Why are stamps entering retirement age

Electronic public administrative does not need more money, but coordination, process management and government pressure
[9.3.2005, TREND / Jozef Andacký, Konštantín Čikovský, Martin Valášek and Peter Marčan]

Going around public institutions and trying to sort affairs out is a real reality show. But while most people enjoy watching SuperStar and only a small minority experience stress, the opposite is true in public institutions. Long queues moving forward lazily; forms endlessly asking for the same information; and stamps and signatures; employees’ fingers pointing to other doors, or another queue. All this is taking time which people could use in a productive manner.A few years ago, similar experiences were faced by bank clients, for example. Most of them, however, already have an alternative; they can pay their bills from the comfort of their living-room armchair. Even at midnight. Over the Internet. Of course, as long as the client wants to. Banks are happy to oblige, since it’s easier and cheaper for them too.What stops providers of public services accepting a client-focused principle of service provision improved by the speed, precision and simplicity inherent to electronic communication?

Not enough money?
Traditionally, the backwardness of the mechanisms of public institutions was explained by rhetoric that the state invests little in its own IT. However, the audit, for example, carried out by S&K Management Systems at the end of last year for the Ministry of Transport, sees the main problems elsewhere than in money. On the contrary, it describes at least the readiness of the public administration’s hardware as sufficient.
Most institutions have computers of standard performance, an Internet connection, networks, information systems. Only over the course of the last three years, the state has spent at least 5.3 billion crowns on the purchase of information technology. We say at least, because the expenses were in fact several billion crowns higher, because the audit based itself on public accessible data which do not include all forms of public procurement, and excludes IT orders which were not placed under the regime of public procurement. The total amount of investments into IT in the state, or even in the whole public sphere does not exist. No-one follows it and so there is no method which could enable an auditor to calculate it, even if public institutions tried to help him.
Even incomplete data and the fact that the state does not intend to slow down the volume of expenditure in IT do allow an assessment to be made. “There is definitely no problem with lack of money,” says the main advisor to the Minster of Finance, Martin Bruncko.
Lots of chaos
If there is a problem in IT technology equipment, it is not the volume of its implementation or its moral wear. The problem is in its structure. The major part of IT systems in public administration was ordered and runs for the needs of the internal management of public organisations. Even these, however, do not work by far in the same way as in the business sphere, to support decision-making, according to advisors from S&K Management Systems.
And what is worse, systems focused in priority on customer services make up only approximately one third of the total. So can we gather from this that the public administration has not understood their purpose? According to one of the authors of the audit, Ľudovít Lauko, the answer is no. He states this based on their company’s experience with private companies: those which provide similar types of services to the public administration or a similar proportion of administration in their activities. The task of most electronic systems there is to provide a service.
However, the audit goes even further. Even where the state offers a service which can be called electronic, in almost two thirds of cases, it has only an informative function. Only one fifth are transactional, those which are able to really simplify the administration system for a client, not only give advice.
Or: over half the entries into the information systems of central organisms of state administration are on paper. So even in ministries which are better equipped in information systems than the rest of public administration, electronic documents are in a minority. This is why we cannot be surprised that most of the information entered into these systems is entered manually. In the twenty central organisms examined, this was the true for 80% of cases. All this can be translated into the language of costs for public administration and the quality of services provided, in the same way as the “low interoperability”, for example, of information services in public administration. This indicates the extent to which individual systems are able to communicate between themselves, in other words exchange information. The audit found zero interoperability in 57 percent of cases.
The record-breakers are the information systems of the Office for State Service SR which was only created three years ago. These are not able to communicate with any other. Auditors found system communications able to surpass the limits of their department, or even exchange information with European Union institutions in fewer than ten percent of cases.
When should public administration clients bear in mind this data? When they do not understand how it is possible for various institutions to repeatedly request the same document from them, often when dealing with the same affair. Especially as the overriding majority of these documents comes from public administration in the first place.
Good morning
The state administration has remained on the level of the last century. Not, however, from the point of view of technological equipment, but from that of processes. Even in 2005, for example, practically the same form was used as in 1975 for declaring permanent residence, and the same personal information and documents are required. Certain procedures have even become more complicated. For example, to obtain a seriously disabled person’s card, the applicant must knock on more doors than in the past.
It is the same with driving licences; once they used to be prepared on the spot, now it takes two visits. And soon, it will be the same for passports and identity cards. However, this is linked to the increase in production costs as a result of new requirements for safety elements and the introduction of biometric data.
Since this technology is expensive, Slovakia can only afford to operate it in one place. So at the place where cards used to be printed directly, at present only data is collected, which is then sent to a central workplace. The card is printed there and sent back to a collection point or the place where the citizen can collect it in person.
Of course, there are services which have improved over the last five years. Whoever wants to check out his business partners does not have to run to the courthouse and pay stamp duty. He simply looks at the extract from the trades register on the internet. Or when he is trying to find out how to register a new car in the police records, he does not need to make a phone call and argue with the information officer. He just types the right address into the computer and detailed explanations appear on his screen within a few seconds. Such an online trades register, or the public information portal Obcan.sk could not have seen the light of day if commercial partners had not taken care of them at their own cost. Even though this type of sponsorship is for them mainly a way of making a good name for themselves in the department and paving their way to lucrative orders.
Political support
Simple access to information from official records and registers, however, is just a fraction of what a modern citizen and businessmen wants from the state administration. It would be of more help to him if the time he has to spend at an institution were shorter, and if he were able to sort everything out in one place. It would be ideal if he could deal with everything at a distance, via a central public portal; not mentioning the fact that he would like to hear institutions also talking about work productivity or the cost structure of fees. Computerisation, however, does not begin from the bottom. And if even the departmental computer technicians try to move things forward, they often face the wall of priorities of their boss, the minister. There is no authority which could manage computerisation across all departments, support and coordinate it. Competencies in government computing have been transferred several times over the last few years from one department to another, ending up at the Ministry of Transport, Postal Services and Telecommunications SR. Several times, the designation of a plenipotentiary for the computerisation of society has also been postponed: for the last time in November last year.
Miroslav Kukučka took up this position, who has spent practically his entire professional life with the Software602 brand, the producer of the legendary text editor T602. As a state bureaucrat, he only has a declarative position for the moment; he is not a member of the government and has no directive competencies towards the other departments, which can carry on dealing with computerisation in their own ways. However, M. Kukučka does not see this as the main problem. “I think that the departments understand best their own problems and know how to find the best solutions to them.” He rather wants to arrive at a stage where departments will operate in accordance with standards and try to coordinate, “in order for them not to try to solve the same problem three times and each in a different manner.”
New principles for services to citizens and businessmen

• No paperwork – replacing paper documents with electronic ones means changing the organisation of administrative work

• No direct contact with the service receiver – correct distance acts require a certain level of security

• Electronic signature instead of handwritten signature– both forms guarantee authenticity

• No principle of local competency – the performance of online public administration can be independent from the country’s territorial divisions

       SOURCE: Information audit by S&K Management Systems
The Ministry of Finance has also made one step forward. After ending the tax reform, it presented the development of a knowledge economy as its next agenda. One of its pillars is also the information society. And subordinates of the Minister Ivan Mikloš openly say that computerisation as part of the “Slovak Lisbon” will only become a priority if it becomes a political subject. M. Bruncko expects that this will also give the institute of plenipotentiary added weight. However, he realises that the awakening of the public administration cannot take place before the elections.
The first reactions to the finance department’s initiative are positive, even from the benches of the opposition. Whether they remain so, time alone will tell. “I would consider it a success if the knowledge and information society became subjects, about which political parties will argue, in the positive sense of the word, during the next elections,” says the main economic advisor to the Minster of Finance.
Not one word about processes
The computerisation of state administration must be compared to the standard introduction of an information system in a commercial business. In both cases, in the first place, tasks must be defined which this or that part of the organisation has to carry out. Then processes must be prescribed which are supposed to ensure this. Further, a suitable software application, hardware platform, communication infrastructure must be chosen - to build up a complex information system. Another phase involves employee training, to make sure they are not lost in their new environment, but know how to use it and thus increase their productivity. And finally, the results achieved must be constantly re-assessed.
Government computer technicians have not gone far in building a complex information system. Just agreeing on a document with the grand title of “Strategy for the Computerisation of Society” took several years. They only met the first part of the task: naming the tasks of the modern state administration.
And this is only thanks to the fact that they copied them from the action plan of the Lisbon strategy for new member of the European Union, eEurope Plus. This defines, albeit relatively loosely, twenty basic services for citizens and businessmen which the state administration should provide in electronic form and online.
The strategy’s action plan cannot be considered as progress; ninety per cent of it was made up of general, or on the contrary very specific, partial projects, most of them with unrealistic deadlines. There was not one word about processes, or changes to them.