The federal E-Russia program addresses four areas: regulatory and legal environment, Internet infrastructure, e-government and e-education. It aims at making information and communication technologies more readily available and at ensuring that citizens have freedom of speech and ready access to information. It is expected to alleviate some of the heavy bureaucratic burden on both citizens and businesses and lead to higher efficiency in the economy and in federal and local governance. E-Russia aims to transfer as much of the state's work online as possible. By 2010, up to 65 percent of all internal and up to 40 percent of all cross-communication between various federal, regional and local governments is scheduled to be done electronically. Ultimately, the aim is to improve efficiency and help bridge the gap in IT between Russia and the rest of the world.
There are expectations for a considerable increase in production of IT goods and services with a yearly increase of up to 20 percent in industry exports for the 2002-2005 period. The national market of information services and computer software is expected to grow five-fold by 2010. IT's share in the national economy is predicted to grow three-fold, to account for at least 2 percent of the overall domestic market by 2010. The program also provides for personnel training and sounder legislative foundations for foreign IT transactions, expected to be worth up to $2 billion by 2005.
The initial stage in the implementation of the program has just been passed. The program is divided into three phases:
- Phase I 2002 - Create supportive regulatory environment.
- Phase II 2003-2004 - Conduct feasibility studies and pilot projects.
- Phase III 2005-2010 - Implement program throughout all federal and regional public organizations.
Last month, when Moscow launched its own program, e-Moscow, to be carried out within the framework of the national plan, it broke a financial record for the city, by presenting a five-year development plan worth $2 billion USD.
On June 10, the Moscow City Duma adopted the "On City Target Program e-Moscow." E-Moscow contains the 2003-2007 strategy for getting the city online and simplifying the city administration, especially by transferring the flow of documents of municipal organizations to electronic formats. One central goal is to build a Moscow interoperability framework and to integrate all existing IT projects by municipal authorities -- for instance the Muscovite's Social Card, the system of city portals (Moscow City Portal, Infograd, Moscow Development Gateway), the system of road traffic control and traffic-jam prevention and the creation of an integrated database of citizens.
In an interview with GTI last fall, Yuri Hohlov, chairman of the board of the Institute of the Information Society Russia, talked about the beginnings of the E-Moscow program, saying that initially, there was no strategy as to how to promote e-development for the city. "There were a lot of different projects and activities running in Moscow, but they were all separate entities. We started to build a strategy of how to move toward the Information Society, and how to convert the industrial potential to the Information Society potential."
The Institute produced an "Information Society Moscow Concept," which was approved by the mayor of Moscow in 2001. "They decided they needed not only the concept," said Hohlov, "but they also needed the action plans and programs. The mayor signed another order in Sept. 2002 to set up the E-Moscow Corporation, which will implement the E-Moscow program. I was appointed a member of the board of this E-Moscow Corporation, and we are running this project with another of our partners, the Moscow Telecommunications Corp., which has worked many years to solve the infrastructure problems. They are owners of the Moscow fiber-optic backbone."
Quelle: Center or Digital Government
