ACTIVITIES :: eGovernment :: Policy :: Efficiency and Effectivenes

Efficiency and Effectivenes - stepping up eGovernment efficiency and effectiveness

New technology can radically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public services, and this is already happening across the EU. Insurance claims can be processed in days, even hours, instead of months; pension records can be consulted on-line in minutes. Initiatives are in place to extend these e-services – cutting back on red tape and increasing the level of satisfaction of all who use them.

Every day, a stream of freight trucks stretches back several kilometres from the Finnish-Russian border. Officials examine containers and check that the paperwork – dozens of different forms – is in order. The process is vital for security and to ensure customs duties are paid, but it is an enormous burden on businesses which could be relying on ‘just-in-time’ deliveries of raw materials. Advanced ICTs and data-handling processes could help significantly reduce the waiting times for these trucks.
This is the logic behind one of the key priorities of the i2010 e-Government action plan, making efficiency and effectiveness a reality – finding better ways of doing what we currently do (efficiency) and, by doing it well, getting the desired effect or result (effectiveness).

Similar examples can be found in many public services across Europe: queues and delays while collecting benefits, repetitive form filling, time-consuming manual bureaucracy, and lack of connections between manual and electronic systems within a department, between departments or between services in different EU countries. All of these problems share two things in common: they are a legacy of a bygone age and they can be radically overhauled by better leveraging ICTs.

Giving eGovernment the competitive edge

The EU target for Member States to cut a quarter of their administrative costs by 2012 could save some €150 billion of taxpayers’ money – money that can be spent better elsewhere. Using ICTs will certainly help reduce the cost burden on administrations – and hence on tax-payers – but only if their integration in public processes is well organised.

If done well, Member States will be the net winners, with better satisfied citizens and businesses benefiting from a lighter administrative burden. Meanwhile, public-sector efficiency, transparency and accountability will show measurable improvements.

Good eGovernment services also help Member States achieve fundamental political objectives, such as improving social inclusion and building a more competitive enterprise sector. Companies, especially SMEs, devote considerable resources to administration – regular tax declarations, managing the social security status of their employees, or applying for permits to carry out their business. When eGovernment enables them to reduce such costs, they can focus on their core activities and generate stronger economic returns for the business and its workforce.

The EU will foster the deployment of efficient and effective eGovernment services with a two-pronged strategy. It will promote co-operation and exchange of best practice and technical standards through the benchmarking and impact assessment of services. It will also support several pilot projects (due to start in 2008 with funding from the ICT Policy Support Programme) which will demonstrate the improvements eGovernment brings to public services in real life situations.
Pilot projects will focus on themes such as:

• the development of specifications so that electronic documents can be recognised, authenticated and processed by different agencies;
• demonstrating that new methods can deliver eGovernment services to groups of citizens and/or businesses that do not currently use them; and
• creating a single structure for the delivery of social assistance services, (child support, unemployment and/or disability benefit, pensions, homecare, etc.) often provided by different agencies, so as to provide a better service to those citizens who rely on them.