“2016 was a turning point in the history of digital transformation of Ukrainian regions. And now, some of them are already showing very good results. I am especially pleased with the experience of Kolomyia, which seems to be several steps ahead of everyone, as well as Ternopil and Horodok,” — Valerii Siroshtan, director of business development at RENOME SMART, said during the Regional Digital Transformation Forum in Ternopil, which was held on November 4 as part of Digital Regions Week.
The forum became a platform for interaction, where representatives of local governments, enterprises, organizations had the opportunity to explore and discuss new ideas in the field of digital development in Ukraine.
“In 2016, when the law on decentralization was adopted, we, together with Rivne Administrative Services Centre (ASC), developed a register of territorial communities. — Valerii Siroshtan shared. — The terms of reference were developed step by step — what is needed, how it should work, what processes and tasks to perform. Actually, Rivne ASC has become a platform for launching a new solution.”
Today, RENOME SMART portfolio already includes 77 communities where the solution has been implemented. With the support of UNDP, 26 communities in Kherson region were fully unified before the war.
“The communities of Luhansk region were digitized as well, — noted Valerii Siroshtan. — And I hope that Luhansk will also catch up with them very soon.”
He paid special attention to cloud solutions — “most communities understand their need in our time,” and gave arguments. First, one does not need to maintain their own infrastructure and invest in it. Second, clouds are physically harder to hack. This is noticeable, in particular, in the temporarily occupied territories, where servers are damaged or taken out by the invaders. Third, three-quarters of communities consist of small localities that cannot accommodate an IT specialist who is qualified to work with servers. Accordingly, using the cloud becomes an opportunity to abdicate this responsibility and eliminate cybersecurity risks.”
Finally, Valerii Siroshtan stressed that both the city and the state are service structures. So in order to provide the right services, in his opinion, it is significant to understand who the receiver is that the services are provided to. And therefore, to know people — the community. The event in Ternopil was organized by West Ukraine Digital project office together with Diia.Business center and with assistance from digital, inclusive, accessible: support to digitalisation of public services in Ukraine project ” (Diia support project), implemented by UNDP in Ukraine in partnership with the Ministry of Digital Transformation funded by Sweden.