Alex Iefremov, CEO of Kitsoft, spoke at the GovTech Explore event for the Swedish IT community about the governmental platform for public services in Ukraine Diia, other Ukrainian digital solutions and their role in the war. We present the thesis of the speech.
In 2019, the new government set a vision to create the most convenient state for people when data runs through government authorities while people stay in their homes or offices.
The Ministry of Digital Transformation set the goal to digitize 100% of public services. It was very ambitious because the government does not have ten years to develop and implement it but only several years to achieve the result.
Our company has been working on public services for many years. We took into account our expertise in the GovTech and offered our low-code platform along with our vision of implementation, and won in this procurement procedure.
Just half a year later, in 2020, we launched the Diia portal. Its mission is also encoded in the name: Diia is an acronym from the Ukrainian "State and Me."
Thanks to the technical capabilities of our platform we could launch new services very quickly. Today it is the most powerful GovTech platform in Ukraine and has more than 100 online public services and 150 integrations with external systems, governmental registers, and organizations for protected data exchange.
From the start, we had a real stress test from Covid-19. We quickly launched social benefits for businesses and the unemployed on the platform. The large request was 200 times more than expected and caused an overload. But during the day, we adopted the system and passed this test successfully.
The invasion of Russia raised new challenges in GovTech. It is not just a direct threat and blackout. Because of occupation, destruction, and displacement of people, the number of officers who provided offline public services has decreased, and some local departments are not working at all. The government needs fast communication tools with citizens to support them.
Unfortunately, citizens may lose their property or documents, but usually have their smartphones. So we decided to use Diia capacity. Our team launched on Diia such online services like:
- an application for destroyed houses,
- registration of refugees (Diia can reflect their ID documents, so they do not need to go to the regional administration to confirm their identity),
- recoveries of documents (birth, marriage, and death certificate can be requested through DIIA, and officials from any region can process the request and send electronic or paper versions with delivery to the address),
- grants for business,
- a combined service for business e-Entrepreneur and others that help to deal anywhere.
But not only Diia helps in this fight. Everyone can submit Notifications of the assets of persons involved in the aggression against Ukraine and inform the government about their property.
ONOVA is a platform for the interaction of different organizations aiming at one goal — to rebuild and effectively modernize Ukraine.
We also participate in other essential projects to overcome the consequences of the war, and we are working on the creation of other digital solutions for rebuilding. Because already today it is important to plan the recovery of Ukraine.