Monday, November 24, 2014

E-service Development in Georgia

“The vision for the e-Georgia strategy reflects this wider scope and it is defined as “Georgia will become a more efficient public sector offering integrated, secure, and high quality e-Services. Improved usage and participation enable an ICT driven sustainable economic growth.”

Significant developments in terms of e-governance in Georgia is apparent in the latest years. So-called “Digitalization” process has started about ten years ago in many governmental agencies. “Georgian Electronic Government Procurement System” [1]and “Online Asset Declaration System”[2] development is an obvious success story of this process.
“According to 2014 UN E-Government Survey Georgia is ranked 56th out of 193 countries, with E- Government Development Index of 0.6 and Online Service Component score of 0.59, which has improved overall ranking of Georgia by 16 positions as compared to 2012 data” (Ministry of Justice of Georgia, 2013).
Another important area of e-service development is Public Finance Management System (PFMS), where e-budget, e-treasury, and electronic debt management system, National Resource Management System, electronic revenue service, etc. are developed. Should be notices that all these services are provided under the MoF supervision.
www.matsne.gov.ge was developed for the special purpose for better access and participation in legislation issues. Participation, grievance, accountability and transparency issues are well developed. Another important issue is that information regarding legislative amendment are constructed in a user-friendly manner, which means that adjustment are visually attractive.
New strategy vision and significant improvement was established in the healthcare field and e-health is currently on the stage of development and implementation. E-health combines a lot of direction, thus, implementation process is gradually managed, services such are e-prescription and registry of pharmacies are already implemented.  E-health is under the Health Management Information System (HMIS) umbrella.
E-libraries, e-meteo, e-stamp and etc., this is not full list of public services, which are in the transformation process to achieve e-service requirements, with the consideration to assure full and comprehensive, modern and technologically sustainable outcomes.
E-service development strategy combines three main directions: Government to Citizen, Government to Business and Government to Government.
In 2012 citizen’s portal my.gov.ge was created, where all e-services were accumulated in order to provide not only public but also private e-services as well.
The main disadvantage of e-service development is disparities between central and local government and public and private sectors. Still, the main challenge is integration of municipal services in the overall e-service framework, and decrease differences between central and local public services.
Another important target of e-service development is consumption issue, where Internet access, poor awareness and weak skills should be considered as a main challenge and obstacle. Thus, not only provision, but also consumption challenges should be under the equal attention.
Affordability and financing sustainability should be guaranteed, not only for development, but also for current maintenance purposes.




[1] Winner of UN Public service Award in 2012
[2] Winner of UN Public service Award in 2013

2 comments: