Public services are in no hurry at Gostekh – Kommersant

The Ministry of Digital Development proposes to postpone for a year – until July 1, 2024 – the launch of the FSIS “Unified System for the Provision of State and Municipal Services” (FSIS PGS) on the Gostekh platform. The system is designed to become a “gateway” for the provision of public services by authorities – in particular, to save the regions from the need to spend money on developing and launching their own solutions. In an explanatory note to the project, the department notes that the transfer is associated with problems in coordinating the necessary documents in the government, while Kommersant’s sources on the market talk about the difficulties of sharing risks when migrating a large information system from the Rostelecom ecosystem, which is responsible for the public services portal, to Gostekh “, the operator of which is Sberbank.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation posted on the portal regulation.gov.ru a draft government decree on postponing for a year – until July 1, 2024 – the launch of FSIS PGS on the single digital platform Gostekh. The department explains this with a new edition of the regulation on Gostech (Government Decree No. 2338 of December 16, 2022), which requires the regulatory framework to be finalized for placing FSIS on the platform (Gostech, we recall, should become an ecosystem for state software that allows you to reuse and design new systems already paid for by the budget). The requirement to allocate FSIS PGS to a separate system was introduced by government decree No. 1152 dated June 28, 2022, now this resource operates as a module of the FSIS “Federal Register of State and Municipal Services (Functions)” (customer – Ministry of Economy, operator and owner – Ministry of Digital Development).

The FSIS itself, in particular, should become a special cloud platform that will allow regions and municipalities to process citizens’ applications received from a single portal of public services – thanks to it, the constituent entities of the Russian Federation will not have to, as they do now, develop and launch their own solutions for this with different functionality and technical characteristics (for details, see “Kommersant” dated June 29, 2022). The Ministry of Digital Transformation has been appointed to be responsible for the development and operation of the FSIS.

In turn, the office of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko told Kommersant that the shift in terms was due to a revision of the format for placing IP on the platform. “Instead of partial integration of the FSIS, the PGS will switch to the platform completely, which takes significantly more time, and will allow synchronizing the work on the transition with those federal executive authorities that will switch to the platform in 2023–2024,” they noted.

In the explanatory note to the project on the postponement, however, it is indicated that in order to create and develop a GIS on the Gostech platform, a plan approved by government order is needed. But in February, the department of Maksut Shadayev developed a draft government decree, which proposed transferring the authority to approve the plan to the presidium of the government commission on digital development in order to speed up work. The new order, however, did not work (as of May 3, 2023, the project was being coordinated in the government apparatus), and the draft government order on approving the plan (according to the “old” model) is only being submitted by the Ministry of Digital to the White House. “With this in mind, the development of FSIS PGS on the Gostech platform until July 1, 2023 is impossible,” the developer points out.

Several sources in the IT market, however, told Kommersant that the bureaucratic vicissitudes of information systems also have a substantive reason: the fact is that the operator of Gostekh is Sber, and the module that ensures the operation of the FSIS PGS on the public services portal is a subsidiary structure of Rostelecom. According to Kommersant’s interlocutors, the delay in the “moving” of the FSIS from one ecosystem and its integration into another is due to the technical difficulties of sharing risks and responsibilities between the former and future “holders” – without a clearly established procedure, both parties can receive claims related to both possible leaks data, and with the performance of the GIS as a whole.

Venera Petrova