Diego Piacentini served two years—from August 2016 to November 2018—as Italian Government Commissioner for Digital Transformation, reporting to the prime minister. In this role, he founded and scaled the government's Digital Transformation Team.

Prior to the civil servant role, Diego worked at Amazon.com for sixteen years as Senior Vice President of the international consumer business and a member of the senior executive team (S-team). Early in his career, Diego joined Apple Computer in Italy in his home city, Milan. Ten years later, he was appointed General Manager and Vice President of Apple EMEA based in Paris, before joining Amazon in Seattle.

After the civil servant experience, Diego finally started his own endeavor: a venture capital fund—View Different—that invests in and mentors entrepreneurs who use tech to reshape traditional sectors. In addition, he is a director on several boards, including Apolitical, The Economist Group, Bocconi University, Endeavor Italy, and IHME, and he has formal advisory roles with KKR, Exor Seeds, and Endeavor.

He holds a degree in economics from Bocconi University in Milan.

It is hard not to be impressed by Diego. Here is a man who left a top job in one of the global top companies to go serve his native country. And he did not even ask for or get any pay.

Given the context and complexity of governance in Italy and the messy state of digital government before his tenure, I guess only a person with the strategic and operational leadership acumen at Diego's level could stand any chance of generating some change there.

Diego did this and even more—in just two to three years he put in place the fundamentals to carry the digital government forward in Italy beyond his time there. His story speaks lengths on how bringing onboard the necessary type of deep experience shortens the transformation cycles and increases likelihood of lasting impact.

His story is also a much-needed assurance that with the right skills and mode of thinking, the right powers and some resource folks from the private sector still can succeed and excel in changing the public sector surroundings they get thrown into.

—SIIM

How Did You Enter the Digital Government Role—and the Italian Government Overall?

The story is super simple, actually. I was contacted directly in 2016 by the then Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. He was a young incoming politician, one of the few government people I know who actually understands the value of digital transformation. He was coming to Silicon Valley to see the Italians there and said that he would like to talk to me.

I met him for breakfast, and he told me his vision to accelerate the digital transformation of Italy. He had no idea how to do it, which is fine—I mean, he was a prime minister, not a CTO. He had this idea to go outside of Italy and try to target Italian diaspora from Silicon Valley or Seattle to relocate and start changing things.

I was very skeptical at first, but then realized that I had been working at Amazon for sixteen years, done Apple for thirteen years. What was I going to do next? I was happy. The company kept growing and doing different things and I was not bored. But I did think that at this point I wanted to stop being one of those Italians that keep criticizing that things do not work, and go and do something about it. I told Jeff Bezos way back in a job interview that I wanted to do something for my original country at some point, although did not know what it could be.

I used this sort of regret minimization approach. Would I regret two years from now not trying to work for the government or would I regret leaving Amazon? For me, the answer was very easy. I would have regretted not to try this.

I agreed on a two-year term. In two years, you can build many things. Especially, you can build a continuous set of processes, which is very unknown in politics as a concept.

What Was the Prime Minister's Motivation behind Wanting This Sort of Change? What Task Did He Give You Concretely?

The ultimate mission became to simplify the bureaucracy of the public administration. He also had a long-term vision of bringing Italy to a more technological ecosystem. So, his vision was much bigger than just the digital transformation of government.

My point to him was that “I see your big vision, but we have two years. We need to build the backbones to make it happen.” Good thing is that he really understood that.

A criticism I received later was that I made a choice to focus my role in just one area. Initially, my role could have been for thinking about digital on a general level—how to regulate social media, how to tax the multinational tech companies, all this stuff. My choice was to focus on digitizing the public administration, not all those other issues—to actually get something done. If this was a mistake or not, I do not know.

I still remember a conversation we had with Prime Minister Renzi four or five days into my job. There was this big conference where he wanted to bring me and have me tell the audience everything that needs to be done. I said I was not ready. I said I did not want to be one of the many slogan tellers because I wanted to have a very clear plan and a clear set of processes. Then maybe two or three months later, I would be happy to speak to those conferences. He was disappointed, he was not used to such an answer—people would die to go to a conference with him. But he accepted it.

Did You Still Hesitate at All about the Role While Deciding?

My hesitation was that there have been so many examples of people coming from the private sector to government and being ineffective. Most of the time, it is because their role was to be an advisor or something not defined. Therefore, they would get lost in this chaos that government is. I was thinking, “What should I do differently to avoid that kind of failure?” That is why I designed the role and hired people the way I did.

What Was the Role You Created?

The role was very unclear at the start. That is where many people coming from a different sector fail—they do not realize that they need to tailor and design the role based on what the needs are. They do not expect that the people within the government do not know exactly what to do. Actually, that they may not know at all.

I went to Rome in August, and nobody works in Italy in August, even less in Rome. I started recruiting and found an amazing lawyer, Guido Scorza, who found us the role of a commissioner. For example, there was a commissioner for earthquake reconstruction and one for spending reform. The commissioner role had never been used for my type of job. It has powers for emergency situations. Being a commissioner gave me the opportunity to hire people without going through the never-ending process of public administration hiring. This was the thing I was really looking for.

So, the role of Government Commissioner for the Digital Agenda was a role we invented. One of its upsides, in hindsight especially, was that I did not have to change if the government were to change. You can resign when you want to, but it is one of the very few positions that is not required to change when a new government comes in.

What Was the Institutional Setup Before or Who Had the Responsibility for Digital Government?

The responsibility had been in the hands of the minister of public administration, Marianna Madia. She was very receptive to me. She told me she was not going to be in my way and would actually help to remove the blockers. She called us the “dream team.”

There also was the Digital Agency, AgID. It had been created ten or fifteen years previously. I had a two-hour meeting with the head of the agency and the management team. It was easy to realize that they were the problem and not the solution. It is a digital agency full of lawyers and very few digital experts. All they did was design laws, bills, regulations. Very confusing ones and always for someone else to execute. They were not an agency; they were not executing. They just issued regulations and directives. The few technology people who were on that team were, with all due respect, just speaking mainframe and UNIX.

Now, politics is politics. I started in August and Renzi resigned in December after he lost a referendum. Because he left, everybody was expecting me to leave because I was seen as Renzi's protege. After a sleepless night, I decided that I was there to do something, and that something was absolutely independent from any political color. Why would digital transformation belong to the right or the left or to the center if this is something that everybody needs? So, I decided to stay with my team, which was forty people strong by then. Not one person decided to leave.

The new prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, was from the same party and he was super helpful. However, he had only one year left until the elections and with one year, you do not push for big structural change. I had wanted to close the Digital Agency and maybe keep the best people, but that is the kind of thing that you need to have enough time ahead of you to execute.

What Were Your Levers or Tools in the Commissioner Role to Push for Change?

We had three macro-level goals: writing a plan, building the infrastructure, and coordinating activities.

One was building a three-year digital transformation plan, as detailed as possible. By the way, this had been one of the main objectives of the digital agency that they never accomplished.

For coordination, I hired a few software developers with very technical know-how to make sure we were in a very strong position to assess the teams in local centers and agencies. These guys were not used to talking to a counterpart. I was told at our first meeting that “this is too technical; we are not going to cover this.” I said, “Oh no, stop right there—we absolutely want to cover this because it is technical.” The architecture and the quality of code is important.

As commissioner, I had the power to impose a directive on the administration and to replace people who were not doing it. I never used the latter, although I was tempted a couple of times. It was just as important and good for people to know that I could do it. But I kept working on nudging them and developing the tools for them.

We created a forum for all the administration to exchange opinions and ideas. This is the way we got digital identity implemented in the services. The City of Milan was doing it at home and then the City of Genoa saw that and asked what tools they used, and then they took it on. The forum had a couple of thousand discussions every day—the users were all civil servants and vendors.

As for tools, we asked the vendors to put code on GitHub. We created a set of tools and guidelines for designers, which was always evolving.

Where Did You Devote Your Time and Focus on at the Start?

The first three or four months, I was hiring people. I received a couple of thousand applications, ended up having 120 people. I was also going around looking, picked the best possible existing great processes and ideas.

To create a great end-user service, you need to start building the basics. That is why we chose as the four big projects to work on: the digital payment platform PagoPA, the digital identity platform, the national resident population register, and an analytics and reporting platform. Activities had been going on for all of them for four or five years; I did not invent any of these four.

We chose these four because these were going to be most useful. If you make payment transactions between citizens and government easy, you can simplify a lot of the services. Identification is another constant in many services. Also, agencies would send information or documents to citizens—we needed to archive them. These all turned into the core of a citizen app called IO later.

We selected a few departments, starting from the City of Milan, and began by working on building out the services for the government app. You can build any technology, but if it is not perfectly integrated to services offered by administrations, it is completely useless. There were twelve thousand public administration units, from schools and hospitals to central government to cities, regions, and provinces. The work on integrating all of them is impossible.

We decided to select ten or fifteen administrations at different levels, right from small towns to large towns to different ministries. They were the ones who were enthusiastic about our role, and they saw a need for a big change. Our point was to work with those who really wanted to work with us, not waste any time convincing others. Hopefully over time, through emulation, the other ministries and the other cities would see how much better the others were becoming. Previously, the digital agency had spent a lot of time trying to create a bill to punish the administrations that were not using their digital laws. I was spending time on nudging the administrations that wanted to work. Two completely different approaches.

You Said at the Beginning of Our Chat That You Set Out to Build a Continuous Set of Processes—How Did You Do It?

The main thing was to build the practices, guides, and tools that could last and keep supporting change. You would be astonished that we had to do one piece to introduce the concept of project management, because there were no people with a background in it. We had to do really basic stuff.

The existing processes I found were just about the regulators writing a rule, sending it through some archaic government communication tools (often through registered mail) to administrations and giving them six months to read and ask questions. We moved everything onto a central platform and published immediately, using existing tools like GitHub.

By the way, everything we did is still available on the web. I did something that had never been done before in Italy. Everything we published was immediately bilingual. I knew that we wanted to get other countries to help us in giving suggestions and to also tell the other countries what we were doing. So, it had to be available in English, too, from the start.

Honestly, I fought hard against the written rules that were describing the technology because every such rule will be obsolete before the law is adopted. I completely stayed away from that. That is why I transformed the concept from rules to guidelines. We separated the concepts—what should be part of the law—from details that should be part of the guidelines, and the guidelines would keep evolving.

In fact, in my plan, the guidelines were to be updated once a year, to make sure that everything was lasting a generation.

You Emphasized That Your Main Work Was to Build Out a Different Team—How Did You Go about Doing It?

Team Digitale, as we called it, started from a blogpost on Medium. I wrote about my mission, my plan, and the kind of people I wanted to hire. I decided to publish it on Medium, because the people I wanted to read it and hear about it were on Medium. This post became the main source of receiving applications. Later I also did regular newspaper interviews, and these did get some good coverage.

We received a few thousand applications and bought a license for a hiring or recruiting software. With the first three people I had, we spent literally hours and hours looking through all those applications. By the way, to find time for that, I had to say no to 90 percent of conferences I was invited to. I do not know if it is true in other countries, but Italy is a republic founded on conferences. Everybody wants to have a conference!

I did not hire people only from the private sector. Ten to 15 percent came from within the public administration, because you do not want to show yourself as this new, total alien that comes from outside and does things that people do not understand at all.

In addition, I was looking for people like me who wanted to give back to their country and they wanted to spend some time actually doing it.

As for technical people, you need to go to a level of granularity about what those people need to do and hire accordingly. For example, one of my best hires was at the time the chairman of Python Software Foundation in Europe. He had great experience in developer relations, he knew exactly how to manage the relationship with technical people, and had all the things that were needed for setting those processes up in government.

As You Were Bringing These People Together, How Did You Mold Them into a Team?

I think that with very few exceptions, the people who were applying for our jobs already had existing in them a fundamental type of culture or traits of what I was looking for. Even the public sector people were the hidden gems from the government who saw our mission and saw it as an opportunity that would never again come in their life. Most of the people were super with IQ, incredibly well-structured at work.

I also did a lot of what I do not like to call team building. I really spent a lot of time in making sure that our people understood my modus operandi and what I was expecting from people. Most of the evenings, I would go out for dinner with one or two team members. In fact, I gained six kilos in those two years!

What Were the Things You Always Used to Say to the Team, Your Mottos, or the Values You Wanted Them to Follow?

First of all, the concept of starting from the citizen and working backwards. I copied this from Amazon. We need to remember that everything we do is not because there is a law that has been written. The endpoint is to simplify the lives of citizens and companies. And guess what—we are all citizens. We all are suffering from the pain, so we should really work at solving it.

The second one I did not have at first, but I had to introduce it pretty quickly. Every time I was proposing something, there would always be someone saying it was not possible. Like: “It has never been done.” But why? So, I educated my team to the five whys method—keep asking why until you are happy with the answer. Turns out most of the time you cannot do things for privacy reasons—tell me why? You can go deeper and deeper and deeper until you realize there was really no obstacle. Most of the nay-sayers did it because they did not really want to change things or because they hated the fact that someone else was doing it. So, the principle was “Never take a no for a no—implement the five whys.”

In addition, I did not want to have an approach that nothing had worked before. You need to do your homework, and you do not want to kill everything. Identify existing projects or processes that have promise but were mismanaged, poorly managed, or not managed at all. Focus on building something really transformational out of them for future use. We were not the only good guys, and we did not want to be perceived as arrogant. No one would work with us if they would perceive us as coming in and wanting to destroy everything.

We also had to create this culture of being really data-driven. People would sometimes see a number and then say, “We achieved it.” But the number would look strange. Then I had to say, “Does the number not look strange to you?” Then they would dig deeper, and the number was wrong. Over time, your empirical experience must tell you that if a number looks wrong, it probably is wrong. Oftentimes, when people show you numbers, it is because someone gave them the numbers. They are happy because “numbers are numbers.” You need to create a culture where everyone dives deeper.

There also is this principle of “disagree and commit.” You often find yourself in situations where people disagree on things and never agree, and it takes days to get things done. My point was that after a good debate, we may agree or disagree on something—but, even if you are disagreeing, I want total commitment in the implementation. Not that you disagree and say you will do it and then do not. Disagree and commit.

What Routines Worked to Keep People Delivering?

I introduced the weekly business reviews. Every week we looked at the major metrics and reviewed them. The team needed to explain why this or that metric was not working in the desired way. At the very beginning, people were coming to the meetings not prepared—not knowing the answers to why delivery was not happening. Next time, they had to come knowing. It was about educating people to that level of attention that they did not expect from a top leader. They do not expect the boss of your boss to ask you a detailed question that educates everybody. If they see the boss doing it this way, they do the same way and you have raised the bar. It does not mean micromanagement; it means that I want you to take notice.

As we were forty people and not an army in size, I first involved everybody in the weekly reviews. You want to educate everybody. You also want to start interacting with two or three levels down, because it is the best way to have intuition about who is the next star or successor in your team. But, you also need to be careful because you do not want to have meetings that become too much of a burden. So, when I felt some processes were well run, I took the risk of stopping to monitor them.

To keep the focus on the citizen experience, we would start the meetings with a ten-minute description of some bad experience. We were receiving citizen complaints, anything from serious to small issues. We knew we could not solve each single issue that day, because that would be like emptying the ocean with a spoon. Still, I wanted to educate the team to the fact that you are a citizen and need to be sensitive to citizens' problems.

How Much of Your Work and Team Practices Came from Amazon Experience? What New Things Did You Learn on the Job?

In a way, it was hard to replicate Amazon because the quality of the people was different—not everyone was at the same level. But I honestly did try to bring what was applicable and a large part of it was.

For example, I took along the approach of writing things simple. Every piece should have a summary of it in a comprehensive language. Small detail, but it mattered a lot. See, each time a new regulation was issued by the government, it was all written in legal terms. Many pages, primes of paragraphs, written in a formal language that sometimes reads like a different Italian that nobody uses anymore. The real content is in two paragraphs somewhere inside.

The thing I learned was not to get frustrated. If you are easily getting frustrated, do not work in or around politics and just stay away from it!

The funny thing I used to say to journalists was that I learned to negotiate with irrational people. What is unique about the psychology of those people is that they are not driven by delivering a result, but by different factors.

The thing I had to unlearn from Amazon is the culture of innovation and invention, the focus on coming up with the new all the time. In some way we were doing it as far as Italian context is viewed. But in another way, we were copying others. Looking around internationally, and also within the administration, at best practices to get the basics right, get platforms working, get the guidelines in.

How Did You Build and Develop Relationships with Stakeholders While in Office?

This is very important, I totally underassessed at first the need to find the right stakeholders who would help us in implementing our projects. I thought that a good project should sell itself.

I realized soon that I always had to have with me two or three stakeholders, the first one being the Ministry of Finance. It took me six to nine months to understand to build a special relationship with the minister of finance and his team, because then they would see digital transformation as a money saver—but I had already lost one year. I was in this one meeting with some department's executive who asked, “What does the minister of finance think?” when I realized that I had not consulted with them.

Another one was the Data Protection Authority. In all my projects, there were privacy risks and privacy implications. It would have helped to build that relationship sooner.

This relationship building can often be confused as being political, while I was trying to be practical and not political. I was seeing things as black and white but should have been managing a little bit more with tones of gray.

Also, it took me a while to build trust into relationships. With a few exceptions, everyone was seeing me with a little bit of skepticism like, “Who is this guy?” “He comes from Amazon; does he have a second agenda?”

Also, the prime ministers were changing and so did governments. When government changed a few months into my time, everybody expected me to resign or be kicked out. As a commissioner, I did not have to resign. So, I started meeting with some of the most vocal critics of mine from the new government, one-on-one. I had to move from running a team to running a communication process. It was successful because those people realized that we were building stuff and the same stuff was going to be useful for them. One of my most successful moments was when one of my fiercest critics transformed to be my strongest ally in the Five Star Movement party that had gotten into government.

How Much Did the Relationship with Prime Ministers Work Out?

I went to the prime ministers when I needed to accelerate a few decisions, to remove the blockers. I used it only three times, I think. You do not want to overuse it because then you lose credibility.

Once every quarter or five to six months, we would have our whole team meet with the prime minister, especially with a new government. I wanted them to get an understanding of who we are and what we can do. Never undervalue or underassess the power of showing who the people are behind the scenes.

What Was the Hardest Part of Your Job?

My kind of work was less controversial than the average work of politics when you must talk about migrants or universal income or retirement age. These huge political issues are at an amazing level of controversy. Mine was nothing compared to that.

Most of my blockers were created by human nature: the rational or irrational sense of making it their job to disagree. Whether they say it has not been done before or something else. Blocker number two was the not-invented-here syndrome. “We have the competence' let us do it completely differently.”

At the end of the day, public procurement in the way it works is probably the biggest blocker of digital transformation, and we did not get a solution to that.

I still remember when Jeff Bezos was giving a talk a few years ago about Blue Origin.¹ One of the people in the audience asked why he thought that Blue Origin could do better than NASA? Jeff was very humble, but his main point was—because it was a private company and did not have to go through all the procurement rules that NASA had. That is why NASA was sometimes three or four years behind the newest technology, because by the time you do a procurement process, by the time that the losers do appeal (because every time there is an appeal), it takes three years to get anything done.

In Italy, the procurement regulations are affected by several crime control mechanisms to prevent bribery and against possible infiltration of the mafia. It is a consequence of how powerful mafia was in some historical times, and when local and central governments were affected by several episodes of bribery and corruption. To be able to counter this, a huge amount of regulation has been created to make sure vendors were not linked to criminal organizations. But guess what—there were many unintended consequences. Occasionally the bad guys went through the process anyway and gamed the system, while for everyone else, selling to the government was a very hard and cumbersome process.

Procurement is also a blocker because of a feature intrinsic in the nature of governance. When you issue rules, laws, guidelines, then they are meant to be universal and work for everybody. That is why they are adjusted to the minimum common denominator, which in the end result is something completely useless because you cannot make everybody happy.

For example, all of the Team Digitale website content was written by several contributors from the team. We needed it also in English immediately and as there are a lot of AI-automated translators, we went to buy the service. We had to go the central procurement website, managed by an agency that does procurement for the entire federal government. Our team was looking for a solution and some five hundred results came in with no differentiation. The procurement agency told us that they would not allow the translation vendors to list the features of the product because in this way it would favor the best products while they want to give everybody equal opportunities. Now, that was a new one to me. In some situations, you want to give full equal opportunity to serve everybody. But, in other contexts you want to give better opportunity to the best.

What Made You Move on after the Two Years?

I can honestly say that I did not want to continue to work in the government, and I considered my job done. When I first approached the newly elected prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, the government asked me to stay three to four months to ensure succession. I built the plan for it,² and I chose my successor.

As I said, the role of commissioner is meant for managing urgency and extraordinary situations. But you cannot have a long-lasting emergency. Plus, with two years you slowly become part of the system. I realized I was starting to give up in some situations. I was losing that level of energy to get things done.

How Did You Make Sure What You Had Started Would Last?

Six months into my job, I was already looking for my successor, which is another unknown concept in politics. That is one of the things that you do as a leader of a company, one of your best moves. Your good team is your succession plan.

I did not want to build things into a “Diego-centric” way. So, one of the proposals in the last paper to government was that it was probably time to move away from the extraordinary commissioner approach and build a much more permanent organism, a much more permanent body—by reforming AgID and have a seat at the cabinet for digital topics.

The most important thing is that we moved from building rules to building services. Let us take, for example, this last summer of 2021 when a COVID-19 pass became mandatory in Italy. As soon as people got their second vaccination shot and the vaccine office put their information in the central database, people who had downloaded our IO app received the green pass immediately and had to do nothing more. These sort of concrete changes we managed to make for better services, and they are here to stay. The pandemic accelerated it, but if we had not built the basis, we would be in a different situation.

What Do You Think You Managed to Achieve and What Are You Most Proud Of, Looking Back?

It is the culture change. The fact that the digital way and how we did it are now considered more normal, not exceptional. It is because we built—and it is because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which stopped the talk of digital divide, which is often an abstract excuse.

The cultural change is evident in the fact I could choose a successor and now there is a full ministry for technological innovation, leading the work from the cabinet level. We managed to build the continuous set of processes that were not interrupted when governments changed.

There are now a bunch of agencies that are following the path. There are a few administrations that we did not even start with, though. For example, I did not go into departments that had regional management. The Ministry of Health in Italy has twenty regional offices and every one of them operates on their separate set of codes, hardly integrating. I thought it was going to take me ten years to get anywhere so I said, “Do not even start.” We also did not go into ministries that had been with specific vendors for ten to fifteen years—as the drivers of making things work, they were not under my control. Even though we told everyone that “here is the plan, here are the guidelines, use them.”

So, we focused and worked with six to seven departments that did very well. Plus, several cities. I am very proud of the City of Milan and Roberta Cocco³ there—they did an amazing job building enabling platforms, enabling tools.

At the end of the day, we were climbing Mount Everest, and I do not think we reached the basecamp yet or perhaps just around there. But my job was done, things were in motion.

Is There Anything You Regret Not Doing or Wish You Had Done Differently?

Most of the regrets were at the technical level, such as some of the choices in building tools for big data analysis that were wrong. Two nontechnical mistakes were impactful, though.

I should have been building a deeper relationship with the stakeholders, like I said.

I would have also needed to communicate a little more on what could be achieved—the potential. I was a little bit shy because I come from this culture where you should communicate when you have something to communicate, as opposed to doing it while still being on the way. We probably could have had a more comprehensive communication process.

Would You Ever Consider Doing Such a Job Again?

I have no regrets about taking the role, even though these were very tough twenty-seven months. But I understand better now the life of policymakers and politicians; it is a tough life.

If I were to do something like this again, it would have to be a very visible top job. Not because it is cool to have a top job, but because it is the only way to get things done. And I would not do it for another country!

What Are Your Three Bottom-Line Recommendations to a Colleague on What Does It Take to Do This Sort of Job Well?

First one is not just a recommendation, but a necessity. Any transformational project needs to come from the top. Being competent is necessary, but it is not enough. Picking the right team is necessary, but it is not enough. Finding the right other stakeholders is necessary, but it is not enough. Building a plan, as detailed as it may be, is necessary, but it is not enough.

What you need for all of this is the blessing and the support of the highest possible role in government. In my case, it was the prime minister. Otherwise, you will never be taken seriously. Otherwise, things are never going to happen because there is too much discussion, too many diverging interests. If the transformational project does not come from the top, there is no success.

Second, try to build the mechanisms that would allow for continuity and not be interrupted when the new government comes onboard. That requires a combination of strategic communication, very clear plans, and the management of the succession plan in the transition.

Third, keep the citizen-centricity in mind. Keep in mind that you are here not to comply with laws, but to make life easier for the citizens.