E-Citizen service is a good example, but an integrated approach is needed.
Digital economy is a precondition for the growth of Croatian exports, but it is also only an illusion if there is no clear strategy that will establish it as a priority in order for Croatia to stop lagging behind the developed world. This was the message sent from a panel discussion of the Croatian Exporters association, reports Poslovni.hr on May 27, 2016.
“We do not need to start from the beginning and we do not need to complicate things”, said Entrepreneurship Minister Darko Horvat while emphasizing the Estonian example – one plastic card that represents the basis for digital communication with the entire state administration.
“The barriers should be removed for real, instead of us just talking about whether the administration has 10,000 or 20,000 more employees than it needs and whether all the paperwork is necessary. When we start eliminating these barriers and when only 5 days are needed to get a construction permit instead of the current 42 days, this will show how much administration we truly need”, the Minister said. He also commended on the e-citizen service, which he described as “fantastic, but requiring some additions”.
Former Minister of Finance Boris Lalovac said that a series of projects, including Central Payroll System (COP), e-procurement and e-permits, function perfectly, but the problems appear when these platforms are to function as one in a harmonized way. “People accept new technologies very well, but the abundance of problems requires time to be solved. We are losing a lot of time on processing documents, and on photocopying, scanning and archiving them. A lot of time is spent doing that, while only five to ten percent of time involves real communication between the state administration and citizens”, Lalovac said. Referring to the Central Payroll System, he emphasized that “the administration was also fighting the COP because it feared layoffs”.
According to Darinko Bago, the president of the Končar Board of Directors and member of the Croatian Exporters Association, discussions about digital economy have been reduced to individual segments instead of the whole. “Digital economy means that functioning of every individual has been digitally recorded. If just one piece of information is missing, the entire system collapses. Today, we are buying and selling things over the internet, but this is only one segment, as digital economy has a big impact on producers and buyers. We need a systemic approach and mechanisms that will guide us in a harmonized way towards the same direction”, he said.
