The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome all of you. Warm welcome for our representative from polish embassy. All of you who are here on site and all of you who are online. Our lightning talk is system thinking approach to the development of effective inter operable and inclusive government. At the beginning I would like to present ourselves. My name is Mariusz Przybyszewski. And this is my colleague Michal Bukowski. We both represent Poland. Previous IGF forum was organized in our country. So maybe some of you had this opportunity to participate last year. If not, I strongly encourage you to visit. We both experience specialist in the field of public administration. Recently enterprise architecture. For both of us, it's more than 15 years of experience in this field. So some organizational introduction about the lightning talk. My colleague is going to present the topic and the view from our polish governmental perspective. Afterwards, we will start the Q and A session when you can share your opinion or ask any questions. And naturally, I encourage you to do so. No matter if you are online or on site, you are going to have the equal opportunity to participate in this element.
We have also prepared to use some interactive during the presentation and I encourage you to participate as well. So for now, a very quick introduction to the topic before I will pass the floor to my colleague.
Apart from the title. There is a subtitle. How architect in the government enhanced digital access to government service for sustainable and common future. And in our presentation, we would like to address several issues. What should be the approach to the development of digital government?
How it address different dimensions of sustained ability. We are going to show how to tackle the complexity of public administration. Explanation of system thinking. We will also mention digital government layers. And finally, how this practice builds inclusive administration and more efficient digital government at this time. Now I will move to moderate the online part and give the floor to my colleague Michal Bukowski to give a presentation.
>> MICHAL BUKOWSKI: Now I'd like to share a screen. I just shared the screen. I see the presentation is on. Good afternoon, everybody. I would like to present system thinking approach to the development of effective, interoperable and inclusive digital government. Let me begin.
So this title is a little bit complicated. I wanted to describe what's inside. The most important element is digital government. The idea of digital government is that it should be effective, inclusive and interoperable. And I will tell you during this presentation how to use system's thinking approach to the development of such a digital government. So let's start from the beginning. What is digital government?
There are many definitions. One of the definitions I like is digital government is a service delivery between government and the public as well as within the government. Using information and communication technologies. Services provide value. Value for the citizen, for everybody. And the value is the most important thing that the government could create. And if you think about the digital government, we have to take into account that now-a-days, digital government is not only for the nationals area but from time to time or sometimes it's supranational, national and public administration which cooperate with each other. And when we think about the development of digital government in one country, we have to also take into account the directions or the regulations from the European union.
And as I said, public administration supports digital government. So now you see the very complex and big definition. What is the public administration by the polish professor?
But as I usually do, compose it into the more perceivable diagram. So this definition says the public administration is a system which consists of people who follow some goals. They do perform some tasks to achieve these goals. And these tasks are defined in the law. People and the organizations use authority and use also technical means to do these tasks and achieve goals. What is important the public administration is system. And the system and the digital government should be effective. Means able to reach the goals. At the same time, it should be efficient. When long-term benefits are greater than efforts including costs. And modern digital government should be interoperable. Effective corporation. Corporation between organizations, between people, between regulations, processes, date, applications and infrastructure.
And modern digital government should be also inclusive. Providing equal opportunity for individuals and groups to participate.
And now we are coming to the topic of systems thinking. Before I say how to apply systems thinking to the digital government development, I would tell you what the systems thinking is. It is the way of making sense of the complexity of the world. In our case, the complexity of digital government and public administration. As I mentioned in the previous slides, the public administration is a very complex system. So we are looking at the subject in our case, public administration in terms of holes and relationships. Split it down into parts. Every complex system works on a synergy. So we have to take into the elements and the connections. So from another point of view, the digital government says the society. Has to fulfill its needs. When we think about the holes, the digital government have to fulfill the needs of the organizations, groups of people. But also of individuals. So summing up. A system as a whole separated from the environment composed of elements that are directly or indirectly related to each other. And on this diagram you see there is a system which is a whole and inside we've got element 1, 2 and they are inter connected. And how it applied to the public administration?
And now we come to the question how architecting the government helps enhance digital access to government services for a shared sustainable and common future?
Public administration as I tried to present in the previous slide a very complex system. Has elements which belong to the cultural, legal, organizational, semantic and technical layers. The best way to understand the system and address its challenges is to use systems thinking methods presented in the previous slides. In Poland, we use government enterprise architecture which is systems thinking approach to public administration digital transformation. And now let's look at the diagram. One of the examples we use in real life in our public administration development. So when you want to understand the complexity of the public administration. When we want to optimize and on the other hand, when we want to communicate it to different Stakeholders, we use visual diagrams. For example, when we look from the bottom, we see the public entity, the organization, grants, IT system which accesses the data in public registers. So society systems -- on the top from the computerization regulations. But they could be in some specific domain, for example. Health domain or finance domain. They also have to meet requirements of the left-hand side from the domain interoperability framework. And also has to apply with the architecture. So we have organizations, systems and regulations. And also in the upper left corner, some notion. Notion of interoperability. So principles and visual models. Organization and development. Principles and models lead to better understand digital government which are reduction of administration complexity. Contribute to increase in interoperability reuse and effectiveness of whole system of public administration.
And now we are coming to the subject of sustainability. To improve the state and availability of desirable materials or conditions over the long-term. And usually, the sustainability is defined as having three aspects. Social, environmental and economic sustainability. And now, I got a question to you. What is the most important aspect from your point of view?
>> MARIUSZ PRZYBYSZEWSKI: So you have the link to the solution where you can vote for three possibilities. So I encourage you.
>> MICHAL BUKOWSKI: So let's wait for a while for the voting. Of course, every vote counts and nothing is bad, nothing is good. We see some changes. Okay. Now we see that for a group, generally speaking, all aspects of sustainability are equality valuable. Will come back to this later. And I will show you the final effect. Coming back to the presentation to the aspects of sustainability. So I talked about three aspects. And how architect in the government support different aspects of sustainability. First, social. When we provide visually understandable information about the complex system of public administration, we inform citizens, inform other organizations how the government digital government is constructed. And how it is going to be developed. So we are better serving. And on the other hand engaging citizens of the democratic society. They could have a vault on it. There is another aspect and environmental aspect. When we reduce the complexity of the information technology system which support public tasks, we also reduce the number of the information technology systems or public required to fulfill the goals of the requirement. Less expenditure in the electric energy. Less pollution of the environment. We have negative impact on the environment. And also when there is a lessee electronic devices required to achieve goals, we are having public expenditures. And we in Poland publish principles and models such as presented on this slide on the polish government web site to inform and engage all Stakeholders. You have screen shot from polish web site. So on one hand within the government, we strongly advice policy makers to take into account the existing ICT landscape shown on these models. And we involve Stakeholders. And to involve Stakeholders, we publish principles and models based on this information and the encouragement to consultations. So it builds in more inclusive administration and digital government at the same time. More information about this topic is presented on the IGF web site. We provided background paper. And I thank you for presentation.
>> MARIUSZ PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Thank you for presentation. Now we will give the floor to our participants. Those who are here on site and those who are online can ask a question by raising a hand or typing question or comment. I encourage you to do so. Do we have a mic?
>> Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you for the presentation. My name is Dennis. I am working at the United Nations department of economic and social affairs. My question is national legal services are important. But also it's important at the city level. In the publication that we launch every other year, United Nations e-government survey, we started looking at the cities. And specifically the most popular city in each UN member state. So I wanted to find out how much of these ideas are spread among the city's municipalities in Poland. Thank you.
>> MICHAL BUKOWSKI: Thank you for the interesting question. The capital stuff you mentioned is very good in providing effective electronic services. Citizen Poland Iran of public administration. Local administration. This approach. Government enterprise architecture started within the government administration several years ago. And it mattered. We incorporated the requirements for the IT systems to conform to that government enterprise architecture. Our aim is to make a cascade of this government enterprise from a strategy point of view. So from the point of view of the minister through the whole government of administration down to the local and regional administration. In one of the first slides I showed the different levels of the government. So right now, the cities, the local administration have their own approach. We are not harmonized it yet. Preparing legal acts and preparing some funding which will support through all the country.
>> MARIUSZ PRZYBYSZEWSKI: I would like to add that cities as you have asked about is a self government. We cannot order the implementation directly. We tried to cooperate through the unions or the city's regions and on-going cooperations. We will implement the architecture also in the government cities. So any other question?
>> Thank you very much. My name is Declan. I work as a strategist with the lawyer's hub best of Nyrobi, Kenya. I have two questions. One is a bit related. How do you apply this digital government system in governments that have federal states or autonomous systems?
Alluded to the limit of cooperation. How do you measure efficiency?
Specific instruments at given times?
>> MICHAL BUKOWSKI: First the cooperation in different levels. In Poland, we have national interoperability framework. And we would like to incorporate some of our government enterprise architecture requirements into this law. And this is abiding for all levels of administration. Build opportunity to prepare the cascade of the government under administration architecture. In Poland, we have different type of public funding for the solutions. And when we take into account the government administration, there are strict processes for applying for funding and proposal of the solutions are the government enterprise architecture. As I mentioned in the first question, so far, the public administration on the regional level and local level were not tested against the conformance with the architecture. We are running right now and starting funding in Poland. Within this program, there are requirements with -- it is very important because not only local administration reuses some of the solutions provided to run public tasks. But also, it builds the own solutions which have to be interoperable and not duplicate to the central government. The second question was about the measurement of the effectiveness. When we think about the effectiveness of the digital administration, it's measured, for example, on the European level. There are some assessments of digital administration Poland and reason with other countries. There is a web site run by the European commission. It is called join up. And there are information about the maturity of the different aspects of every country including Poland. And also, when we think internally about the efficiency of such approach, government enterprise approach, we could measure it, for example, by the reduction of the number of solutions required to perform the public tasks. If we, for example, within the architecture provide central solution for the documents, many of the administrations, they do not have to spend money to buy or develop solutions. To be state of prepared solutions.
>> MARIUSZ PRZYBYSZEWSKI: I will apply for the first question. Which we don't have actually. So we have the settle government and many of the tasks is given by the government. Some of them it's not. They have their own independence. So if you would like to follow some ideas which is not covered by the local government would just cooperate. And we encourage through different advantages. They are finances and the best technical solutions we can offer centrally and use it and follow our issues.
>> I have another question this time at the national level. So the way we measure a government at the United Nations is looking at the portal and human capital. If the people in Poland can use the online services. And also the infrastructure if there is sufficient infrastructure to access online services and use those. I would like to learn more about your views and your projects on that. Not only for the goal but other projects to increase digital skills. That's my first question. The second one is about the usage. Do you collect usage data about the services you deliver online. And reconsider some of the services are normal relevant. And what are the most active services now?
>> MARIUSZ PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Those questions go to some other responsibilities.
>> MICHAL BUKOWSKI: Maybe I can respond to the second question. The measurement of the public services available online. So there is web analytics system connected to major public services. And data collected are not only taking into account into the government and to evaluate the effectiveness of the services. Also are viable online for the public. So we have a special dedicated web site which collects the data. So the visitors and internal information. How many service forms were applied to the government with each case. It's not only used for the opt mization of services but also made publically available to anybody online. So it's related to the measurement.
>> MARIUSZ PRZYBYSZEWSKI: So regarding the data you collected, experience of providing those data in the past. So I have experienced also the situation where maybe the data you were given was the institution responsible for the issues. But they were collected wrongly. We try to make it better. If you wish to receive some date information about projects which are actually not -- they are located just next to us. So connect collect them and provide you no problem with that. I don't see any question online. No, there is no question.
>> MICHAL BUKOWSKI: Check for a question and I will respond something more to your question. From our point of view, enterprise and architecture, we see the competences of the public servants are key element to the development of the systemic approach for the whole government. So right now, we are preparing the draft of the new framework. And we invited the department which specialty are the digital competences into the work so we could see if we set some requirements within the law for the public administration. How to address the development of human capability on the side of the government to be able to realize proper capabilities. So we also have a focus on it.
>> MARIUSZ PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Still no questions online. If you have some last question, we can have it. If not, we are overtime already. Thank you very much for your attendance. All of you online and on site. All the information. The background paper which is available at the IGF site. And I will provide you the special information. Thank you very much.
>> MICHAL BUKOWSKI: Thank you.