Reden, Interviews

Speech by State Secretary Morak at the "eGovernment for All Europeans" seminar (Englisch)

Fellow Ministers, Commissioner, Ladies and Gentlemen!

Firstly, for those of you joining us this morning for the first time, let me extend a warm welcome to you to Vienna. I trust that you will have time to explore the city and even to see some of the subtle ways in which information technologies – in the eGovernment sector in particular – is improving the life of all.

For those of you who joined us already at yesterday evening’s IT and Telecom Ball, I trust that you all have sore feet from an evening of dancing and that you are now invigorated and buzzing with ideas for what promises to be a very interesting and exciting day of work ahead of us today. Our ambitions today are twofold:

Firstly - as I will outline shortly - we aim to agree on and commit to practical steps towards implementing the ambitious targets set out in the European Commission’s working document “Signposts for eGovernment to 2010”. We have achieved much within our respective member states but the spotlight today is turned to what we can achieve between our member states, and to the specific and additional issues that we face in developing cross-border and pan-European services.

Secondly, we aim to provide an important input to the policy-making processes at a European level that will be needed in order to achieve those targets. Although we will see and hear about a wide range of technologies and capabilities today, our focus is on what is required from policy-makers in order to maximise the benefits of those technologies in line with our policy and social objectives.

In opening this event, however, it would be remiss of me as Minister responsible for eGovernment not to highlight some of the success stories here in Austria. So, before we turn our attention to the business of the day, I would like to briefly mention some developments in eGovernment services in Austria.

In common with other countries, we have given considerable attention over the last few years – at the national, regional and locals levels – to the development of online services by public administrations for the benefit of businesses and of our citizens.

Our citizen-card framework for electronic identity management is widely available through bank cards, health cards, student-identification card and in addition, through mobile phones. You all have it with you today, on the conference badge, and I would invite you all to sign up and try out some of the services that are available using our unique approach to electronic identification and authentication.

This framework is used in Austria by a cooperative partnership of federal, regional, city and communal government and the private sector, both in the e-Government, e-Procurement as well as in the e-Health or in the e-Banking sectors.

In public administration, we have rolled out a uniform electronic document workflow and filing system and that is used across all Ministries. We have also developed a range of applications and reference systems from population and land registers to an electronic legislative drafting system. We have agreed on an e-Government act giving the comprehensive legal basis for the implementation of our holistic approach.

We have also established a public service portal that serves as a nationwide digital public office support system for citizens and entrepreneurs.

This site - help.gv.at – has received the 2003 European Commission’s e-Government Award for being the best service-offer in Europe and offers some 1,000 e-forms for over 150 life situations in several languages and is compliant with the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines to the top level, “triple A compliant”.

Full details of our infrastructure and policy framework can be seen in the “eGovernment ABC” that has been distributed to all participants.

Much of the infrastructure in place – together with the policy and technology frameworks supporting them – has, inevitably, a strong national focus. A principal concern in each country is first and foremost to serve its people and promote economy. But we are also part of the European project, and as a member state of the European Union, we are fully committed to addressing the growing need also for cross-border and pan-European eGovernment services. It is in order to address these needs that we are gathered here today for this high-level seminar, that we have entitled “eGovernment for all Europeans”.

The European Union rightly prides itself of its principles of freedom of movement - of people, goods, capital and services. The exercise of those freedoms requires – and has always required – close cooperation between our administrations. Whether it is the right of establishment in another EU country, or the collection of VAT on goods in the country of sale; whether the mutual recognition of qualifications, or the common nomenclatures needed for the clear and safe labelling of foodstuffs and drugs; whether the right to travel with a simple national identity card, or the fluidity of financial transactions enabled by the single European currency – all of these success stories of the European Union we now take for granted.

The exercise of these freedoms of movement is enshrined in many key policies and increasingly concern the electronic domain. But the electronic domain throws up a new series of challenges from electronic identity and authentication, through to mutual recognition and use of electronic documents and processes between different local, regional and national systems, all demanding ever greater interoperability between administrative systems across Europe.

We face something of a dilemma: on the one hand, there is no formal, legal basis for mandatory coordinated EU action regarding the functioning of our public administrations. Put bluntly, nothing in the EU treaties obliges our administrations to work together in the area of eGovernment, at least not directly.

On the other hand, however, if we do not act in concert, we could face a potentially embarrassing irony: that we erect electronic barriers to the exercise of those EU-wide freedoms of movement because of an exclusively national focus of our eGovernment strategies, and this, precisely in the one domain – Cyberspace – that knows no natural borders!

We must therefore rely on our mutual willingness to cooperate together in finding mutually acceptable solutions. Let us remind ourselves just what is at stake, with a few examples.

Firstly, it is estimated that public procurement contracts account for upwards of 15% of the European Union’s GDP. Any public tender over a threshold value must be published in such a manner that companies throughout the Union can apply and compete, irrespective of their national base in the Union. In implementing new rules governing electronic public procurement in Europe, we need to examine the range of policies and technologies deployed and ensure that such choices do not constitute a hidden barrier to fair competition. It is imperative therefore that related technology and policy issues are addressed – such as the validity of official electronic documents and of electronic signatures in different countries.

A second example concerns electronic identity. Many eGovernment services across Europe – such as filing tax returns on line or applying for a state benefit – inevitably require proof of a person’s identity or status by the competent authorities. Requirements of proof of identity or entitlement however vary widely from authority to authority and as more services become available in the electronic space, the difficult issue arises of online, electronic identification.

Each of our administrations struggles to find the right balance between three important factors in electronic identity management: what is technologically feasible; what is socially and politically desirable; and what is publicly acceptable. All three of these factors are in constant flux and the balance will depend on national circumstances. Attempting to strike the right balance at a European level will be even more of a challenge: There is no desire to create a common, centralised model nor do we have a mandate to do so. We will nonetheless have to find a means of enabling interoperability between different national standards, to the satisfaction of all.

The third example concerns a more directly practical need for cooperation. Each of our administrations is faced with limited resources and budgets to provide an increasing range of eGovernment services. As our administrations start out on each new project, they are often unaware that other administrations – in their own country or beyond – may have already tackled the same problem and provided a solution which – as a public good – they would be willing to share with others in the public space. Sometimes, the sheer scale of the solution required may be beyond the resources available to an administration acting alone but that could be managed through the careful and thoughtful sharing of resources and solutions. Our idea for the development of an eGovernment Resources Network, first raised at the Ministerial Conference in Como and again last November in Manchester and now gaining momentum, is an attempt to address this and provide mechanisms for greater resource sharing and cooperation between our public services.

Together with the ever-present concerns over security and trust on the Internet – addressed yesterday in detail and examined further this morning – we will explore these issues today.

In doing so, we need to keep in mind the interests and priorities of the end users –  whether they are citizens, businesses or indeed officials in public administrations, they should not be concerned with the underlying technologies or processes that make up electronically-delivered services but only with using them as simply as possible.

That has been a priority for most of us in the delivery of our eGovernment services within our countries. This is even more true for pan-European services where users may not be familiar at all with the formalities and procedures of another country’s administration, let alone the language. It must now figure as a central concern for the delivery of services between our countries.

The main goal of this event is therefore, to gain commitment to a set of joint actions around the issues of eGovernment today: far from being purely technical, many of the open issues concern important legal, political and organisational factors that need to be addressed urgently if eGovernment Services are to become fully enabled.

Our objective must be to propose specific actions for the development of sustainable and seamless pan-European electronic services, by assessing what needs be done to make them happen, not only at the level of national administrations but also as a result of cooperative efforts at the EU level.

At the end of the day today, we will present an “executive summary” of our findings and proposals that can serve both as an important policy input and as a starting point for practical, focussed work, not only between our administrations but in cooperation with the European Commission and the private sector.

Let’s get to work!