National
Development Agency

Dr Ferenc Baja State Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office and Government Commissioner for Info-communication, Dr Ákos Bálint Director of the Managing Authority for Public Administration Reform Programmes of the National Development Agency, and Mr János Matisz Managing Director of VÁTI Hungarian Public Non-Profit Company for Regional Development and Town Planning presented the significance of the development implemented in the area of public administration and the main results of the project at the press conference marking the close of the project.

The objective of the area of development of public administration within the framework of the New Hungary Development Plan is to improve the efficiency and standard of public administration services and make public administration services more client-centric by moving away from the current practice of office and case-centric public administration procedures. The State Reform Operational Programme (SROP) boosts the performance of public administration by renewing Hungarian public administration procedures, as well as by shaping the attitude and developing the level of qualifications of public administration employees. This is how the citizen attempting to arrange a matter becomes a respected client and strict administrators evolve into helpful service providers. Consequently, setting up the IT background conditions required (standardised developments, applications and quality assurance systems) is as relevant as establishing the regulatory framework (eliminating redundancies inherent in services and the infrastructure).

Hungarian public administration IT is currently comprised of separate isolated sub-systems hardly suitable for cooperation; moreover, back-office procedures also operate at a low electronic level. The public administration reform that has been launched can only reach its goal if central, regional, micro-regional and local e-administration developments are built on the same grounds and client-centric developments are implemented creating a modern, flexible architecture and enabling the use of efficient technological instruments.    

Dr Ferenc Baja highlighted the following: setting up the electronic public administration framework system is a major step towards the establishment of a services-oriented state. The Public Administration Informatics Committee approved the 20 new standards and 100 new documents developed as an outcome of the project, as well as the standardised framework system set up on the basis of these on 12 March, and issues this as a Recommendation. Therefore, the application of standards, rules of procedures and requirements developed within the framework of the project may be stipulated as mandatory requirements for some 140 public administration institutions during the course of the e-administration developments they implement and will serve as guidelines for at least 2000 local governments as well.      

"Developments implemented within the framework of the State Reform OP and the E-Administration OP build on one another. Procedures simplified and re-structured within the framework of SROP appear in the new EAOP systems, whilst the standards of the electronic public administration framework system will equally be integrated in EAOP developments." – said Dr Ákos Bálint Head of the Managing Authority for Public Administration Reform Programmes.

The fundamental task of the priority project „Setting up an electronic public administration framework system” of the State Reform Operational Programme involved developing technological inter-operability (ensuring cooperation between various systems) standards and defining organisational inter-operability requirements. Public access to the standards developed will be ensured in a requirements store accessible by all developers by logging onto www.ekk.gov.hu.

Developing project management methodology and setting up the technical monitoring system was also an integral part of the project, since participants engaging in future projects will be required to apply e-administration framework system requirements.