Overcoming the COVID-19 Crisis with KM and Smart Governance: The Challenge for the Italian Public Sector

March 2020, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte has ordered several restrictions on Italian citizens and locked down the entire country to stop the spreading of COVID-19. This strategy has deeply pushed the digitalization of the Italian public sector through knowledge management patterns, leading to a rethinking of the “Public administration mindset” with a Smart Governance approach (Italian stability act, 2021, Heeks, 2002). This work analyses the paradigm shift occurred in the main Italian reforms that occured in the last year through a “Knowledge Management Toolkit” (Herbert, 2010) along with a report of interviews conducted with local authorities’ managers and citizens, showing that while the plague was spreading, the Italian Public sector conducted a silent revolution led by two words: digitalization and knowledge management