The goal of Digital Transformation of the Public Sector is the achievement of a better quality of life for citizens, via a more responsive and transparent administration and governance. By now it is clear that technological innovation, both in terms of computer architectures and software systems, is a crucial component of it, yet not sufficient. Indeed, a cultural, organizational and legal shift in how public organizations operate and relate to the citizens is also required. Nevertheless, computer scientists can play a key role in such a transformation and, given its impact on Society, it is essential to achieve a broader level of awareness of it and involvement in it of those scientific and professional figures. To this end, a technical map specifically designed for computer scientists, but properly placed in the context of the cultural, organizational and legal changes mentioned above, would be highly beneficial. To date, such a map is missing, to the best of our knowledge. The main contribution of this Tutorial is to provide it, together with a guided tour describing which key technological aspects enable and drive such a transformation. More specifically, based on a careful analysis of the available scholarly literature, that does not seem to include any Computer Science textbook material, a model of such a transformation is proposed, together with carefully selected examples incarnating it to show its validity: the cities of Barcelona and Chicago. Finally, a look at the future of this area is also provided.

Digital transformation in the public sector provides digital services to the citizens aiming at increasing their quality of life, as well as the transparency and accountability of a public administration. Since adaptation to the citizens changing needs is central for its success, Agile methodologies seem best suited for the software development of digital services in that area. However, as well documented by an attempt to use Scrum for an important Public Administration in Italy, substantial modifications to standard Agile were needed, giving rise to a new proposal called improved Agile (in short, iAgile). Another notable example is the Scrum@IMI method developed by the City of Barcelona for the deployment of its digital services. However, given the importance of digital transformation in the public sector and the scarcity of efforts (documented in the scholarly literature) to effectively bring Agile within it, a strategically important contribution that Computer Science can offer is a general paradigm describing how to tailor Agile methodologies and, in particular, Scrum, for such a specific context. Our proposal, called Scrum@PA, addresses this strategic need. Based on it, a public administration has a technically sound avenue to follow to adopt Scrum rather than a generic set of guidelines as in the current state of the art. We show the validity of our proposal by describing how the quite successful Scrum@IMI approach can be derived from Scrum@PA. Although iAgile can also be derived from our paradigm, we have chosen Scrum@IMI as a pilot example since it is publicly available on GitHub.

Platform Engineering (PE) is a growing area of Software Engineering, with many facets, including the elusive concept of Internal Development Platforms (IDPs). They integrate various technologies and tools to support the realization of software projects, especially their managing and developing roles, fostering Agile collaboration and enhancing team productivity. In particular for the new trends of Agile remote working and for Agile applied to the Digital Transformation in the Public Sector. While proprietary IDPs abound, academic research that could naturally lead to open-source IDPs remain scarce. In particular for Scrum, a fundamental Agile methodology in the strategic area of Digital Transformation in the Public Sector, where IDP self-hosting is also appropriate. This paper addresses this gap by proposing the design and realization of the first, to the best of our knowledge, IDP supporting Scrum, being open-source and with self-hosting capabilities. The end-product of our research is the Compositional Agile System (CAS), an extendable microservice architecture-based IDP. Its design, as well as CAS, makes full use of hands-on previous successful experiences of IDP development by members of this team, specifically non-trivial tasks in Italian Public Administration and to foster remote working in University Software Engineering classes, a practice started during the pandemic but nowa standard.We offer several architectural and example scenarios where CAS can be of use, concentrating on the Public Administration. Particularly relevant is the use of CAS in analyzing a pillar of Italian Digital Administration available to its citizens, i.e., AppIo. The software is publicly available.

Digital Transformation (DT) is the process of integrating digital technologies and solutions into the activities of an organization, whether public or private. This paper focuses on the DT of public sector organizations, where the targets of innovative digital solutions are either the citizens or the administrative bodies or both. This paper is a guided tour for Computer Scientists, as the digital transformation of the public sector involves more than just the use of technology. While technological innovation is a crucial component of any digital transformation, it is not sufficient on its own. Instead, DT requires a cultural, organizational, and technological shift in the way public sector organizations operate and relate to their users, creating the capabilities within the organization to take full advantage of any opportunity in the fastest, best, and most innovative manner in the ways they operate and relate to the citizens. Our tutorial is based on the results of a survey that we performed as an analysis of scientific literature available in some digital libraries well known to Computer Scientists. Such tutorial let us to identify four key pillars that sustain a successful DT: (open) data, ICT technologies, digital skills of citizens and public administrators, and agile processes for developing new digital services and products. The tutorial discusses the interaction of these pillars and highlights the importance of data as the first and foremost pillar of any DT. We have developed a conceptual map in the form of a graph model to show some basic relationships among these pillars. We discuss the relationships among the four pillars aiming at avoiding the potential negative bias that may arise from a rendering of DT restricted to technology only. We also provide illustrative examples and highlight relevant trends emerging from the current state of the art.

Motivation: A Genomic Dictionary, i.e., the set of the k-mers appearing in a genome, is a fundamental source of genomic information: its collection is the first step in strategic computational methods ranging from assembly to sequence comparison and phylogeny. Unfortunately, it is costly to store. This motivates some recent studies regarding the compression of those k-mer sets. However, such an area does not have the maturity of genomic compression, lacking an homogeneous and methodologically sound experimental foundation that allows to fairly compare the relative merits of the available solutions, and that takes into account also the rich choices of compression methods that can be used. Results: We provide such a foundation here, supporting it with an extensive set of experiments that use reference datasets and a carefully selected set of representative data compressors. Our results highlight the spectrum of compressor choices one has in terms of Pareto Optimality of compression vs. post-processing, this latter being important when the Dictionary needs to be decompressed many times. In addition to the useful indications, not available elsewhere, that this study offers to the researchers interested in storing k-mer dictionaries in compressed form, a software system that can be readily used to explore the Pareto Optimal solutions available r a given Dictionary is also provided. Availability: The software system is available at https://github.com/GenGrim76/Pareto-Optimal-GDC, together with user manuals and installation instructions. Contact: raffaele.giancarlo@unipa.it Supplementary information: Additional data are available in the Supplementary Material.