Towards citizen-centered digital public services: lessons from a Romania – Republic of Moldova dialogue

Radu Puchiu: Welcome! I would like to start with those who are still in the room with us today with a very direct question and I want you to raise your hand. How many of you have had an interaction with the state in the last year where you felt truly respected, listened to and well served?

This is exactly what I want to talk about today, because things are divided very strangely. The perception is that we do not have enough public services, but, what do you see, they often happen. I think we need to talk more and, beyond strategies and plans and so on, I want this panel to go very concretely.

Let’s see what happens at the grassroots level, if you will: how a good public service is born, how we can make it beyond a promise or a slide in a presentation, make it a real experience for people.

And, so that we can answer, today I have invited Nicoleta Colomeeț, Răzvan Jiga and Gheorghe Damian to join us – and I invite them to the stage – Nicoleta Colomeeț, Răzvan Jiga and Gheorghe Damian.

We discussed, you discussed how these public services actually happen and I want to ask you, to go to the area of ​​examples, in fact, with each of you. And I want to start with Nicoleta Colomeeț.

Moldova, at least from Romania, is seen as an example. It has good services, many things have happened and those who are familiar with digitalization have seen that they are happening very well. And I want to ask you which is the example that shows most clearly what a truly citizen-oriented public service means. I know there are many, but can we choose one?

Nicoleta Colomeeț: First of all, good evening and I am glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I said and I say it to those who are still here and those who are watching us online: next time, call us with a keynote.

I will also make a small mention today. The 16-day campaign of activism against violence, including digital violence, begins. And we invite you all to join us in combating digital violence in general.

But to return to the question you asked, first of all, the Electronic Government Agency of the Republic of Moldova is that mythological institutional creature that, apparently, Romania dreams of from everything I listened to today and heard. All that Romania wants: we want a central point to decide, to dictate rules, to tell us how to do things, to enforce, to have some kind of capital, institutional and so on, to be bureaucratic, but also to have tech people.

Well, we are this agency in the Republic of Moldova. We are organized directly under the State Chancellery and we have a very broad mandate. We manage and operate over 28 platforms and services and systems that actually set the basic architecture, the digital infrastructure based on building blocks of the Republic of Moldova — reusable building blocks, something that we actively and insistently recommend to you and we will not stop until we succeed in everything and see the implementation. Someone has to fight for us too, right?

Well, we are like that, more categorical, some of us, in Moldova. And we also had the mandate to do something that is called, in the classic format, the re-engineering and modernization of public services. I call this “gentle bulldozing”, because if you say “bulldozing” it sounds a bit aggressive, but if you put “gentle” in front it is gentler.

But we have this mandate to have a methodology, first of all, of re-engineering. And it, in fact, is the point that guides the way we approach institutions or how we give institutions the mechanism and tools to digitize services and platforms.

At the same time, our basic belief is that we do not digitize bureaucracy. So this must be something that must enter the blood everywhere. We do not digitize bureaucracy. I am not interested, I do not want to hear, I do not know, it does not matter.

In some aspects with more success, in other aspects with less, but, in practical terms, we really succeed. And considering the fact that we have this mandate of governance, of general oversight, we can really enforce, including the once only principle.

I’m getting a little off the main point of the question, but I think it’s important to mention this. Because you have to think about the fundamentals then. Service, after all, is the expression of the relationship between the citizen and the state within a context, within a life event or within an action, a necessity.

I would start a good and ideal service with the question of whether, in practical terms, we need it. And if it brings added value to the citizen or the state. And if it does, what is that added value? That what? That it brings money to the budget? That it gives work to a bureaucrat? That what does it do? So that’s the first thing.

In a very practical way, we, at the agency, start most of our presentations with a slide with a very old photo in front of the Ministry of Justice. It is an image that is the precursor to one of the most popular services that are being digitized in the Republic of Moldova, and that is the request for a criminal record — and not just a criminal record, but also its apostille.

So, in the Republic of Moldova, people would gather in line in front of the Ministry of Justice at 5 o’clock, they would make lists on paper, fight among themselves, sell seats, there was a van that sold seats. That’s how people would stand in line. And that was one of the first services that were digitized, in a practical way, in Moldova.

We had other iterations. That van no longer exists. This is the most requested service, it has hundreds of thousands of requests per year, completely automated, delivered online, delivered online with an apostille, translated into all possible languages ​​and we still deliver it anywhere in the world, the physical document, if you need it. We deliver it predominantly, by default, digitally, in what we call the personal cabinet and, at the same time, you receive it anywhere in the world you want.

This is an example of a popular service that works well. But what is the recipe? The recipe is simple. One: we don’t digitize bureaucracy. And two: we take common sense and put it on the table.

We, at the agency, only this year — actually, how good we are — only this year did we institutionalize and start hiring experience designers. Because I come from the private sector, I come from product management and product marketing and I know how much experience matters, actually. You can have the best re-engineering specialists, you can have the best business analysts and still have three buttons that you don’t need.

And then we are obsessed, in a practical way, now, in Moldova, with experience. We are obsessed with coherence and we are obsessed with strategic centralization of access. And when we talk about single access points, let’s make them unique. And that’s what we’re doing. I hope this answer is quite broad and has some ramifications.

Radu Puchiu: I thought this wasn’t just gentle bulldozing, but it sounds good. That’s very gentle. Thank you!

I’m going to Răzvan Jiga, because he heads the entire IT&C department at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on which many services depend. Maybe few people know how many depend on your ministry. And I want to ask you the same question: what is the best example, what does a better, simpler relationship between the state and the citizen mean? What was the hardest thing to simplify in your service?

Răzvan Jiga: First of all, good evening everyone, thank you for the invitation. The hardest thing is to start something. And, from our own experience, we say that the first service was also the most complicated.

Now, as it happens, our colleague and good friend from the Republic of Moldova also started talking about the criminal record. Indeed, three years ago, we also started with the criminal record, with the implementation within a project with non-reimbursable financing. And I have to give a little bit of credit: it all came against the backdrop of a small failure.

We learned from a failure of an acquisition that targeted a software development, which we thought we had done almost perfectly. I have to admit this. And it turned out, over time, that the solution we proposed was, in fact, one without purpose. We recovered very quickly from this failure and decided that, together with those in the business area — because we are talking about criminal records, our colleagues from the Romanian Police — together with our technicians, few but hearty, to embark on this path. 

And we succeeded. We have until now the MIA service hub: over a million criminal records signed with a qualified certificate, over a million users, over 40 million accesses. There are about 17 services at the moment and more are coming.

But the decision to start was difficult. Because, at that time, we were not considering the issue of financing. We had financing secured through OIPSI. We really had an extraordinary relationship with the financier — it seems to me that he is no longer the Minister of European Funds — but we really had a good relationship in this area and they understood us. What they could not do was strictly related to the personnel side: specialized personnel, personnel from the business area, business analysts.

Somehow, our kind-hearted team took over all these roles. It really found, in the business area, people who understood that we should not digitize bureaucracy. We really did make some fantastic fine-tunings on these first services and they became an example for the following services.

I will not hide from you the fact that even nowadays there is a temptation to put an application with the “undersigned” online. I mean, we still have this impulse from some beneficiaries in the public sector to request, on the institution’s website, when you request a service, to pass another “signature”, to upload your data. And it’s a struggle, speaking of process re-engineering.

If we had realized then how complex the development of the service is — because it turned out to be quite complex — but, especially, the subsequent operation, the administration… Because you go from the physical counter area, you go online, you no longer have 8 hours of interaction with end-users, you have 24/7. And you have n times more people who, at best, you say you thank, but, in fact, you have more dissatisfied.

The IT structures in public administration can confirm that, in fact, for us, digitalization means quite a lot — not just loading, because that is not a problem — but quite a lot of problems that we need to address. Many are, let’s say, relatively technical, which we solve, others are at the business level and here we need to collaborate with the process owners.

Whether we are talking about those who actually deliver the services, or those who provide data for those services. A concrete example: the registration of persons. With the implementation of this first service, we had to integrate, we interoperated the SNIP with the MIA service hub, with the Romanian Police — with the ghișeu.ro area. We collaborated very well in this area with the banking side, where we also had to bring 3D Secure. It was implemented as a push and as a need to secure access from the counter to the hub.

This complexity that we are discussing, I tell you, it appears along the way. But if you have a kind-hearted team that wants to do it — and I found this team, I was lucky to find this team here, at the Internal Affairs — and build this first service together with them and all the others after that, it goes much easier.

Radu Puchiu: Ciugud had a kind-hearted man, I saw from our clip and, speaking of gentle bulldozing, you were not gentle with the demolition of the counter, from what I remember. Very nice. And I want to ask you: what is the example that had the greatest impact? Where the people, the citizens, really were — that is, the city hall responded to what the people want, not necessarily to the bureaucratic processes behind it.

Gheorghe Damian: Well, of course the biggest impact was everything that digitalization of public services means and we did it somehow gradually. We started with the payment of local taxes and fees. And, speaking of trust, we have an integrated management system at the institution level. I see in real time each employee, what they are working on, I have various reports on various offices.

I was looking at March 31 this year: the tax collection rate was somewhere around 70%, and the day before yesterday I actually looked — the tax collection rate at the level of the Ciugud Commune, with the day before yesterday, in fact, was somewhere around 98%. Which means that the service provided by us is doing its job, that the trust in public services is very good.

What I like very much now and what we are implementing is a collaboration with the Union of Public Notaries. You know that, in order to make a notarial deed, you have to go to the city hall, pay all your taxes, get a tax certificate — that you have no debts — after which you have to go to the notary, and also take some documents from the city hall.

And we have agreed with some public notaries that we will give them limited access to our database. The citizen goes to the notary; if he has debts, the notary pays his debts, gets his tax certificate, gets the documents he needs from our database, makes the documents, no longer makes the person come to the city hall with the notarial deed, but uploads it directly into our platform and, somehow, everyone gets paid.

It was very difficult to convince the notaries that it is for their benefit, but in fact, it is for the benefit of the person. The person is no longer walked to three counters to earn something. This is what we are dealing with now.

And what is very important — there was a lot of talk here about bureaucracy — since 2009 we have measured the time that the citizen has to wait for various documents at the city hall. How do we make it so that the citizen no longer has to go to the counter to get a document?

And since then we have, for example, the possibility of getting your urban planning certificate in 24 hours, your building permit in 48 hours, all this by uploading your documents digitally. The big problem we have is with the files for building permits and I am glad that you are here. We have raised this issue many times at the level of the Ministry of Development, because we know very well that architects and verifiers like the biggest and most numerous stamps on documents.

Maybe we can find a way to force them to give up stamps and give us the documents in digital format. We ask for them on CD, but not stamped and, God forbid, a lawsuit, they don’t stand up. If we no longer have an archive, the only documents we find in the archive now are the permanent ones and are the documents for building permits, which are very voluminous in a locality where there is quite a lot of construction.

Yes, I’ll stop. I could talk a lot.

Nicoleta Colomeeț: We, Moldova, have solved this thing. We, by law, have obliged. First of all, we are now sorting out all the permissive actions and permits and so on, to reduce them.

In general, in Moldova we have over 50–60% of digital public services available online, 75% for the business environment, over 50% for citizens — various forms of digitalization, whether it’s front office or full cycle, in short.

At the level of permissive acts, we, by law, said that digital default and it is not discussed. Plus, some local authorities have started to invent all sorts of acts there; some aspects are still being intervened, but we have something called CIJAP, the Automated Information System for the Management and Issuance of Permissive Acts.

So, theoretically, each issuer has a back-office behind it where it receives and manages this information. In turn, everything is based on Building Blocks Architecture. In turn, the citizen, in fact, has a single access point where he comes and chooses what type of act, authorization and so on he needs.

We are now going to make version two. The first was how it was done, this will be a little more usable, but it works and works very well. We issue practically all permissive acts there, so digital default. And this must be regulated at the level of law.

And it is clear that we are a small country, with a big heart. No, it’s a little easier on us in some ways, given our size, but…

Gheorghe Damian: Sure, coming from the top down and making the grassroots understand how important it is. What we lost: we had this chance since 2007, I was talking about PODCA. Now 60 million euros are waiting for us plus 60 million provided by the state. I think it’s a huge chance and we should exploit it. 

Nicoleta Colomeeț: Let me say, considering that we are a little smaller, it is probably sometimes easier for us to have a top-down approach, but for us, if you ask us about one more thing, I also say that a service is a service and we sometimes isolate them, but, at the same time, we make the data work in favor of the citizen and how we build real experiences. 

We have such a wonderful application, it is called EVA. However, we will also integrate it at the web level in EVA; by the end of the year we will launch it. And we, in EVA, have centralized everything. 

We have a module, it’s called “My Data”. In the “My Data” module I see social contributions, tax debts, tax contributions and so on. And we had debts there. It appears nicely in red: tax debts, red, 200 lei, 400 lei, it doesn’t matter, real estate, whatever. And it’s red.

And what do we do? I think this is red. And you, as a citizen, want to act on this red, because instinctively what does red mean? Alert, danger, I have to do something.

And, well, there was a problem with us and we all said: “Hey, we have to put the button here, we have to put the button here, we have to pay here”, especially since we have the integrated payment management system. With us, we operate the on-pay system. All our payments go through the government electronic payment service, practically all state receipts and all state distributions, billions of lei.

That’s it. And I’ll tell you a little statistic — and this is an evidence-based approach focused on and obsessed with the citizen and to continuously simplify, simplify, optimize and introduce good experiences for citizens. We put the button exactly a week before the deadline for paying taxes to the state. It wasn’t intentional, but it worked out well.

And just like we put it there, we, in a week, collected more payments, just through that button alone. So we collected a quarter of the payments that we collected over the last year, from the app, from the entire app.

What else did we do in the next step? We made a partnership with Mastercard, in which, given the fact that we operate, manage the payment platform, we said: “Let’s make a partnership, let’s do incentivizing for people.” And Mastercard said: “Great, we give 10% for everyone who pays from the application.”

And you pay taxes, state taxes and you have 10% cashback from a private company. Great, win-win for everyone. And all these kinds of accents we see very, very useful, but, well, we have the luxury of having a fairly large infrastructure, we have a well-established architecture, we have some things that we can leverage.

Radu Puchiu: The architecture exists. When I go back to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the story is about the interoperability that you had to do. And my curiosity, and I think that of many, is: if you can do it, why is interoperability still a topic for everyone? Can’t we find some models to export? Look, those building blocks that Nicoleta was talking about earlier.

Răzvan Jiga: Yes, I would continue with regard to the infrastructure, also mentioning the fact that after the implementation of the hub, although logically it should have been somehow the other way around, for other reasons that we do not need to bring from history, we were a little late: the electronic identity card appeared.

We have over — or almost — a million holders in less than 10 months. We believe that it is a small record, even if, in other situations, other countries would probably have succeeded a little more; for us it is a record. Because there was a mobilization at the infrastructure level, at the people level and even at the financing level, exemplary, starting with March of this year.

This year too we managed to connect the card, as we called it, to the MIA service hub. Basically, we also have an authentication with the electronic card on the hub. This means that we manage to capitalize on the holders of electronic identity cards for both the MIA portal.

We are in discussions with those from SPV, ANAF, with those from the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Labor, to create the mechanisms — those SDKs, those APIs — capable of allowing authentication on their own portals using the electronic identity card. And, of course, the discussion remains open for local public administration, because we have thought of the electronic identity card as a mechanism not only extremely secure — because there are many security standards that we have implemented — and from the ICAO area, because it is also an identity document, a travel document, but also from the area of ​​public services, electronic services.

We want to go with this type of authentication, along with the others, of course. It doesn’t mean that we have to eliminate user/password or other mechanisms that are already implemented and over time, but it takes a little time, it takes a little resources to reach that interoperability layer that the Ministry of the Interior will not only provide, it must make it available to all public entities. 

And we have assumed this. I repeat: the MIA service hub is also a standard created and the electronic identity card. The civil status part will also come, which has certain issues to be resolved from a technical point of view. I believe that technically we have solutions. 

The interoperability layer remains, let’s say at the business level, which must be a little accommodated, because the processes and flows… Extremely cumbersome, extremely, extremely cumbersome, they put us in difficulty. I coordinate a team, I repeat, of developers who, often, have to effectively hold some kind of, I don’t know, psychoanalysis sessions with end-users, to explain to them that those N registers, those N approvals, those N approval flows have no purpose in the online environment.

Even if we present the existence of some procedures, some GDs, some laws, we can modify them. We can do it.

Radu Puchiu: We can learn from Moldova and from you. We have three minutes left and I would like one minute for each one, a question. If you were to leave one idea today for those who will build public services in the coming years, what would it be? I also asked the president this morning. I will end with you.

Gheorghe Damian: To have confidence. To not give in. Even if, as you said, sometimes we fall, let’s get up, because that is the solution.

I remember when the TV appeared in our house and my grandfather said to me: “Look, you see Judas in the house.” If we all leave with the thought that digitalization, digital transformation, is something bad for our lives, it means that we don’t understand anything and that, in the end, this is the solution, especially for politicians: increasing the voters’ trust in them by using these digital solutions.

Răzvan Jiga: It may seem a little too brave. If we don’t do it, others will. So digitalization will come upon us.

We have the opportunity to take care of it, together with partners, together with people who can — and we have them in the country, both in the public and private sectors. We just have to somehow bring them, under legal conditions, of course, together to deliver. Because otherwise others will come and the conditions will probably be different.

Nicoleta Colomeeț: Digital transformation — let’s cite what brings concrete and real benefits for citizens.

In a practical way, we have done an analysis. And we did a simple analysis, just on the government payment service, Mpay, and we know this: we know that digital transformation brings a return on investment of 100 to 1. Show me an investment project that brings you such a return on investment.

So, first of all, investing in digital transformation is an investment. One.

To mirror what Helen said, we don’t operate projects, we operate products, platforms. We don’t think about one-off solutions. We think about how we operationalize and how we build ecosystems strategically, thoughtfully, planned, to reuse, not to build and invent the wheel every time for the 11th cart in our platform arsenal. 

And most importantly: it shouldn’t be a political battle, because, in the end, everyone wins. And the gain from the time saved, the money saved — and money is saved not only in real money, not only in real RON — money is saved in time, in energy, in nerves, in interaction, in the fact that you make me a misanthrope [unclear]. You made me happy that I didn’t have to interact with a human, in a practical way, at the counter. 

We did another analysis. We thought like this: for digital services, how can we monetize them, bring more money to the agency, try to become self-sufficient. And we said: “Let’s charge 10 lei a top-up for all services that come to us through what we call the electronic platform for digitalizing services.”

Why 10 lei? Because to go by trolleybus one way and the other — in Moldova it costs 6 lei a trip, that means it’s 12 lei. So it’s already cheaper than the round trip, effectively. And we, with 10 lei, close half of our question on the budget.

It’s super simple, everyone benefits. And it’s not a battle, it’s not a fight. It was said earlier here, on stage: there must be a vision and a country strategy, not a political [unclear], because, in the end, once again, everyone benefits.

Every mother, every parent, every elderly person, every pensioner and every entrepreneur.

And then Romania really has, from the Republic of Moldova, all the openness. We gave a preview, we gave a first eyes preview of something we call Ego4Dev, where all our libraries and all shared platforms are integrated, so that our principles on digital platforms can be better understood from a single access point.

And we are here to support you and make a good team, both on reusable platforms, on wallets, and in the AI ​​area, no matter how distant it may seem.

Radu Puchiu: Thank you very much. Robert Berza said at the beginning to look with confidence and optimism. I leave more optimistic after this panel. Thank you very much, in your applause. Thank you.