Let's go back in time. "The e-Stat.cz think-tank was established in 2004 to support public administration reform with a focus on specific projects promoting a lean, strong and efficient state. Partial parts were successfully implemented between 2007 and 2010 - for example, the Czech POINT project, the introduction of data inboxes or the creation of basic registers of public administration," says the e-stat.cz website, which refers to the era of Prime Minister Topolánek's government. And also that not much has happened since then.

"But we also have to admit that we live in such an incredibly complex environment that it cannot be simplified through digitalisation alone. How many government information systems would you say there are today? There are more than 5,000 and we have 700 services on the Citizen Portal. That's a jungle that is getting denser all the time," reflects Tomáš Rutrle and talks about the fact that the degree of complexity is always ahead of simplification.

"We often think of digitalisation in such a way that we no longer have to write something down on paper and queue up at the office to do it. That's great, but it doesn't lead to simplification of the form in question. It's still just as complicated, there are sections like “give details under paragraph XY of section XY”, so you still have to open up, say, the tax law and see what it means. That's not what we wanted."

So are we understanding digitalisation wrong?

Often the main motive is that digitalisation is more convenient for citizens, that they don't have to fill in the same forms over and over again. Somehow that is happening today, a lot of things can be done through the Citizen Portal. But there are still quite a lot of things to fill in, and most importantly, no one in the public administration is taking advantage of the fact that all actions done digitally leave a digital footprint - so you can always come back to it and ask: How many types of this submission did this office manage to handle versus another? How much did this system and the human labor cost to process this agenda? How much does it cost us per filing of this type and how many do we manage in a month or a year? And couldn't we do it for half the cost and time? Because that would lead us to further simplify the execution of the agenda. But that is not happening.

Last year, the DIA (Digital Information Agency) tried to get the ball rolling and say what these digital services are. A number of authorities have taken the approach that a digital service means ‘sending it by data box’. The DIA said no, the minimum standard is a pre-populated form, but it still hasn't been done, and the law's effective date has been delayed another two years, which will end up being about six years from when the law was passed. As a state, among other things, we lack real interest at the offices.

Are we lazy? Are we unwilling?

If you compare this with the commercial sector, why are banks investing in digitalisation? Because it makes sense for their business. Rather than having thousands of branches across the country and tens of thousands of people in them whose quality of work you can't supervise, it's easier to have a direct channel and know exactly what's going on. I don't get information from branches about how people are behaving and where they are spending, but mobile banking is an amazing source of data. I then have a number of motives for doing it, for making it more client-friendly, for reducing my own costs, for coming up with new products. All of these things are missing from e-government. The state doesn't think of the citizen as a customer, it doesn't see the prosperity behind digitalisation.

Let's use concrete examples to show this, for example, tax filing, for which many people use tax advisors.

I imagine that the office could offer you a similar interface to what your tax advisor provides. It acts as a ‘translator’ of your user experience - you know what roles you are acting in, and it asks you questions, downloads a series of documents from you, and then translates that into a form for the tax office. There's no reason why this can't work electronically, why the state can't ask for the same documents and process them.

The disconnectedness of databases - the need to deal with multiple authorities and to supply the same information multiple times - is also often cited as a problem.

Information exchange is an important topic. Basic databases on people, land and companies were constructed 20 years ago. However, each central authority has its own systems where it keeps the information it needs for its own agenda, and it is not entirely easy to arrange, even though we have the technical means to do so today, for it to be willing to release data from its own agenda to other agendas. As things stand, there is no incentive to do this - when a department does it, it pays for the extra work out of its budget. And even if it did, it is a problem to reconcile the data because the same data models are not used across institutions. As Aricoma, we are now working on a project on control reporting, which brings the fact that the employer no longer sends it to several offices, but only to one, which then forwards it to the others. It saves companies a lot of time and money, but it is the unification that is incredibly difficult.

There are too many systems. Don't we want one single one?

A big leap for simplification would be one universal interface that is not made up of different forms, but responds to the needs of the citizen. The system would then say, “supply me with this and this”, and in the background it already arranges what needs to be sent to which of the information systems, and just gives you a confirmation. That's going to start to happen more and more. In the commercial world it will naturally be much faster than in e-government, but it has a good chance of prevailing because it will be efficient for the user. And it may also be the recipe for solving that perceived complexity and complexity. Because a lot of things are already available on the Citizen Portal today, but it really takes time to find, for example, dog tags in Humpolec among the 600 services. That's why we need a layer of intelligent digital assistant that takes over the request and doesn't burden you with the need to fill in ‘section 128 information’, but asks you straight away, ‘Do you happen to have a disabled child under 18?’

This is an improvement in e-government. What about healthcare and its digitalisation?

At least something is moving, the Act on the computerisation of health care has been adopted, which introduces several basic registers and defines the ways in which information is to be exchanged, so the conditions are slowly being created. But there are many players in the healthcare sector with their own economic and political interests, and not all of them are keen on transparency. Healthcare providers are paid for performance, so they want to deliver as much as possible. To keep it from completely washing up on the shores, health insurers limit them. And then somewhere in the corner is the Cinderella of prevention, which could save a lot of money. But it doesn't economically benefit any of the players, so why would they pursue it.

You also said yourself that the bad luck is that digitalisation is not an issue to strike for in the town squares. How do we change that and increase the pressure to innovate?

The only thing that works is that people realise what the better alternative is. The state can't do what the bank did, it can't hard leave just the electronic way. It has to make it accessible to those who are not familiar with technology or perhaps don't have access to the internet. Which then limits the potential for savings because you can't cut one of the channels. We can't force citizens, but we can give them incentives, where it is more convenient and faster, to motivate them. Or to rely on the fact that the generation that was born with a phone in its hand won't even know anything else.