National telecom operator Rostelecom – 53.2% owned by the federal government – announced last week that 70 out of 83 Russian regions are now linked to its interdepartmental government communications system.
The buildout of the system marks a major milestone in this country’s progress towards e-government, a comprehensive IT-enabled cloud-based platform offered to the regions on an SaaS basis and designed to help the Russian government interact with populations and businesses while improving links between its own levels of command.
According to Rostelecom, which was appointed last year to implement the ambitious program, the remaining 13 regions have been allowed to put together their own adaptations of an e-government format tailored to local environments. Those will all be incorporated into Rostelecom’s national system by July 1, 2012 – the deadline set by federal law for the regions to fully embrace electronic interaction.
Moving ahead of schedule, Rostelecom says it is fine-tuning its regional e-government operations in all four dimensions prioritized in Russia’s original 2008 e-Government concept: G2C (Government-to-Citizen), G2B (Government-to-Business), G2G (Government-to-Government), and G2E (Government-to-Employee). Federal authorities have already been operating under the new regime since October 1, 2011, the national telecom operator said, adding that data available at the federal government level will be shared across Russia’s nine time zones to avoid duplication of citizen-requested information.
The tab for the endeavor is about $150 million, a cost which experts say amounts to a fraction of what Estonia and Singapore once spent on what some feel are exemplary e-governments. The across-the-board effort includes, among other things, the introduction of the long-awaited electronic signature for personal banking cards, which will abolish considerable paperwork – a bane of today’s bureaucracy in Russia.
