2017•03•02 Guimarães
As part of its ongoing series of seminars, UNU-EGOV Government Fellow Nata Goderdzishvili delivered, on 28 February 2017, a presentation on the theme “Development Path of Digital Georgia: From e-Government Initiatives to e-Governance Frameworks”.
Nata told the story of Georgia’s digital transformation and on how Georgia took its first historic steps from bureaucratic paper world to build strong ICT based ecosystem and sustainable information society. How accessibility and service quality has been achieved by the widespread application of ICT in all sectors and all levels of public administration in addition to enactment of supportive governance, legal, strategy, policy frameworks and technical infrastructure. She explained the reasons why some projects failed and how others succeeded. Nata repeatedly emphasized the strong alignment between e-government with the political agenda and how political ownership, leadership, inter-agency cooperation and collaborative governance are key factors in the process of ICT enabled reform in Georgia’s past and present.
In 2006, nobody believed that even a very simple, basic public services was accessible without spending hours or even days in paying bribes. Public and elected officials at all levels of government, go-betweens and intermediaries were all on the take. At the time no one could imagine the day where application and issuing of a passport would be possible in less than a day and with only one visit to a fancy and citizen-centric public service delivery halls. Nobody would have believed that the registering of a business could be as easy as 1, 2, 3 and fully online – not even requiring an actual visit to a government agency- or that citizens no longer be carrier pigeons between government departments to just got a stamp on a piece of paper.”
Nata is the Head of the Legal Department at the Data Exchange Agency in Georgia. In her role as a lawyer, Nata has had first-hand experience and been actively involved all major ICT and e-Government initiatives and projects during the last 7 years. Nata is at UNU-EGOV as a Government Fellow for the period 1 January to 31 March 2017 and is actively contributing with her knowledge and experience for the project EGOV for Context-Specific Public Service Delivery and enrich the project with Georgian case studies and country-focused reforms.
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