Until the writing of this report, according to Ali Bahadri Jahormi, the government spokesperson, more than 83% of the devices included in the national e-government service window have been connected and more than eight million people of the country have benefited from the services of this window. December is the last chance to connect devices included in the national window of services, but the most used devices, namely universities, banks, hospitals, and devices under the Ministry of Health, have not yet been connected to the national window. It seems that e-government has reached a certain path in implementation with all the challenges and obstacles that it has brought to governments in the last two decades. But where the end of the e-government story will be is another story, which in a word, may be called the intangible fruit of the e-government in Iran after the fourth, fifth and sixth development programs have passed and four governments have passed. Next, with the definition of electronic government, we will have an overview of the plans and programs of the eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth governments with regard to the fourth, fifth and sixth development plans for the development of electronic government and based on two criteria. We take a look at e-government assessment, i.e. the United Nations e-Government biennial report and the e-Government performance report, as well as the budget law.
The definition of e-government refers to the government's use of information technology to transfer information between people, organizations, the market, and other government departments. But e-government in Iran was keyed with the aim of making the government available to citizens 24 hours and seven days a week in order to provide services, the communication of all government institutions with the people through telecommunication platforms and the Internet. The use of digital technology in government institutions with the aim of reducing the cost of government services, facilitating commercial and administrative relations between the private sector and the government, reducing the size of the government body, reducing administrative violations in the government and increasing people's trust in the government were among the other goals of this plan in the country. So far, various plans have been implemented for the implementation of e-government in Iran, which can be mentioned as the establishment of electronic service offices, government counter offices, portals providing government services such as iran.ir, mobile government, and the national service window of the smart government.
Late beginning takfa plan
It was at the end of the reform government that the implementation of electronic government was put on the agenda, and with a plan called Tekfa in the eighth government, the first openings of information and communication technology in the government structure of Iran took place. This was the first time that a budget was considered for the implementation of electronic government in the law. The Takfa plan, that is, the information and communication technology application development program, was approved by the government in July 2018, and its credit sources were predicted in note 13 of the budget laws of 2018, 2018 and 2018. This plan obliged the government to provide non-attendance services to the people in order to improve quality, reduce costs and quickly circulate information between executive agencies.
Although the development of e-government in Iran was considered one of the main axes of the Takafa document, this plan was stopped in 2004 and practically this plan was not implemented until the e-government plan was once again on the agenda in the ninth government.
Perhaps the only meaningful reference to the establishment of electronic government in the fourth development plan is the emphatic statement "3.3 percent of government employees are information technology specialists and 13 percent of the country's population is also familiar with this technology." But despite this, according to note 13 of the budget law of 2085, the executive bodies were obliged to provide all government services electronically to the people by creating electronic systems. In 2006, the Supreme Council of Information Technology approved the country's comprehensive information technology system document, and once again the development of electronic government was on the agenda of the government. However, the fifth development program is considered the main road map for the establishment and development of electronic government in Iran. In this program, executive bodies were required to provide online and electronic services until 2015 by connecting to the National Information Network.
From the claim to the claim of the first electronic government
The electronic government was supposed to be defined and implemented in the first stage with 20 services by the executive bodies and as the infrastructure of the electronic government interactive document between the executive bodies and the three powers in the form of a comprehensive electronic government document roadmap. In general, in this map, about 260 projects were defined for executive bodies. Originally, this map included the boundaries of the 9th government e-government project. However, in the years 2011-2014, with the rule of the fifth development program, new tasks and executive services were added to the comprehensive e-government document. This program was the roadmap for the movement of e-government between the 10th and 11th governments.
In the 5th development plan bill, e-government and e-services were discussed in several basic articles and provisions were seen on e-health, e-banking, e-services, communication infrastructure, government databases and also teleworking. In this program, achieving the second position of the region in electronic government was one of the main goals. At that time, the United Nations e-Government Development Index was included as the most reliable e-Government evaluation index in Article 46 of the Fifth Development Plan Law. In 2012, which coincided with the law of the fifth development plan in 2011, three main indicators of online services, information technology infrastructure and human resources were introduced by the United Nations as an evaluation indicator of e-government. According to this index, in 2012, the country's rank was supposed to be in the 16th place of Sindh countries. But this rank has not been achieved until today, when more than two decades have passed since the implementation of various plans for the establishment of electronic government in the country.
At the time of the establishment of the 10th government, Reza Taghipour, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, claimed that the 10th government is the first electronic government of the country and 1800 types of electronic services will be offered in the country. In those years, he had announced to the media that by the end of 2001, 200 electronic services will be provided to the people, and in 2010, 350 electronic services will be available to the people, and by the end of the fifth development plan, these services will reach 1,000 services. According to Taghipour, by the end of the fifth development plan, 70% of administrative activities should be electronic. But this claim of Taghipour never became a reality and remained as the claim of Iran's first electronic government.
However, the peak of efforts of Ahmadinejad governments to implement electronic government goes back to the 10th government. Specifically, in the 10th government, on the one hand, there was supposed to be an integrated system of electronic interactions of the government called CITAD, and on the other hand, the inter-organizational document "GIF" - which referred to the 100% electronic communication of the government institutions. start working But the inter-device interaction document was not used by the 10th government and the silent project for e-government was established, and at the same time, the fate of the Citad system was not determined and only the name of this project remained in the history of e-government. However, these days there have been talks about the Citad system and it has assumed the role of the first operator of the public e-government services in the 13th government in line with the national smart government service window plan.
In the 10th government, the development of electronic healthcare services and electronic banking was introduced as one of the priorities of the Ministry of Communications and Technology. At that time, according to Article 37 of the Civil Service Management Law, the country's executive bodies were required to provide services to citizens electronically in order to improve the quality and quantity of affairs and eliminate the need for people to visit the executive bodies in person. The time limit set for the implementation of this decision was announced on October 24, 2009. The 10th government also faced a serious failure in implementing this law. However, with the approval of the road map of the comprehensive e-government document in 2009, a more serious step was taken in the implementation of e-government in the 10th Fawa working group. In the notification of this document to the executive bodies, the implementation of electronic government by the end of the year was assigned. The electronic health file and smart national card were among the most important projects of the electronic government in the 10th government, and the government failed to achieve the set goals in both cases. The e-government pilot project was implemented in Bushehr and Kerman in Khordad 90, and based on this, the 10th government was introduced as an e-government. . It is possible to consider plans such as registration and announcement of online results of tests of the Measuring Organization and fuel smart card as examples of successful e-government plans in the 10th government period.
The sudden peak of e-government
With the change of government and the assumption of power by Hassan Rouhani as the seventh president after the revolution, there was talk of electronic government once again. In general, the Law of the Sixth Development Plan is considered the basis of the plan of the 11th and 12th governments in the implementation of electronic government. In this program, with the establishment of electronic government, there was a 12.5% reduction in referrals to government offices. From November 2016, with the formation of a working group consisting of the Ministry of Communications, Administrative and Employment Organization, Program and Budget Organization, the development of e-government became more serious.
In this working group, due to the diversity and multiplicity of e-government projects in the country and to target these projects, 23 projects were selected as priority e-government projects from the set of projects and were approved by the cabinet on May 9, 2017. It was after that that the implementation method of this document was announced by the administrative and employment organization on 20 September 2017. In general, at that time, the Information Technology Organization of Iran, on behalf of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, was responsible for the implementation of e-government projects in the form of the e-government service exchange gateway, open data, the Iranian national workbook, and 23 priority electronic projects. Perhaps the accompanying government was one of the main plans of the 11th and 12th governments, which somehow ended up in the 13th government with the national window of smart government services. In Rouhani's government, receiving electronic services of devices led to 93 devices with electronic services. Of course, electronic services of the mentioned 93 devices were never provided to the people in an integrated and unified manner. But the government along with 55 services was able to gain some place among the people to do electronic affairs. Also, in the 11th government, at the same time as the e-government evaluation report in 2016, Iran took the 106th place, but the Rouhani government was able to climb up 20 places in 2018 to gain the best position during the evaluation periods of the United Nations e-government.
Government due to delays
With the establishment of the 13th government in the field of governance of the country, electronic government was included in the main program of this government. So far, the completion of electronic government has always been emphasized as the main priority to prevent corruption and golden signatures in this government. The development of electronic government in the framework of the National Information Network is one of the main programs of this government, and its development has been emphasized in the decrees of the government ministers. This importance is determined in the single article of the 1401 budget by emphasizing two main tasks for the development of electronic government.
According to Javad Mohad, Deputy Director of the Electronic Government of the Information Technology Organization of Iran, one of these tasks has been assigned to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, which is to set up the window of the National Smart Government Services Unit; Of course, this law obliges the executive bodies to connect 30% of their services completely, from the acceptance stage to the service delivery, electronically and to the window of the National Smart Government Services Unit. Another thing is that the administrative and employment affairs organization of the country has been obliged to identify the most used services among the devices and to re-engineer the processes of electronicization and providing services to the people with the cooperation of the devices. According to the note of the budget law, the window of the National Smart Government Service Unit must be fully launched by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology by the end of January, and the devices are also required to launch their integrated internal window by the end of September of this year and to the window of the National Smart Government Service Unit. connect The development of e-government in relation to the devices under Article 29 of the Law of the Sixth Plan of the Country's Development and public institutions are obliged to connect the window of their smart services unit to the national window of smart services of the government in interaction with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.
However, connecting all the windows of the smart service unit of the required devices to the national window of smart government services is the final architecture of electronic government in Iran. Although according to the latest news, so far 83% of the required devices have been connected to the national window, the most used ones have not been connected to this window due to the limited remaining opportunity. Following the delays in the establishment and development of the e-government, according to the upstream documents, the president is in charge of completing the architecture of the e-government. It has to be seen whether the architects of his e-government can bring the 20-year process of establishing e-government in Iran to a suitable point, or whether, like other mentioned governments, the completion of this historic plan will be entrusted to the next government.
Electronic government in the middle of numbers and ranks
The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations publishes a report called Survey Government-E UN every two years. In this report, the state of e-government development in 193 United Nations member countries is examined. E-government evaluation pays attention to emerging trends in the field of e-government, problems and opportunities for e-government development, and innovative solutions for e-government development, and organizes its biennial evaluation based on the three aforementioned criteria. In the following, we will have an overview of Iran's position in the evaluation reports of the United Nations e-government from 2003 to 2022, and we will examine the peak and decline of the e-government among the governments of the country in the last 20 years. According to the United Nations e-Government evaluation report, Iran's ranking from the first to the last reporting period of the e-Government Development Index was 103rd in 2003, 98th in 2005, 108th in 2008, 102nd in 2010, and 2012. It was ranked 100, ranked 105 in 2014, ranked 106 in 2016, ranked 86 in 2018, ranked 89 in 2020, and ranked 91 in 2022. Based on this, in 2018, Iran ranked 86th with 20 steps up, and in 2008, with 108th rank, Iran got the worst rank among e-government evaluation courses in the world. But the highest level of mobility of the e-government index has been achieved in the last four periods, so that this index has reached the 86th rank in 2016 from the 106th rank in 2018, which shows a 20-step rise for the e-government, and also this index in the last two periods. That is, in 2020 and 2022, compared to 2018, it has fallen by three and five levels, respectively.
Based on this, the highest rate of development of the e-government index was in the 12th government with a rank of 86 and the lowest rate of development of this index was in the ninth government with a rank of 108. A rank that was lower than the world average and on a regional scale at that time, only Syria, Iraq and Yemen were ranked lower than Iran.
However, in general, in the ninth government, there was basically no specific plan for the electronic government, and this government is placed between the two plans of takfa in the eighth government and Citad in the tenth government, i.e. the period of governance of the e-government road map document, and in the eleventh and twelfth governments Also, the plan of the mobile government and the smart government were two plans that were implemented by this government in order to develop the electronic government, and following the plan of this government, Iran climbed 20 steps in 2018. In the 13th government, according to the latest report in 2022, e-government has fallen five steps compared to its peak period in 2018.
Electronic government performance report
In 2015, to evaluate the state of e-government and the level of connection of devices and the number of services provided by them, the government established the basis of the e-government performance report for the internal evaluation of e-government. According to the electronic government record report - which covers from the end of 1369 to the spring of 1401 - in the first to ninth periods, respectively, 19.30% with the evaluation of 60 devices, 28% with the evaluation of 83 devices, 28.49% with the evaluation of 93 devices. 60.05% with the evaluation of 93 devices and 62.08% with the evaluation of 105 devices, 49.94% with the evaluation of 154 devices, 40.65% with the evaluation of 160 devices, 40% with the evaluation of 163 devices, 40.2% with the evaluation of 170 devices The device has contributed to the development of electronic government in a period of six years. Based on the statistical comparison of 9 periods of electronic government records, it is possible to evaluate the development process of electronic government in Iran, but what is clear among these statistics is the lack of an integrated and comprehensive process of devices in the establishment of electronic government. In general, from the first period, when 60 devices were evaluated to the last period, when 170 devices were evaluated, 110 devices were added in the process of e-government, but according to the latest evaluation, among the 170 devices, 60% still do not have the capacity to develop electronic government. Only 40% have used their capacities.
Electronic government budget
Since 1981, a separate budget line has been earmarked for the development of electronic government in Iran for the ministries responsible for its implementation. In its 20 years, e-government has had a dedicated budget every year in the country's budget law. Although the first budget determined in note 13 of this law was equivalent to 12.5 billion Tomans, it did not help much in the implementation and development of e-government, but it was the beginning of a 20-year process until 1401, when the budget bill proposed an 88% increase in the e-government budget compared to the year 1400 was given. In other words, the government was supposed to spend more than 526 billion Tomans in the e-government sector in 1401 so that the e-government will be operational after 20 years. However, due to the inflation in the country, the establishment of the electronic government is still associated with buts and ifs, and the prevailing trend shows that the connection of the required devices to the national service window in the 13th government will not happen easily and on time.
