Ministries, agencies and services are connected to the new GosEDO system

As Kommersant learned, the government apparatus has launched the final stage of the process of digitalization of the executive branch. The electronic document management system for transparent and trusted communication between the White House and ministries and departments has been completed, deployed in a building on Krasnopresnenskaya embankment (about 1.5 thousand workplaces) and will now spread beyond its borders – by July 1 it should cover 27 most ready for this is the responsibility of federal services and agencies, and then, as technical readiness increases, of ministries: from 2025, all federal executive bodies led by the government must be connected to the document flow on the GosEDO portal.

On January 17, the head of the government apparatus, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko gave instructions to the head of the Ministry of Digital Development, Maksut Shadayev, to “put” the State Electronic Documentary System into wide operation – in particular, by March 1, a schedule for “moving” to a new information exchange format for the first 27 federal services and agencies, and before July 1 – all government departments. According to Kommersant, the GosEdo hierarchy is almost flat, jobs are divided into conditionally “registering” (their functionality is limited to document flow and routing), “executive” (allowing meaningful editing and control of the hierarchy of work on documents) and “ministerial” (this is a lightweight option for secure government mobile computers with basic administrative functions). The executor of the state contract for IT support of the system is Rostelecom, which over the past year and a half, under the control of the White House, has brought it to full compliance with the technical specifications.

As Dmitry Grigorenko’s office explained to Kommersant, the new tool, the GosEDO portal, differs from the previous electronic document management system (the so-called EDMS) in two significant properties: it works with fully machine-readable documents, which makes it possible to track the history of approvals and performers (in EDMS of ministries and departments exchanged PDF images of documents, which do not allow, for example, to organize a search by text or details), as well as end-to-end support for a system of electronic signatures that guarantee the authenticity of the texts of sent documents. In addition to working on them, GosEDO monitors the transmission and execution of digital orders.

It should be noted that seemingly technical innovations, the launch of which was being prepared de facto from the moment Mikhail Mishustin arrived in the White House, turned out to be one of the main tools for the executive branch’s adaptation to sharply accelerated changes in the situation – we recall that in 2020, document flow was almost entirely “paper”, and its transformation into a single information ecosystem was carried out de facto “on the go” and required parallel maintenance of “paper” in areas where immediate digitalization was impossible, in order to maintain functionality in the conditions of first the COVID-19 pandemic, and then the military operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine and its consequences. According to Mr. Grigorenko’s office, about 2 million documents per year pass through the White House alone and about 8 thousand legal acts (government resolutions and orders) are adopted. Only the launch of the EDMS as part of a single ecosystem of document flow in the White House staff caused a multiple reduction in the time required to work with documents – for example, the time required for preparing documents for consideration by departments was reduced from ten days to an hour, and the approval and submission of bills to the State Duma was reduced from ten days to one day.

At the moment, 87% of documents in the White House are already “circulated” in electronic form (at the start – no more than 40% and in the format of scanned paper originals), three times in comparison with 2020, to 274 participants, interdepartmental electronic exchange has expanded – now in It involves not only federal executive authorities, but also subordinate organizations. According to the “prototype” of the analytical system for monitoring the implementation of key government tasks already deployed in the EDMS, since 2019, the average time for preparing White House resolutions and orders has decreased sixfold, to a week. Now the government apparatus expects to launch more flexible tools for analyzing public administration processes, which, according to Dmitry Grigorenko, “instantly produce objective data and facts, which helps improve executive discipline and the quality of management decisions” – this, we note, is a de facto response to the frequent internal The executive branch criticizes hasty decision-making due to the participation of departments in the bureaucratic race: if it is possible to correct a rash decision in a few days, the cost of an error really decreases.

Oleg Sapozhkov