The report, ‘Making Life Easy for Citizens and Businesses in Portugal, Administrative Simplification and E-Government’ analyses Portugal’s simplification programme, known as the ‘Simplex’ initiative, and finds that it has come far in a short time with the transformation of its public sector and its service delivery.
By targeted use of e-government, Portugal is in the process of making citizens’ and businesses’ everyday life easier, through administrative simplification supported by an increasing number of coherent and integrated services accessible online. Achieving a simpler public sector, more responsive to demands from citizens and businesses, requires strong political commitment and drive in achieving administrative simplification and e-government goals. Among its achievements, the report says that the time taken to register a company, for example, has been reduced from 54 days to under 48 minutes.
The report also left some important recommendations for the Portuguese government. “Building on this success, Portugal should consider continuing its strong effort to make public service delivery more efficient and effective by focusing on user-needs. A prerequisite for this is to ensure that services can be delivered coherently. To achieve this, a fully integrated back-office with special focus on sharing resources such as business processes and data, and the availability of skilled staff are key,” the report said.
The review was the first study undertaken by the OECD to analyse the successes and challenges of administrative simplification and e-government in a national context.
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Quelle/Source: The Euro Weekly News, 26.06.2008
