Our representative Milica Milonjić participated at the meeting with the NGOs entitled “Modalities of cooperation for improvement of the eGovernment portal (eUprava) and presentation of e-services” organized by the Ministry of Information Society and Telecommunications.
Milica pinpointed the main obstacles in the area of service delivery:
- Civil servants do not accept changes in the workflow and refuse to start using electronic system of service delivery;
- Public authorities are not interested in setting up services at the eGovernment portal;
- Small number of available services at the levels 3 and 4 allowing two-way communication and transaction [1];
- Electronic document management system (eDMS) is not used in full capacity in all the ministries while in some instances its implementation is held back at the level of managerial staff [2];
- Failure to comply with the deadline set under the Law on Electronic Government for providing the data necessary for establishment of the Unified information system for electronic data exchange among state authorities and public administration bodies;
- Procedures for data exchange among state authorities and public administration bodies are not clearly defined, and consequently many public administration authorities collect huge amount of additional data which originally comes under jurisdiction of other authorities;
- A significant number of registries is still kept in the manner which is not appropriate to the new technological age. Namely, the data entry is done by hand and, thus, does not support the electronic exchange and processing;
- The price of issuing digital certificates is not cost-effective due to a small number of available services at the levels 3 and 4.
Additionally, she pointed out that service delivery in two key areas for citizens and businesses – e-Health and e-Procurement is not at the satisfactory level. Furthermore, she stated that it is necessary to provide equal conditions and opportunities for the use of e-services and the Internet for the entire population and that one way of achieving this goal is to improve digital literacy of citizens.
The opening remarks at the meeting were delivered by Mr. Stevan Ljumović, Managing Director of the Directorate for Electronic Government at the Ministry while the services available at the eGovernment portal were presented by Ms. Vesna Simonović, chief administrator of the portal.
At the meeting, it was announced that in the forthcoming period the focus will be placed on promoting the eGovernment portal, increasing the number of available e-services that will have widespread use, as well as on improving digital literacy of citizens, government officials, together with representatives of the media, NGOs, and businesses.
[1] Service at the level 3 enables two-way communication, including interactive filling of forms (e-forms) and registration with authentication (by filling out the form a specific service is initiated – e.g. document delivery to the user’s address) while service at the level 4 provides transaction, which implies complete processing of the case with online payment services, and feedback to the user.
[2] eDMS operates in full capacity in nine ministries, although production is established in all ministries. Under the Public Administration Reform Strategy 2016-2020, which is in the drafting process, it is planned for the eDMS to be implemented in all ministries by the end of 2016, after which its implementation will begin in other administrative authorities.
