Venera Petrova’s column about the government’s loss of IT ambitions

The government has decided on financing and development scenarios for Gostekh – for the period from 2024 to 2030, the planned amount of federal spending is estimated at 238.9 billion rubles, as follows from the updated project for the digital transformation of public administration. Let us remind you that Gostekh was supposed to be a way to save on replication of code already purchased by the state, but the figures in its plans are comparable to the costs of non-unified code. In the presentation of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, presented back in 2021, the total cost of maintaining 826 federal GIS and 3,303 regional systems was estimated at 170 billion rubles. for three years (plus a request for their development in the amount of 118 billion rubles).

This, however, would not be so bad – what is important is what is expected to be obtained for this money. An industry transformation project traditionally contains several development options – in this case, “Natural Future” and “Target State”. The first, as explained by the Ministry of Digital Development, is a future in which circumstances do not change and the state does not have any stimulating influence; in the second, measures are put in place to purposefully achieve the required indicators. In this state, 101 services will be created on the platform by the end of 2025, and by the end of 2030, 100% of the federal and regional GIS from the number to be formed on Gostekh will be on it.

The clause “from the number of subjects” in documents of this level is significant. The “defensive” capabilities of individual departments lead to the fact that the lists of GIS that will not be included in Gostec (and their budgets will remain under the control of scattered government customers) may expand, sources in the industry told us, or in any case, they will move to the platform may take a while. In particular, with regard to GIS, which are objects of critical information infrastructure, it is a different story – the decision to “move” them is made by the head of the department.

Although the Ministry of Digital Development says that different scenarios are possible and the strategy involves constant work on this document and its updating and adaptation to changes, “total Gostekh” is probably not among them. An indirect confirmation of this can be the transfer of the “selection” of GIS for transition to the platform to the presidium of a government commission, not all of whose decisions are public. As one Kommersant interlocutor joked, “in terms of the degree of concealment of information, we have already approached the “best” times of the USSR.” However, there is no point in this concealment – the interested business roughly understands who will be in Gostekh and who will not, no worse than the government commission, the rest are not interested in this, and hiding the very fact that the idea of ​​“code reuse” may lose in the competition The idea of ​​departmental control of the IT budget will still not work.