The Smart Government conference continued with the presentation of the ‘E-government benchmark report’ by Sebastiaan van der Peijl from Deloitte.
He presented key international trends in e-government, touching upon the situation in Croatia.
– The user is at the center of e-government services, the vision is based on three pillars: open services that anyone can use, open data available to all, and open decision-making that encourages participation. The point is that you do not have to navigate bureaucratic mazes during important life events such as the birth of a child or the opening of a business; instead, you have a ‘one stop shop’ service – emphasized van der Peijl at the conference, adding that services must be interoperable, meaning that new services can be created from existing ones, depending on the needs of citizens and entrepreneurs.
– Croatia ranks 47th globally and 23rd in the EU according to the e-government development index; unfortunately, the e-participation index is quite low – he pointed out, noting that we are still in the phase of discovering e-government and are not yet utilizing its full potential, but that we are on the right track.
“How to leverage new technological trends in the digitalization of the public sector?” is the question that Per Gade, chief advisor at the Danish Agency for Digitalization, attempted to answer in his lecture at the Lider conference “Smart Government”.
– The role of our agency is to ensure that taxpayer money is spent rationally, and digital technology is a great help in this. We want to harness digitalization for the advancement of education, public administration, and healthcare. Our goal is that by the end of this year, 80 percent of communication between citizens and institutions takes place digitally. Opening companies, enrolling children in kindergartens and schools, all of this is already going through digital channels, it is mandatory to communicate this way, except for citizens who are unable to use a computer – said Gade, adding that such a working principle provides the state with a secure channel for communication with companies and citizens.
Ivica Perica, director in the business consulting department of Deloitte Adriatics, attempted to illustrate how public administrations of countries will look in the future in his lecture titled ‘The Government of the Future – Key Factors and New Concepts.’
– Citizens are demanding more and more, they want real-time services and expect technology to enable this. This will certainly affect public administration. Thus, economic factors, social factors, and technological factors are completely changing the approach to services and the treatment of citizens by the state – emphasized Perica, noting that the greatest changes will occur in education, social services, healthcare, as well as transportation and the environment.
