Digital transformation E-Government

Dear readers! It is widely known that digital transformation to E-Government processes take place in many countries. Anyway, according to the recent research even the advanced countries still haven’t realised more than 12-18% of their digital potential. Digital transformation of public administration, or E-Government, is one of the aspects of realising the potential of digital transformation. Many governments are working on automation of state services nowadays. 

In this article let’s discuss current disadvantages of public administration which E-Government services development will fix.

Disadvantages of the public administration system

  1. You may probably know that representatives of the youth of today have their own system of values which is described as post-materialism. One of the aspects is that the young have little desire to interact with state authorities, because they do not associate themselves with a state, they are mostly individuals. In this regard, digital transformation to E-government service will make possible for such people to avoid “analogue” interaction with state authorities. Undoubtedly, possibility to book a visit to a doctor online, request a necessary record from state authority, register business online, pay taxes online will be positively accepted by the society, especially by the young post-materialism adopters. This is of high importance due to the fact that a number of such people is constantly growing. According to the research only in Russia there are 25 million of such people and expected to be 50 million in 10 years. global digital transformation
  2. The second problem is that today the government has no specific data about its citizens. It is solved by executing a population census every 5-19 years. But the problem is that collected data become outdated next day after the population census is finished.
  3. Due to the previous point, the government’s decision-making process is not considered to be data driven. A great challenge of any state today is to apply data-driven approach to decision-making process, in other words, to take decision on the basis of relevant, up to dated data about citizens. Right now decisions are taken on the basis of manually and unsystematically collected data which government officials process manually, and then report to superior body. The quality of information depends completely on competences of officials, as well as the quality of decisions that will be taken on the basis of data. Automation will exclude human factor with the process of working with data. A unified database with records for all citizens is required. Such database should contain basic data about every citizen, like name, surname, age, date of birth, as well as status (occupation, job, social status), health status, property information, family composition information, revenues and expenses. Even this data open possibility to apply data driven approach to decision-making process. There is also a great possibility to execute experiments with vital decisions when such a database exists. When there is a necessity to take an important decision, public authorities can just apply this decision in a virtual database, simulate the situation and then just analyze the results. Results will show whether the given decision is worth taking.
  4. Bureaucracy. Automation of document flow between the state authorities and citizens – G2C branch of the E-Government development – will simplify and speed up the processes significantly.
  5. Not all citizens involved in the decision-making and decision-discussion processes. There is also an issue that people who are directly affected by decisions of state authorities are not involved in the discussion. E-government digitization will make possible to involve everyone in the process, depending on people’s desire to participate. Possibly, the best variant is to realize it via functionality of online polls, with the possibility for everyone to propose their own decisions. However, it will be also necessary to apply some rules or principles so that decision making process would be impossible to stop by multiple discussions “abusing”. 
  6. The last aspect we would like to mention is state online elections and referendums within the E-Gov system. Today analogue mode of elections is applied in most of the countries . Digitization of the process will eliminate the necessity of long preparations and involvement of administrative resource to carry out elections. Again, digitization of the process makes possible to pass state elections or voting simply creating a vote in the already existing state E-Government information system. Taking into account the importance of the issue, blockchain technologies could be applied for such voting procedures to increase reliability and security of the process itself. And, of course, to ensure democratic principles of elections. 

Summary

Today practically all states understand the necessity to perform digitization on state level, knowing  its benefits. In general, societies understand that digital transformation to E-government makes possible to eliminate corruption, improves efficiency of public administration, helps build the society of common transparency. However, still more is to be done to promote digital transformation to E-Government activities among the society.  

Right now we enlisted the most significant problems, on the authors’ opinion, that development of E-Government services is expected and is capable of eliminating. Among them are low efficiency of public administration, absence of relevant, up to dated data about citizens, only partial involvement of citizens in decision-making and decision discussion processes.

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