectiveness of
delivering the services online.
By making it mandatory for the municipalities to establish a One-Stop Business Shop, Law 447/1998
paved the way for its transition from Administrative Organization (AO) (Quadrant 1, Figure 1) to
Service Center (SC) (Quadrant 2, Figure 1), while Laws 133/2008 and 160/2010 required the SUAP to
advance to the Virtual Service Center (VSC) stage (Quadrant 4). However, only a user-centred
approach can ensure the effective transition from AO to SC, a stage in which it is essential to closely
integrate/coordinate the bundling of services at both the intra-organizational level, i.e., among all the
offices involved in the delivery of a service, and at the inter-organizational level, i.e., among all the
local agencies involved in the business authorization process. Nevertheless, although Law 447/1998
had already issued a clear set of requirements for intra- and inter-organizational
integration/coordination, according to the SMME rankings, the functioning of the Italian PA never
fully complied with even the basic organizational prerequisites of the SC model. Law 133/2008 and
Law 160/2010 then called for the SUAP to advance from SC to VSC status, making it compulsory for
the One-Stop Business Shop to provide its services online and for the relative public agencies to use
ICT to manage information flows. Even so, these additional laws made little positive difference to the
overall situation.
Italy then wrote European Directive 2006/123/EC into law as part of Law 160/2010, launching the
national www.impresainungiorno.gov website and standardizing the SUAP front-office but failing to
define how the back-office activities, including the inter-organizational workflows, should be
organized or which technological solutions to use to manage the intra- and inter-organizational
information flows. This has significantly undermined the efficiency and efficacy of the municipalities’
effort to transform the SUAP into a fully connected digital business service provider.
The fatal flaw of taking an exclusively ‘innovation by law’ approach is that it glosses over the major
organizational criticalities of setting up one-stop government, such as the fact that the smaller
municipalities lack the resources needed, in primis, the skills to not only implement the model’s
standardized procedures, but also to manage relations with the relevant PA actors and stakeholders. By
tightening the regulatory screw and expecting the practical side of implementation to sort itself out on
its own, the various governments have charted a course that could only lead to an unhappy ending.
Indeed, the findings of the Italian case study teach us that unless reform is tackled from the grass-roots
perspective (addressing the problems of resources and competences from the bottom up to help the
municipal organizations provide an effective response to business needs) it will never have the desired
effect. Giving the municipalities the much-needed organizational support to set up their SUAP would
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have made all the difference. Instead, Italy continues to chase the elusive ghost of simplified
administrative processes and, as a result, has made no headway in improving the Italian economy’s
competitive edge.
And so to our second research question, “Is the exclusively legislative approach a true driver of
innovation?” The belief that the law alone can drive innovation is disproved by the impact of the
SUAP programme on the users. In fact, on a scale of 1-10, the 2013 PromoPa Italian SMME survey
ranked the SUAP as a means of simplification at a lowly 4.3. Moreover, even though the various laws
issued in 1998-2010 eventually pushed 94.5% of Italian municipalities into setting up a fully
operational SUAP by 2013, most of them did not even bother to inform the potential users either about
the new service or the relative opportunities to simplify and ease the administrative burdens; in fact,
only 37.6% of the SMMEs said they knew about the latest SUAP requirements introduced in 2010.
Hence, the municipalities seem to have set up their One-Stop Business Shops in name only, providing
yet further evidence that more than regulatory compliance is needed to generate the desired benefits of
innovation.
The second critical aspect revealed by the SUAP case study is the risk of over-estimating the
effectiveness of delivering the services in online format. Despite the fact that Law 160/2010 called for
the full virtualization of the One-Stop Business Shop, making the online channel mandatory for the
delivery of its business services, the PromoPa 2013 survey shows that the SMMEs rank the online
delivery of services as less important than debureaucratization, the synergic organization of the
offices, the competence of staff, and even the opening hours of the public offices. That the SMMEs do
not consider the virtualization of the One-Stop Business Shop a strategic priority is confirmed also by
the efficacy rating of the latest SUAP interventions (especially those aimed at transition to full VSC)
designed to simplify government-business relations. In fact, the fairly high 2011 rating (6.2 on a scale
of 1-10) had already retreated to 5.5 in 2012 before sinking even further, to 4.3 in 2013. Hence, it
appears that the hurdles encountered by the SUAP programme were at least in part created by getting
the priorities wrong and misjudging the demand for online services.
Naturally, the potential of a virtualized SUAP to deliver more efficient and effective services should
not be underestimated solely because the priorities of the SMMEs diverge from those identified by the
SUAP programme (for the transition from SC to VSC). Rather, what the SUAP case underscores is the
risk shared by many e-government programmes that the delivery of services online is expected to
happen as if by magic, i.e., without doing the appropriate ground work, or at least making a
simultaneous effort to deal with basic problems such as organizational structure. Indeed, the simple act
of virtualization actually risks emphasizing instead of resolving this issue.
A final observation on the case of the Italian SUAP is that the policymakers’ focus on the law has
swept aside other primary considerations. For example, not only the implementation factor, but also
the behaviour of the civil servants, the responses and reactions of the regulated subjects and
interference from pressure groups. In addition, the Italian public system is an idiosyncratic organism
that has a bad habit of neglecting other, interrelated aspects. In the SUAP case, the spate of regulations
was not issued in a vacuum but loaded onto an already complex framework made up not only of other
legislation, but also habits, behaviour models and beliefs. Second, ICT itself yields regulatory effects;
in consequence, the design and use of artefacts depends not only on considerations of technical
feasibility and usability, but also on interpretation, power relationships and administrative procedures
(Lanzara, 2009, p. 37).
4 Conclusion
The paper has followed the empirical trail left by the e-government programme dynamics of Italy and
the Lebanon since 1998, drawing on the framework developed by Hogrebe, Kruse and Nüttgens
(2008) to map the routes taken to implement their online Business Shops. Moreover, although the aim
of the study was not, initially, to make an original contribution to the evaluation literature, it is hard to
ignore the important implications that have emerged.
Italy’s and Lebanon’s One-Stop Business Shops
13 International Conference on ICT in Organizations, Paris 2015
The macro-level assessment suggests a negative response to the first research question: ‘Has the
SUAP programme lightened the administrative millstone that crushes Italy’s businesses, thus helping
the country to reboot the economy and increase its competitive status?’
The current status of the SUAP programme indicates that the Italian government’s strategic mission of
simplification with its expected benefits continues to dance out of reach. Many institutional,
organizational and technological problems have hindered the development of the virtual One-stop
Business Shop. The local governments have had to deal with the major issue of how to incorporate the
SUAP into the municipality’s organizational boundaries, its degree of autonomy in the given context
and how to find the resources needed to make it function. Another key aspect is whether the
businesses themselves have the technology needed to access the online services, given that the Italian
business landscape is made up chiefly of small and very small firms not all of which are computerized.
The response deduced from the analysis to the second research question “Is the exclusively legislative
approach a true driver of innovation?” leaves no room for doubt that while administrative
simplification by law is necessary, it is far from sufficient. In other words, the legislative intervention
is only one of several inputs. Compared to the earlier measures, the latest SUAP law not only opens up
new scenarios of discontinuity, but also introduces elements of uncertainty and complexity that weigh
on the decisional processes, with the smaller municipalities penalized by contextual factors, not least
the traditional attitudes of Italian administration.
On the other hand, the Lebanese case study shows it is precisely the lack of legislation that is the
stumbling block to OSS implementation. The four main pillars of Lebanon’s Public Administration
Reform (PAR) of 2002 were technical, service, capacity building and legal. However, the fact that the
review and modernization of the country’s laws and regulations is still a work in progress has hindered
any advances in the first three areas. The PAR relies heavily on equipping the ministries and the public
institutions with ICT infrastructure and applications in order to upgrade the public administration.
However, any attempts at reform in Lebanon are blocked by the country’s political situation and the
government’s lack of interest in the appropriate follow up. In addition, most ministerial decisions are
taken by consensus so imposing a legal framework on the ministries or the institutions is already a lost
cause. The challenge is to introduce an approved legal framework into the governance of the public
administrations, making them an integral part of the public sector modernization effort. From that
perspective, Lebanon might find the “innovation by law” approach more advantageous, on condition,
however, that it learns from the Italian case to use legislation to enable instead of to coerce innovation.
The Lebanese legislator has already created the conditions for the adoption of a user-centred approach,
but both the legal and the technical frameworks need to become firmly embedded in the mainstream
modernization policies and service design.
This shift to a technological and legal framework would seem the most workable path to reorganizing
Lebanon’s public administration but demands the coherent and strategic planning of PAR policies
across all areas and levels. In this respect, the situations of Lebanon and Italy are very similar. In Italy,
the failure to address the municipalities’ basic organizational requirements led to the overestimation of
the effectiveness of the online delivery of services. Therefore, the ensuing implication for the Lebanon
case is the need to work on mainly transforming the organization, the structure and the processes of
government (i.e., administrative reform) while encouraging the active participation of citizens.
The selective assessment exercise presented here is limited to the current status of Italy’s SUAP and
Lebanon’s OSS and their respective contextual effects. A more in-depth assessment of the one-stop
government programme that covers a broader platform of stakeholders (e.g., other public agencies,
business intermediaries) would require further knowledge gains and an interdisciplinary analysis.
Nevertheless, the authors firmly believe that the approach to increase our understanding of how the
reform processes develop, as proposed by the paper, needs to go further than just analyzing the
regulations and the policy tools in order to encompass the multiple contextual factors and their
dynamics.
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