Delegate Minister for Digitalisation Marc Hansen has set out a number of ambitious projects for this year. The current procedures and work processes in the Civil Service are to be modernized to meet the demands of the digital age.
The Minister is consciously focusing on the potential of GovTech, i.e. technologies that facilitate exchanges with citizens and businesses, as well as the internal communication between individual administrations.
EXPERIMENT, EXCHANGE, INNOVATE
The GovTech Lab aims to accelerate the digitalisation of the public service by drawing on the knowledge of external actors. In line with an open innovation approach, the ministry is creating an interactive platform that brings together civil service actors and experts from the private sector. A community for the exchange of creative ideas and new technologies.
The GovTech Lab aims to foster an innovative work culture by organizing a variety of challenges. First, the administrations propose a specific problem to be solved in the context of the challenge. After that, a public tender will be held, in which start-ups, researchers, companies, independents and even students can participate. They should propose innovative solutions to the specific challenge and thus be able to demonstrate their individual competencies.
The first challenge called Bye bye robots! was launched at the end of last year: with the aim of protecting civil service websites from spam attacks. Candidates should develop a new method to check whether a human or a robot has actually logged in.
HARMONIZATION OF ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURES IN FAVOR OF THE CITIZENS
In the context of administrative simplification of the public service, Minister Marc Hansen presented in early January another new project: enquetes-publiques.lu – a digital portal for participation procedures.
The new site enables citizens to have quick and easy access to information on current public procedures. The citizens have the possibility to submit their contributions electronically to the authorities concerned. In addition, users can subscribe to specific procedures or topics. Finally, the administrations also benefit from the new site because of the easier and faster management of citizen contributions.
STRATEGY OF DIGITAL GOVERNANCE
Recently, the Minister Marc Hansen also presented the new E-Governance Strategy 2021-2025, which defines the various elements for the digitalisation of the public service. This transition should be guided by 6 principles.
While in 2015 the 3 criteria of Once only, Digital by Default and transparency were already fixed, 3 new ones are now being added:
- Inclusion: the services should be accessible and understandable to everyone,
- Security and trust: administrations must guarantee the protection of private data,
- Interoperability: standardized IT programs are intended to guarantee the compatibility of data and thus facilitate communication between administrations and citizens.
