Teleadministration

Teleadministration is based on the concept that documents in electronic format have legal value. Administrative informatics is not new, but for many years it was merely Information Technology applied to legal documents, that is, the reproduction of paper-based legal documents into electronic file systems. Instead, Teleadministration turns this approach into its head. It is based on research conducted in 1978, the year when, at a conference promoted by the Court of Cassation, launched the then-futuristic idea that an electronic document could have legal value. 1978 was also the year in which the first research on digital signatures (RSA) was published in the United States, yet it would take more than twenty-five years for jurists and mathematicians to start working together.

For many years, and even before 1978, IT helped Public Administration but kept a “safe distance”, assuming that the ‘sacred nature’ of the Law demanded the use of pen and paper. Information Technology merely managed and filed copies of legal documents: it was known as “parallel IT”, since it was an accessory to the activity with formal value, the one based on pen and paper.

Thus, the logical, legal and material premise of Teleadministration is the conferment of legal value to IT documents.

In Italy, the linguistic expression teleamministrazione was first used in 1991 at the Roman ‘La Sapienza’ university, during a conference organised by the Court of Cassation, in which it was said that: «the new system of administrative information technology is called “teleadministration” because all the work of the Public Administration will be carried out through devices, that could also be computers, linked to the central server through a network.» Teleadministration was indeed considered a type of teleworking.

With Teleadministration, amministrative procedures become electronic administrative procedures and, more specifically, those that are initiated by a party realize the electronic One Stop Shop.

In the decades from 1970 to 1990, the Court of Cassation was at the core of research on the relationship between IT and Law, organising international conferences every five years on the topic. The 1993 international conference featured the fundamentals of teleadministration, providing the details of the administrative systems behind the One Stop Shop concept:

It should be noted that the 5th fundamental mentions electronic rather than digital signatures. This is because, in the jurists’ domain, digital signatures were not yet known. The generic reference to the electronic signature is however valid, and its general nature is actually suitable for the rules contained six years later in the Directive 1999/93/EC. As we will see, the Directive refers in particular to all procedures initiated by private citizens, but the system remains valid for all procedures initiated by the administration offices as well.

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Wikipedia