Defence, online platform for all companies. Crosetto: 'Small and innovative do not enter our offices'

The Defence personnel app, on the other hand, is an operational tool designed to allow Defence personnel to quickly and punctually record every meeting with stakeholders, including those that are occasional or held outside institutional venues. This functionality ensures the traceability of interactions and contributes to strengthening internal control mechanisms. The solution goes in the direction of introducing modern, uniform organisational models based on the principles of fairness, legality and impartiality. The App can be downloaded in the app store of the Defence intranet portal 'Archimede'. From 1 October, Defence personnel will be obliged to register any meetings with stakeholders on the app; until then, a trial run of the new tool is planned.

"An excellent initiative," said the prosecutor of Rome, Francesco Lo Voi, speaking at the presentation of the platform. "Extremely useful, I hope it will be spread to other sectors of the public administration to ensure transparency and legality, including on lobbying activities".

 "Does this app serve to control? - the minister asked himself - No," he replied. This app is to give freedom to those who work for defence. Because there is a double filter. The first is that people have to accredit themselves to work in defence. It is up to us to make sure that the companies, the people who accredit themselves are people we can meet normally. Nobody knows people's history, nobody can know them. If they had to register on a site, and if there is a filter, each one of us who meets a person knows that we meet them with a certain peace of mind. Then we will make sure that that filter becomes more and more able to intercept any possibility of malicious entry. But it cannot be the person who meets a person who has to do the history of that person, because none of us has the possibility of doing so

The platform, which is intended to be a bridge between the ministry and the corporate world, also has a second function. "To give innovation the chance to talk to us," the minister clarified, "Leonardo, Fincantieri have always entered our offices, more easily than the minister of Defence himself, because of relationships consolidated over years, because of habits, for a thousand reasons. Small and innovative companies do not enter. However, we live in a time when speed is fundamental, technological change is fundamental, and we have realised that very often it is also true in the normal lives of men: those young and those small run much faster than the old and the great. We must have the ability to understand what is the best way, what is the best tool. And very often, as Ukraine teaches us, it is not the giants but the small ones who are hungry, who want to innovate and who are not locked into categories and concepts. We need to put our big ones in competition with these small ones, because,' stressed Crosetto, 'only through competition do we increase technology, increase speed and, if you will allow me, lower prices. With monopolies, prices are not lowered. One of the objectives we have in defence,' Crosetto concluded, 'is to ensure that a euro spent in the West is worth at least, when I don't say a euro spent in Russia or China, not a tenth as it is now'.

"The idea of this platform," the minister added on the sidelines of the meeting, "was born with the desire to make Defence totally transparent, which, if it somehow has more resources, will be one of the major Italian contracting stations. We need every representative of the Armed Forces to be able to talk to every company, because we have to give all companies the same opportunity to propose, especially the technological renewal part, and we have to be sure that ours do so with transparency, honesty and cleanliness, and so we have decided to have registered any person talking to Defence, so that we have a filter to prevent criminals from gaining access to our employees, and on the other hand to give people who work for Defence the opportunity to be traceable in all their contacts and therefore to be able to do so with serenity. At the same time to push companies that have never worked for Defence, but have innovative ideas that can be useful, to come forward and propose them'.

In illustrating the ministerial decrees relating to the initiative, Michele Corradino, section president of the Council of State and legal advisor to the Ministry of Defence, noted that the operation has two objectives: it is "aimed at ensuring impartial and traceable relations and relationships between Defence personnel and stakeholders, respecting the principles of legality and equal treatment"; it intends to "guarantee equal attention to all productive realities with the aim of seizing any useful proposal or idea". The new EU directives, he explained, go in the direction of relations between administration and enterprise that are 'reconstructible' and that allow 'any subject to enter into relations with the administration', including start-ups and scale-ups.