INTERAGENCY COOPERATION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT: A GOV 2.0 APPROACH

In the last few years a “Second Generation E-Government Paradigm” has emerged that maintains that to achieve greater value in service delivery and reduce costs, integration and redesign of government organizations and processes is a necessity. This result is particular difficult to achieve in countries characterized by a high administrative fragmentation and by the prevalence of small municipalities. In this qualitative paper I will discuss the conditions that make it possible to achieve the horizontal integration among municipalities, as a way to enhance intermunicipal cooperation and to allow small municipalities to manage innovation and to deliver high quality services to citizens and enterprises through the sharing of resources. More specifically, I will argue that intermunicipal cooperation can be enhanced through the use of social computing and cooperation tools to support trust building processes, thus strengthening the relationships among the partners of the cooperation. Finally, with reference to the case of One Stop Shop for enterprises in Italy, I will show how the social computing and cooperation tools can be used to support interorganizational workflows, even in case they concern critical processes involving interorganizational risk management