“I ask the heads of the constituent entities to take these issues under personal control,” he said at a meeting of the government commission on regional development on Monday.
“Let me emphasise that we will closely watch the situation in each region, and the transition to a new format will be considered one of the vital efficiency indicators for regional and municipal authorities,” Putin said.
He said the federal government would give a great deal of attention to this issue and promised rewards for good work.
“I ask you to study the possibility of providing additional financial support to regions that make the biggest progress in introducing information technologies,” the prime minister said.
He stressed the need to rid people of the need to “visit offices” and to provide public services in electronic form. “We should rid people of the need to go to offices, get their nerves wrecked there standing in lines when they need to receive elementary papers from the technical inventory bureau, the social security department, the house maintenance company, the passport office or the registration office at a polyclinic,” Putin said.
“We should build a system of public and municipal services in electronic form within the next several years,” he said.
He believes that the key to this problem should meet present-day requirements and be electronic. “The role of such a key is played now by the social card, and many regions have positive experience of using it on a mass scale,” the prime minister said, adding, “It is necessary to resolve as soon as possible all legislative and organisational issues pertaining to the introduction of electronic cards”.
Putin said agencies and institutions should not issue their own special cards. “It should be a universal card and give access to all public electronic services and be accepted by all agencies across the country,” he said.
“If agencies continue issuing their own special cards that work only within a certain municipality, we will create additional problems for people,” he warned.
“Now territorial and departmental information systems largely develop separately. Hence problems of compatibility, the absence of a normal inter-agency and inter-regional document flow. This separation should be overcome because it is harmful and dangerous,” Putin said.
Otherwise, people “may get other problems at a new electronic level,” he cautioned.
In his opinion, “the biggest progress can be seen where regional leaders deal with the issue themselves and understand its importance. But if regional authorities do not give it enough attention, we will think that they do not want to improve the quality of services and streamline bureaucracy, and do not think about how comfortable people feel.”
He suggested promoting and spreading the positive experience. “This is why we plan to create some sort of a library, a databank of best regional practices so that all regions could use it for free and use the best and tested models,” the prime minister said.
“A special inter-agency commission has been created for effective coordination of this week. It will deal with the entire set of issues pertaining to the promotion of information technologies in the work of federal, regional and municipal authorities,” he said.
The new commission will coordinate the work of federal and regional executive bodies in respect of the following: determining a unified policy of developing and using information technologies in public governance, industries and the social sphere; devising and implementing measures aimed at expanding the use of information technologies in order to improve the quality and availability of public and municipal services rendered to organisations and the population; making the use of information technologies in the work of government agencies more effective; improving the effectiveness of inter-agency interaction and internal organisation of government bodies through the use of information and telecommunication technologies.
The commission will seek to optimise the federal government’s coordination in the creation, use and development of information technologies in federal, regional and municipal governance, and development of e-government.
Pursuant to Russia’s information society and e-government concepts up to 2010, the development and use of information technologies have been declared priority tasks for the government.
Currently, all issues pertaining to the use of information technologies in the work of government bodies in Russia are solved only at the federal level by several governmental inter-agency bodies, including the government Commission for Federal Communications and Information Technologies, the Council of Chief Designers for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies in the Work of Federal Executive Bodies, and the government Commission on Administrative Reform. The president has also ordered the creation of the Council for Regional Informatisation.
The abovementioned coordination bodies regulate the use of information technologies, and their competences frequently coincide. As a result, their decisions are often uncoordinated or duplicate each other. This causes delays in the implementation of instructions and creates uncertainty in determining the persons responsible for their implementation.
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Quelle/Source: ITAR-TASS, 08.02.2010
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