For example, the director of the IT and Communications Department of the Government of the Russian Federation Alexey Popov has admitted that regional administrations are holding back the e-governmental initiatives with 11 of Federal regions still not being connected to either the unified e-services portal or the interagency cooperation system. This wasn't announced at the RIF+KIB event though - I guess they decided against "washing dirty linen in public", so to say. While also announced last week, though, it was at another venue - The Council on Regional Information System Development. While 11 regions have no support of the Federal-level program, regional implementations that do work give a... well, underwhelming performance. 46 regions have failed to provide own regional services, relying only on the ones forced by the top and 54 subjects somehow decided that testing their own developments was not necessary. Given these setbacks, Popov suggested the interagency cooperation system development was finished - but, as you can see, implementation is another story. Not only regional administrations are unwilling to provide own services to their population, they also don't even test the service that's been given to them from the federal level, meaning that it is likely they are bug-ridden and are not ready to be used on a regular basis by the citizens. "Those regions that are lagging behind should rapidly become more active as we are nearing the moment when we need to not only provide the e-governmental services, but also educate people and train them how to use the system. The latter is impossible if there is no system. The state of things in several region illustrates that even a directive from the prime minister concerning regional administration providing 14 mandatory services was not followed. The 14 services cannot be provided with zero regional contribution". He followed by stating that his Department along with the Communications and Press Ministry I've mentioned earlier in this broadcast, will continue overseeing the implementation of the program nationwide and demand from regional administrations to not just blindly follow instructions and do the bare minimum or even less, but to provide reports and protocols on successful testing of required services. The Minister of Communications Igor Shegolev also had a few words to say. He noted that the demand for state services, both federal and regional will be driven by the speed of development of e-government, referring to the administrative initiative - or lack thereof as we can see for now. He also suggested that it's not the federal government that should nudge regional and municipal bodies to implement G2C services, but the citizens themselves - after all, they are the reason for all of this.
Vice president of the Rostelecom ICT company Alexey Nashekin actually tried defending the apparently "lazy" regions. The things is that those regional bodies that use "out of the box" implementation for the e-government system has it working perfectly, unlike those that try to provide their own solutions. Moreover, implementation of extra services requires a lot of hard work and coordination - if a local body tries to connect so new services to the unified state service portal that should be available to local citizens - well, this causes "desynchronization of the system of interagency cooperation". Marina Korobkova, Head analyst of ComNews Research, a company that focuses on analysis of the ICT market, explained that there is a number of initial problems that hold back successful nationwide implementation of e-government. Well, the most obvious problem is the same that hampers internet penetration - huge area. And, of course, red tape - which is kind of ironic, seeing as how the system is aimed at abolishing excessive bureaucracy. Another problem is that the wide array of software solutions that is now used under the umbrella terms "unified state service portal" and "interagency cooperation system" - well, these are heterogeneous pieces of software developed by different companies over a span of a few years and their correct integration is also an issue. Apparently the task was as follows: make sure that governmental agencies can share documentation with each other. Regional bodies could either get an "out-of-the-box" solution or opt to develop software that would allow this sort of functionality - and this sort of mish-mash is proving to be a problem. Regardless, the deadline is still set for July of this year - by that time at least basic functionality of the e-services portal has to become accessible to each and every citizen of the Russian Federation.
With a lot of words and numbers on the subject of e-government in Russia being thrown around last week, PCWeek Russia has published an interesting article dedicated to the issue. And, as one might expect, the state of things outlined by the experts who participated in the article is worse than the official statements. What’s surprising is that they’re not much worse, actually. One of the major hurdles on the way to a bright electronic future is, as I’ve mentioned, the fact that governmental bodies were left to own devices, with only one firm directive: get on with the times and use electronic document management. It’s like building a massive puzzle with several groups of people and telling them – bring your own pieces! Sure, the groups actually create a single structure out of their own puzzle pieces, but when they all come together and try to connect each other’s’ products, they are faced with the fact that groups used different types of pieces for their internal needs. Having some programming background, I can safely say that this problem is not impossible – for example, there is a special field of programming, and its sole purpose is to facilitate communication between incompatible systems.
Another problem highlighted by the article is low level of integration of IT in the government – governmental bodies mostly are not interested in using modern IT and ICT solutions to perform their duties and those projects that do launch often fall into disuse. Anecdotal cases suggest some state agencies have not even mastered the art of email yet, let alone full-blown document integration. Citizen-oriented projects that are done in a slapdash manner have the added “benefit” of frustrating users and cultivating a negative attitude towards the e-government concept in general. But enough about the problems – some experts actually praised the overall effort, if sometimes forced, to bring Russia up to speed. While still nowhere near the top in e-service availability and governmental efficiency and transparency facilitated by the internet, we are catching up, fast. The UN “E-Government Survey 2012: E-Government for the People” placed Russia 27th in 2011. In 2010 the country was ranked 59th.
The article goes on into technical details of e-governmental solutions used in Russia – for a non-specialist these are quite boring, frankly. But I would like to highlight one aspect of electronic data management systems – security. A representative of an IT security company explained that not just governmental bodies, but also developers themselves believe “secure data management” means using digital signatures – but in reality there is a wide variety of security measures to be implemented in order to guarantee safety of internal data. In other words, forces digitization of the Russian government with little initiative from regional and municipal officials and even less understanding, the citizen’s records can become, while more easily accessible, also less protected. And that is something to think about, given the increasing hacker activity attacking digital systems worldwide.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Peter Lekarev
Quelle/Source: The Voice of Russia, 24.04.2012
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