As Zvono.eu writes on the 24th of September, 2019, the City of Bjelovar is the first Croatian city to be fully digitally transformed. This was confirmed at a recent presentation of the Bjelovar project – the first digital city, where several months of work on internal processes towards citizens was presented to the public.
The idea was to keep up with new technologies, open things up and make things more transparent to Bjelovar’s citizens and simplify their communication with the city government, and also to allow the city’s employees to be more efficient and make their jobs easier overall.
In the last few weeks, there have been about fifteen internal digital processes going on in Bjelovar’s city administration building that officials have been working intensively on. In total, eighty digitised processes have been implemented by a company called IN2, which will soon be automated, following the education of city employees themselves on the matter. It is expected that the digitisation of all of Bjelovar’s work processes will improve precisely the efficiency in the work of officers and, of course, drastically reduce all costs involved.
”We can’t build a new modern society which belongs to the 21st century on the old, outdated bureaucratic model of the last century. We want to be a small, fast and efficient city administration with no things just left lying around and forgotten in drawers, we will introduce standardised behaviour towards citizens and entrepreneurs, and the treatment of each party will be the same. The system is very precise, measurable, and we will be able to evaluate each city employee through their work, since it will be clear exactly how much each person has done during the year,” said the Mayor of the City of Bjelovar, Dario Hrebak.
One of the eighty implemented processes was presented to the media, pertaining to the request for financial assistance for a newborn child in the family. This will enable citizens to obtain the cash benefit of 1,000 kuna provided by the City of Bjelovar for newborns from the comfort of their own home.
Therefore, they will be able to provide the necessary documents from home – the identity cards of both parents, the birth certificate of the child, a certificate of residence, and the details of the current account to which the payment is to be made, of course, all with a completed application form. Even the application form will be able to be sent digitally via a standardiaed procedure, with maximum security and protection of personal data, without waiting in the hallways of the city administration. It almost sounds like Croatia is being dragged into the 21st century.
Soon, the City of Bjelovar will present other processes such as the request for one-time financial aid, scholarship applications, grants, enrollment in kindergarten, and so on.
”The City of Bjelovar wants to re-set the standards in the public resource management model. It has been proven that GDP is growing in line with the digital transformation of society and that investments go to places where there is legal certainty and where public service is very fast and efficient. Estonia, for example, has made a major leap forward even though it was far below Croatia in terms of development.
Today, it is one of the leading countries in development, and because of the digital transformation of the public sector, they have made a big step forward in terms of development. I don’t see why Bjelovar, or Croatia, could not do the same. With this project, we’re sending a message to everyone that we’re taking things seriously and that the money invested in Bjelovar is worth more than it is anywhere else in Croatia,” said Mayor Hrebak.
When it comes to executing projects, it is important that the leadership and team are ready to change their ways of working and replace their old business processes. This is actually what makes digitisation successful. We are fortunate to have found this in Bjelovar,” said Katarina Siber Makar, CEO of IN2, the company which worked with Bjelovar on the project.
Tatjana Skoko, director of Microsoft Croatia, a partner in the project, emphasised that technology is a major driver and force of change in society, and that projects like this presented by the City of Bjelovar are excellent news because such projects make life and society better, and technology is what makes all of that possible.
It is important to note that thanks to digitalisation, the City of Bjelovar now has the transparency application, which makes Bjelovar the first, or the most transparent city in Croatia in this area. Through the application, all citizens have a transparent view of payments made from the budget of the City of Bjelovar, including payments to legal and natural persons, as well as expenses such as, for example, the daily allowances of all city employees.
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