ZAGREB, March 23, 2018 – Digital transformation of society, technological aspects of globalisation and its impact on society, and strengthening the ICT sector in Croatia are some of the topics of the first ICT Society forum which is taking place in Osijek on Friday.
Bernard Gršić, state secretary at the Central State Office for the Development of the Digital Society, said that about 45 percent of Croatians did not have the basic digital skills and announced that Croatia would soon establish a national coalition for digital jobs and digital skills, which would make it the 19th EU member state to launch such an initiative.
Gršić said that the initiative would bring together the research community, industry, government and other sectors dealing with development of digital skills. He added that a national digitisation strategy and an industrial digitisation strategy were being prepared as the necessary documents for developing a digital society.
Assistant public administration minister Zrinka Bulić said that the government, in addressing challenges of digitisation, was preparing action plans at three levels – digital society, the economic sector and public administration. She said that projects to computerise business and administrative processes, which are being prepared by the Ministry of Public Administration, were worth more than 700 million kuna, 85 percent of which would be covered by the EU.
The conference was organised by the Osijek Software City association and the Institute for European and Globalisation Studies. The Institute’s founder Anđelko Milardović said that the conference would discuss, among other things, how to stop emigration trends by further strengthening the ICT sector because this was a demographic and development issue not just in Osijek but elsewhere in the country as well.
Ivica Mudrinić, founder of the HUB 385 company and former CEO of Croatian Telecom (HT), said it was difficult to define strategies when Croatia did not even have a national development vision. He said that step by step progress in business was not enough sometimes and leaps needed to be made, adding that the ICT sector and digitisation was an opportunity for Croatia to make a leap.
