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Public Administration of the 21st century

The Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe identified eGovernment as one of the key elements to maximise the growth potential of the digital economy and to achieve an inclusive digital Europe. It announced the launch of an eGovernment Action Plan ('Action Plan') for the period of 2016-2020, setting out the vision, underlying principles and policy priorities, which constitute the following pillars of the Action Plan:

  1. Modernising public administration with ICT, using key digital enablers (Pillar 1),
  2. Enabling cross-border mobility with digital public services (Pillar 2) and
  3. Facilitating digital interaction between administrations and citizens/businesses (Pillar 3).

The Action Plan focuses on some particularly impactful actions that will help accelerate the digital transformation of government through these principles. The Midterm Review of the Digital Single Market Strategy further emphasised the need to strengthen the transformation of public administrations and added 5 new actions.

All actions of the eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020 have been completed. Information about their implementation can be found on the Actions Dashboard.

In the 2017 the Tallinn Declaration on eGovernment, Member States endorsed the vision and key principles for digital public services put forward in the eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020 and emphasised the importance of user-centricity in the Annex of the Declaration. The 2020 Berlin Declaration on Digital Society and Value-based Digital Government takes the user-centricity principles formulated in the Tallinn Declaration a step further by strengthening the pioneering role of public administrations in driving a value-based digital transformation of our European societies.

In the Council Conclusions ‘Shaping Europe’s Digital Future’ (9 June 2020) Member States  called on the Commission to propose a reinforced EU digital government policy, bearing in mind the e-inclusion of all citizens and private actors, to ensure coordination and support for the digital transformation of public administrations in all EU Member States, including interoperability and common standards for secure and borderless public sector data flows and services

Do you have ideas or needs for European digital government policy? Please feel free to share them with us!

EU eGovernment Action Plan