ACTIVITIES :: ICT for Societal challenges :: Effective online public services
Effective online public services for citizens and businesses
Effective
interaction between public administrations, citizens and businesses is essential
to build the digital society. Online delivery of basic services to citizens
(e.g. personal documents and certificates, income taxes and job search tools)
and businesses (e.g. company registration, social contributions, corporate tax,
VAT) help public authorities to meet people’s needs. Today, many public services are
available online. While the “passive” use (e.g. reading information) of public
authorities’websites has remained pretty stable over the past years, there has been a steady
increase in the “interactive” use of these services, such as the downloading of
official forms (from 20% in 2004 to 27% in 2009) and returning completed forms (from 11%
to 20%). However, progress still has to be made. Today, less than 40% of EU
citizens and 70% of EU businesses use online public services in Europe. Also, most public
services do not work across borders, and services for online registration of new companies are still lagging behind.
The European Commission is working towards effective online public services via the eGovernment Action Plan, which aims to empower users to actively contribute to the production of eGovernment services or even policy-making, fostering transparency and openness of digital public administrations services to function as efficiently in other EU Member States as they do at home, and increasing the overall usage. Concrete goals include the registration of data with governments on a “only once” basis, the EU-wide use of national electronic identities (eID), the personalisation of services to better respond to real user needs and the promotion of more open, proactive and transparent administrations.
The eGovernment Action Plan is fully in line with the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) which addresses these challenges by ensuring that public sector websites are fully accessible by 2015; by requesting Member States to agree by 2011 on a common list of key cross-border public services; implementing seamless crossborder e-Government services in the EU single market, with the ultimate goal of enabling companies to set up and run a business, and for citizens to study, work, reside and retire anywhere in the EU. Key in the strategy is the development of large scale pilot projects (LSP) engaging stakeholders such as public authorities, service providers and research centres across the EU in the implementation of common solutions to deliver online public services and make them accessible throughout Europe. So far, three LSP have been developed – STORK, PEPPOL and SPOCS – and one, e-CODEX, was launched in January 2011.