Have you ever wondered what the concrete impacts of digitalisation are? How do we quantify them? What indicators do we use? These are the questions Milan is trying to answer with its Digital Sustainability Model.
To assess the impacts of digital transformation, the City has developed a model based on three main measures of sustainability to citizens and the municipality: economic (money saved), environmental (carbon emission saved), and for the first time, social (time saved). The model was applied to different services, like the General Registry Office. This service acts as the main access for any kind of certificates citizens might require. The assessment of the digitalization of the service through the Digital Sustainability Model showed that for individual residents, the ability to obtain city certificates digitally saved them 1 hour of travel each on average. Not only the residents benefit from digitalisation, but the administration too. The analysis showed that the digitalization of the delivery of certificates, for example through the Digital Folder Citizen service and the Connected Newsstands project, saved approximately eight minutes per digital certificate, totalling 45,500 hours. It resulted in a saving of €1.2 million. Finally, environmentally speaking, it saved 450,000 sheets of paper and 49 tonnes of CO2 – calculated as equivalent to planting 3,266 trees.
The model was built to be adaptable to the wide variety of services provided by the municipality and to monitor the impact of digitalisation on each of these services. With this tool, Milan paves the way for systemic monitoring and assessment of the efficacy of each digital transformation project. More importantly, Milan draws the link between digitalisation and sustainability to its core (economy, social, environment).
If you are interested, the City’s innovative model will be freely released as a blueprint for other cities interested in developing a sustainable digital transformation.
You can also read more on this article on the Yes Milano website.
You can also read the English version of the model analysing benefits of digitalization here.
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