Mantova is an Italian city situated in the northern region of Lombardy. The Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC) met with the city of Mantova to learn about their progress within the ICC. As a country, Italy decided to focus on the digitisation of the public administration of all its cities and communes so Mantova took the opportunity to join the ICC and naturally chose to work on the Citizen participation and digitisation of public administration thematic track.
Sofia Salardi, ICC project manager for the city of Mantova, explained the context of the participation to the ICC and the main transformations the city carried out during this period.
The digitisation of the demographic service
Mantova decided to start the digitisation with one of the most important services in the municipality - its demographic service. Their services are crucial as they gather some of the most common and frequently used requests (such as birth certificate, registration of residence). In total, 29 services should be digitalised by the end of Mantova’s current ICC journey and 5 of these have already been fully digitalised. These services include requesting certificates and appointments and notifying a change of address.
Digitisation accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic
The digitisation project has already existed for several years in Mantova but it was accelerated in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It became very clear that most services needed to be available online, such as the request for birth or death certificates. During the first part of the pandemic, the city’s work focused on granting access to all services through the public service for digital identity, the “Public Digital Identity System” and through the national mobile application for administration services. To allow safer remote access and ensure better data security, the municipality of Mantova also shifted its services to the cloud.
Looking ahead in Mantova
The goal is now to digitalise the remaining services offered by the demographic services and to replicate this digitisation in the other municipality departments. The primary focus of the city will be to pursue its digital transition but it will also work on developing physical access points to these services throughout the city. These points will allow citizens to access these services if they cannot and do not know how to access them via the digital platform.
The municipality of Mantova is delighted with its ICC participation because it has helped the city to plan its transition smoothly with state-of-the-art, practical examples. It was also efficient for them to learn about international examples and not only national ones.
The Intelligent Cities Challenge is pleased to see the progress of Mantova and looks forward to seeing the full digitisation of the demographic services department.