Risk Management in a Cooperation Context”, Proceedings of The 11th European Conference on E-Government

One-Stop Shop for Production Activities (SUAP) is the solution Italian Government has chosen to adopt, since 1998, in order to make it easier doing business. However, despite more than ten years of efforts, the ranking of Italy among the countries that have facilitated going into business have not improved over the past years. Thus, in 2010 the Italian Government decided to further simplify the procedures by turning the current legislation from the traditional ex ante authorization regime into an ex-post controls regime. Under this new regime, all the required controls have to be operated within a fixed time interval defined by the law. Most often these controls have to be operated by different public agencies, thus determining two main problems: (a) the agencies involved should cooperate in order to make the controls efficient and effective; (b) since these agencies usually suffer from a chronic lack of resources, the only way to safeguard the public interest is by identifying, through a careful analysis of the potential risks involved, what controls really need to be made. In the paper I will consider how the public agencies involved in the functioning of the SUAP can satisfy the requirements determined by the new Italian legislation, by resorting to a form of inter-organizational risk management. In the first section of the paper, I will first provide a full explanation of the Italian model of SUAP and the recent changes in the Italian legislation concerning its functioning, and then I will show why the current regime of ex-post controls requires the SUAP to implement an adequate risk management system. In section 2 I will consider the Team Risk Management (TRM) model that has been originally developed to manage risks in software-dependent development programs involving different organizations. In section 3, I will show how a slight revision of the TRM model can be integrated within the SUAP’s workflows to help all the public agencies involved to cope with the requirements stated by the new Italian legislation concerning starting, transforming or closing a business. Finally, I will discuss what conditions different public agencies should satisfy in order to implement an effective and efficient inter-organizational risk management system.