Cyprus Mail 14 May 2020 - by Annette Chrysostomou
Kyriakos Kokkinos
The coronavirus has forced authorities to move quickly with digital transformation and acted as a catalyst for change, deputy minister of research, innovation and digital policy Kyriacos Kokkinos said on Thursday.
At a teleconference on the topic ‘The pandemic crisis as a starting point for digital transformation’ Kokkinos explained authorities are making changes which without the pandemic would have taken much longer.
“In other words, Covid-19 came as a catalyst for digital transformation,” he said.
He said the crisis has made the authorities stop focusing only on larger projects.
“We let go of them [big projects] and at the same time through a more flexible approach we made small steps that serve our needs, which although they resulted from the coronavirus will remain in our lives even after the pandemic, such as teleworking, e-learning and electronic communication between the citizen and the state,” he said.
As an example, he mentioned setting up the labour ministry’s platform for the payment of benefits to employees.
“We designed a system within two weeks, it was something unheard of,” he said.
If this was done in the traditional way, he added, people would have had to fill in a form, and with around 200,000 beneficiaries whose forms would have to be processed, payment would take ten months.
Asked about e-justice, Kokkinos said this was a dream which began 15 years ago.
The last tender was announced in 2017 for a project of about €15 million and a bid evaluation will take another year to complete.
“This shows our inefficiency regarding fast processing,” he added.
Thus, it was decided to implement a section of e-justice for now, the electronic registration of cases, appeals, payments and to even have some kind of hearings with teleconferences and to change the legal framework.
According to Kokkinos, the promotion of e-justice is high on the list of 160 priorities in the digital transformation, which includes online services in the department of urban planning, the land registry, and the electronic registration of new students.
“We hope that in September or October we will be able to hand this project to the legal world,” Kokkinos noted. “It is not an easy task, but it has high complexity and high value.”
Another project the deputy ministry is tackling is teleworking in the public sector.
“It is primitive for a civil servant to go to the office in the morning to clock in and leave at 2.30pm and to be paid exactly as the card says, as if it were a factory,” he said.
“Why can’t civil servants or private employees work from home if necessary? Give them the system, the infrastructure, the legal framework and the system of government.”
