for Local Governments

from issuing basic registry documents to providing licenses and permits. This municipality
also has a well functioning Citizen Assistant Center that has been successfully
replicated in dozens of municipality across the country.
Generally, the existing municipality profile features no strategy for the improvement of
ICT usage. Nearly all municipal decision-makers have heard about ICT but there are no
concrete action plans for their implementation. ICT development depends on mayor’s
priorities. At the same time, there is a growing understanding among mayors that the
use of ICT will be unavoidable in the future. If local leading government structure consists
of people who understand and accept the importance of ICTs in a modern government,
then activities in this field will be included in the srategic plans of municipalities
and will be supported. Bigger development projects are mainly dependant on foreign
aid and executed with the assistance of foreign ICT companies. Computerization of
governmental and municipal offices is not systematic: it is quite common that computers
are not networked and not connected to internet, even if internet connection in the
office exists.
There are no mechanisms/fixed procedures for ICT budget planning. The percentage
of budget spent on ICT and its development of municipalities is low. The low budget is
spent on phone communications and in very rare cases on the ICT. Very few databases
and information systems exist in the municipalities. Information is not integrated with
the databases of the branches of the ministries.
After the implementation of the decentralization process, it is very important to pay
great attention to the establishment and integration of the databases and improvement/development
of ICT software infrastructure. Electronic document management
and workflow should be developed to improve the efficiency of the municipalities.
There is a lack of offer of online services (with exception of few cases of one way download
of certain forms from the web sites). Some of the municipal websites provide an
opportunity for citizens to ask questions, but there is a lack of internal procedures and
general regulations on what kind of data should be accessible for the public.
The telecom liberalization process has given first good results (prices are going down,
availability of internet in urban areas is growing) and first projects of rural broadband
will connect better rural remote municipalities. Central government, municipalities,
business and citizens use more computers and there is rising demand for e-services.
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