Digitalisation is one of priority tasks of the Serbian government, whose goal is to establish a transparent, efficient and economical public administration. The means to achieve this is modern, integral, efficient e-Government, accessible to all
Thanks to Prime Minister Ana Brnabić and her deep commitment to digitalisation, the Serbian Government has decided to form its own service, as a central and highest IT authority in the country – the Office for IT and e-Government, whose director will report directly to the Prime Minister.
In this issue, we have been talking about it with Marija Kujačić of the Office for IT and e-Government.
The Office for IT and e-Government was created by merging the Directorate for e-Government and the ICT sector of the Administration for Joint Services of the Republic Bodies, to better deal with developing information systems and e-government, IT infrastructure, information security and standardisation, training and international projects.
Another important step in centralising and strengthening the state’s IT capacities was the establishment of the first state data centre, which houses key information and communication infrastructure of the state authorities essential for the efficient functioning of e-Government and the IT systems of the public administration.
More than 40 staff now work in the new premises of the Office in the TK Centre building. The State Data Centre also houses equipment for issuing timestamps, and by the end of the year equipment for the Central Electronic Registers System will be installed.
CERT – the Centre for Information Security of State Authorities will also be established here. In the coming year, the equipment of all state authorities will gradually be moved here so that the Office for IT and e-Government will start providing state cloud services – a government cloud.
After seven years of operations, the e-Government Portal will be redesigned. It will have a simpler and more user-friendly interface
Although the National Data Centre was built and designed according to modern technology and safety standards, making it operational did not put any financial burden on the state budget. the existing capacities of the TK Centre were simply used: this centre is owned by the Republic of Serbia and contains the ‘heart and soul’ of Serbian telecommunications and information technologies.
Moreover, opening the first centre of its kind will bring not only the highest technical and security standards and centralisation of the state ICT infrastructure, but will also contribute to rationalising the budget of the Republic of Serbia, both in terms of using existing hardware and software, and of future investment.
The team of developers and other staff at the IT and e-Government Office will finally receive all the support they need – equipment and space to develop new, efficient, electronic services for business and the public.
After seven years of operations, the e-Government Portal will be redesigned and given a better user interface that is simpler and more user-friendly. The services will be grouped more logically and all processes on the Portal will be faster.
The focus of the Office will be on improving the Central Registers System, establishing a Central Population Register and Meta register, and we believe that this year we will lay the foundation for m-Government, so we will scale down from computers to mobile phones for our fellow citizens.
So, we have done a lot in the past year. The largest and most important task was to set up healthy and solid foundations for everything that will follow – for the comprehensive processes of digitalisation of the entire public administration that await us in the year ahead.