It would be smooth without paper – Newspaper Kommersant No. 54 (7499) dated 03/30/2023

A targeted survey of officials who directly work with data in the ecosystem of the federal government revealed significant discrepancies in the level of their assessment of the digitalization of arrays of documents (30–100%), as well as the loss of motivation by performers to expand them. The document flow of ministries and departments remains heterogeneous, and the prevalence of fully digital formats suitable for automated processing is comparable to the probability of stumbling upon scans and paper documents that are not suitable for it. Clearing and full-fledged digitization of data is hampered by the lack of competencies and built-in schemes for joint work with their arrays.

The March study of the state data digitalization status in federal authorities – conducted by the Polylog agency – revealed a significant variation in the degree of “digital progress” between ministries and departments: while 67% of those surveyed declared that at least 70% of data were digitized in their department (of which 28% rated it at 90-100%), 17% of respondents claimed that no more than 30% of the data in their field of work was digitized.

The survey sample is small, but targeted – data was collected in the form of an anonymous survey of employees of 15 government agencies who were asked to share a questionnaire with colleagues and from other departments, a total of 72 people participated in the survey, most of whom either work directly with the data or coordinate this activity. As Polylog explained to Kommersant, respondents talked about data stored in registers and databases, as well as in the form of electronic documents signed with an electronic signature. However, Alexander Malakhov, head of the Digital Development direction at the Center for Strategic Research, is confused by the survey methodology – the categories of digital documents are not obvious from the report, and because of this, the gap in the actual degree of digitalization may be “not so huge.”

Official statistics also give other figures: for example, when the federal project “Digital Public Administration” required 95% electronic accessibility of mass socially significant services by 2030, in reality, at the end of 2022, the figure reached 99.97% – however, the opinion of people directly involved in achieving of these indicators, it may be of interest in the question of how the implementation of KPIs and substantive tasks diverge.

In particular, all survey respondents who directly work in the digital environment of the White House declare the presence of scanned documents in it (in fact, images that do not allow electronic tools to fully work with them), 95% mention excel tables as working formats. The prevalence of modern electronic documents with electronic signatures is less – 94%, entries in registers and databases are even lower – 89%, and two-thirds of employees still encounter paper documents. At the same time, “the provision of services without civil servants or with their minimal participation is possible only on the basis of high-quality machine-readable information in databases, and not scans,” says Lyudmila Bogatyreva, head of the Polylog digital solutions department.

Civil servants name the lack of motivation as the main obstacle to full-fledged digitization (46% of respondents), the main incentive is legislative requirements (74%). Commercial companies have a clear internal motivation – increasing profits, which is possible due to the efficiency of work through digitalization, while for officials, an external incentive comes first, says Lyudmila Bogatyreva. Working in a digital environment requires new skills, which can also slow down the process. “It’s difficult to work with data, extracting the necessary elements to solve management problems is still more of an art than a routine process, experience and a deep understanding of the subject area are needed,” says Evgeny Styrin, head of the international laboratory for digital transformation in public administration at the Higher School of Economics. Also, a significant proportion of respondents called competition for control over data an obstacle – maintaining the array by several departments (24%) and several divisions within the department (33%).

Venera Petrova, Oleg Sapozhkov