E-GOVERNMENT FOR SMALL LOCAL GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS Walter Castelnovo Dipartimento di Scienze della Cultura, Politiche e dell’Informazione, Università dell’Insubria, via Carloni, 78 – 22100 Como (Italy), e-mail: walter.castelnovo@uninsubria.it The Italian National Centre for Information Technology in Public Administration (CNIPA) introduced the concept of Local Alliances for Innovation (ALI) as the tool for the inclusion of small municipalities in the spread of E-Government in It- aly. Based on the CNIPA’s definition, the paper discusses the concept of ALI as an organizational model that can be resorted to in order to reduce the administra- tive fragmentation of the system of Local Government in Italy. By elaborating on the relation between the ALI model and the model of inter-municipal cooperation, the paper considers under what conditions an ALI could evolve into an Integrated System of Local Government, that is a system of Local Government Organizations strictly interoperable. Since it determines a form of virtual integration among the partners, an ISLG allows a simplification of the system of Local Government while preserving the autonomy of its members. 1 The inclusion of small municipalities in then spread of E- Government Starting from the year 2002, the development of E-Government in Italy has been based mostly on projects funded under the National Action Plan for E- Government (DIT 2002), managed by the Italian National Centre for Information Technology in Public Administration (CNIPA). The National Action Plan has been based on two phases supporting innovation projects on a territorial level. The first phase started in 2002 with an announcement that funded 134 projects with 120 million euros (for an overall value of about 500 million euros). The second phase, that is still going on, includes the funding of projects spe- cifically devoted to the inclusion of small local government organizations (SLGOs, municipalities with less than 5000 inhabitants, that represent about the 72% of the Italian municipalities) in the spread of E-Government (CNIPA 2007a). Please use the following format when citing this chapter: Castelnovo, W., 2008, in IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 280; E-Government; ICT Professionalism and Competences; Service Science; Antonino Mazzeo, Roberto Bellini, Gianmario Motta; (Boston: Springer), pp. 1–10.