Octavian Oprea, ADR: “Next year we will reach a degree of digitalization of over 30 percent in the case of life events”

“Romania’s future will be digital or will be lost. We looked at the countries around us or in more distant lands, such as Estonia, which everyone is talking about. These are examples that Romania should take up as soon as possible when it comes to digitization and the identification of resources to transform the way the citizen interacts with the state.

Whether we like it or not, when we talk about digitalization, we mean the elimination of bureaucracy that attracts a number of impediments and a lack of trust of the citizen in public institutions,” Octavian Oprea, vice president, Authority for the Digitalization of Romania (ADR) said during Romania’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan Conference 2022 organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“ADR is at the epicenter of the digital transformation of the Romanian public administration. PNRR in its current form can help Romania in terms of hardware infrastructure. In PNRR we have a component that improves the way in which civil servants interact with digital technologies and bring the citizen into the digital area through various specialization programs.

In PNRR there are two very important milestones that Romania has managed to achieve. These are two legislative changes: the GEO for the government cloud and the interoperability law. The Interoperability Act is an exceptional initiative. Romania needed a normative act by which public institutions understand that granting access to data to other public institutions is not a danger. This law on interoperability helps public institutions to reach another level.

I am convinced that the final form of the government ordinance on the government cloud will have a positive impact for all actors involved and is a tool that Romania needed. Digitization is not always about the hardware infrastructure; we are also talking about high-performance applications adapted to the needs of the citizen.

In the last two years, the ghiseul.ro platform has increased from 350,000 users in December 2019 to 1.4 million. Last year, we had over 1 billion lei in transactions registered on ghiseul.ro, which shows the Romanians’ openness to digitalization.

ADR tries to make available to partner public institutions the infrastructure with applications and know-how to eliminate the bureaucratic process from the provision of public services. We are a reliable partner for the public sector, but especially for the private sector.

Since last year, Romania has a public policy of digitization and e-government which includes about 50 crucial projects, most of them referring to the events in the life of a citizen.

I am convinced that next year, with the support of the Ministry of the Interior, we will reach a degree of digitization of over 30% in the case of life events.”

Full recording of the conference here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5f1JNCEe-I&t=5504s