SDA Bocconi EMMAP alumna Valeria Vaccaro has been appointed, just a few weeks ago, President of Consip by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Consip is the agency that manages the buying of goods and services on behalf of the Italian public administration, and the MEF is its one shareholder.
Vaccaro’s appointment tops her robust career in the public sector: she has been an officer at the Ministry of International Trade; a supervisor at the Legislative Office of the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Treasure; MEF’s Cabinet Director; Managing Director at MEF’S General Administration, Services and HR Department, and MEF’s HR Director.
A Law graduate cum laude, she graduated from our Master in Management of the Public Administration (EMMAP) in 2017, thus strengthening her managerial skills.
In a comprehensive interview with Veronica Vecchi and Manuela Brusoni, available at E&MPlus, Valeria Vaccaro has explained Consip’s future strategies to improve PA expenditure and generate public value. Public procurement accounts for very important spending in every country (in Italy, public spending for goods, services and work is worth about 15 per cent of GDP) and needs to express a more and more advanced and conscious demand, generating increasing public value. A good use of public money depends not only on selecting projects and priorities but also on changing the rationale and tools of buying, which most of PA people have always considered to be a mine field.
“I have always been convinced that collective wellbeing needs to be at the heart of public policies. Consip has been created to generate spending savings. I think this is the right time to strive to have its role evolve from supporting spending reviews to enabling value creation”.
In recent years, there have been several actions on the side of expenditure, first of all centralizing it as a means to review spending. On one side, this approach has driven economies of specialization and a greater control on spending; on the other, it has not always allowed to leverage the most innovative responses the market is able to give to our increasingly diverse and complex needs, especially when centralization is associated with a culture heavily focusing on administrative processes and savings for their own sake.
The next months will be key to define a new procurement attitude, implying stronger management capabilities, both in the public and private sector, in order to enhance trust between the PA and the markets, which is a key driver for radical rerouting.
As to the role of Consip in fostering sustainability and gender equality: “We all have a duty to increasingly enable and develop sustainable public buying and services as well as gender-responsive procurement. As to the latter point, Italy is really lagging behind other European countries, and data on female unemployment during the pandemic are alarming”, Vaccaro said.
Read full interview on E&MPlus
SDA Bocconi School of Management
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