Luca Attias

Government Commissioner for the Digital Agenda

Luca Attias

I am a Roman; being born and having lived in Trastevere make me a true Trasteverino. A good 50% of my roots is here in the Capital; the other half is spread between Valencia, Livorno and Tunis.

As a child, I was good at different sports and dreamed of becoming like Pietro Mennea, my idol. In a way, I succeeded as speed and intense work were always traits of my personality. I graduated in Electronic Engineering from the Università “La Sapienza” in Rome, that is quite a few years ago now.
IT became my profession and I started with quite a challenging international technological experience in the private sector. From a professional point of view, it was an extraordinary adventure: that’s where my analog blood turned into digital. It was then, through the comparison with other international experiences, that I developed the conviction that in our country, even in the private sector, there was a serious problem associated with managerial skills and meritocracy. The crisis in the IT sector and the aspiration to make a difference and do something more rewarding, led me to work in the public sector; I joined the Italian Court of Audit (Corte dei Conti) where I was for many years Director General of the IT Department, a position from which I am currently on leave as I joined the Team. At the same time, I completed a Master Degree in Business Engineering at the University of Tor Vergata. Working in the public sector made me reach, together with my colleagues and my boss, goals that were unimaginable from a planning, organizational, communicative, managerial and ethical point of view. Within the public sector, I have committed myself in every possible way to the introduction and development of a widespread digital culture at all levels. For years, I have been engaged to increase our country’s awareness on the importance of managerial skills, meritocracy, human resources management, the fight against corruption, while I tried to demonstrate how all these issues have a close relationship with a more efficient use of digital technologies. Yet, I am still wondering -and failing to accept- why in sport and arts (in the widest sense possible) the best are, for the most, the successful ones while in the Italian Public Administration, this happens so very seldom. Some of my statements such as “today, the civilization of a country is also measured by the degree of digitization achieved,” “digital emergency” and “digital contamination,” the frequent correlation that I draw between corruption and failure to digitize, my theory of the digital philosopher, my ethical-managerial-digital theatrical performances, my official request to introduce a Nobel Prize for IT, the digital training of many thousands civil servants, all this briefly sums up all my attempts at making “going digital” a priority in the Italian political, public and media agenda.

I am a maniac of object-oriented philosophy and of abstraction, the metabolization of which, I believe, is in fact the first requirement of a digital manager.

There was only one reason for me to decide to leave my beloved team at the Court of Audit; Diego Piacentini knew it well and exploited it. Paola, my partner and victim of my lifestyle, was born in Florence and Lorenzo and Andrea, my sons were born there as well. I totally depend upon them just like Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire”. While I am a “digital philosopher”, the three of them humiliate me daily by demonstrating that in our family, the only victim of the digital divide, it’s me.

Start Date: October 31, 2018

Period Provided: until December 31, 2019

Annual Compensation: € 240,000

Approved by the Court of Auditors: June 10, 2019


Last update: 09/01/2019
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