20 February 2006
Name of the Project
Integrated administrative services in the e-Region Blagoevgrad
Duration, including Starting date and (planned) Closing date
November, 2005 July, 2006
Overall Aims and Objectives
Rationale
The Region of Blagoevgrad is situated in the Southwestern part of Bulgaria (bordering Greece and FYR of Macedonia) and is one of the largest in the country.
The Bulgarian municipalities are the administrations that provide almost 80% of the public services. Usually they account around 100-120 different items as: Legal status; Municipal property; Licenses to business operations; Urban planning and construction; Ecology and environment and others.
Some of the most requested services need the customers to provide a number of accompanying and verifying documents issued by some other state agencies. This fact implies lots of burden and stress to the customers. Our initial idea in that project was applying IT solutions to allow institutions to exchange data and verify information while networking. The project aims at:
1. Establishing of official channels for the exchange of electronic documents among the regional, 14 municipal administrations and 6 state agencies functioning at local level;
2. Increasing public service quality and introduction of integrated service packages;
3. Decreasing the need of the customers to meet the administration, thus improving transparency of the service procedures.
Stages of Implementation
The project so far is moving with a good pace of implementation. All the administrations have become familiar with project objectives and approved it officially in agreements. There have been set two working teams: of public service officials and IT experts. They are in a process of defining: services, organization of document exchange, payments and terms of provision. IT experts have been developing hardware and software need assessment and also appropriate solutions.
Summary of Results/Evaluation
For the first time in Bulgaria a big number of public service providers will be networking using contemporary IT solutions that will ensure low cost and time efficient service to the citizens and business. This will be a good step forward to on-line or distant services.
Contact:
Todor Mladenov
Foundation for Local Government Reform
Mladost 1, Yerusalim Str. bl. 51
Office building, office 2
1784 Sofia, BULGARIA
tel. +359 2 976 89 40; 976 89 89
web: www.flgr.bg; www.invest.bg