Romania is not yet a digital leader and the authorities are trying to press the 'restart button' through the development of the government cloud, which is expected to replace fragmented IT systems with integrated and secure platforms, Deputy Prime Minister Oana Gheorghiu told a specialist conference on Friday.

'I will begin with an honest observation: Romania is not a digital leader. Not yet. We have legacy systems, fragmented institutions, decades of processes built around the convenience of the state rather than that of citizens. And I say this not as a criticism of the past, but as a starting point for what we are doing now. Because we no longer have the luxury of time, the world is moving fast. The gap between what citizens experience in their private digital lives and the experience they have with the state, with interacting with the state, is becoming impossible to justify. That gap is also becoming a competitive disadvantage for every business operating in Romania. So we are pressing the restart button, and the foundation of that restart is infrastructure. A government cloud that replaces fragmented IT systems with integrated and secure platforms, ensuring that data moves between institutions, not between counters. At present we are working through bottlenecks in the process directly with institutions and contractors, because building in silent mode must stop,' Gheorghiu said.

According to the government representative, a national programme will be launched to train public servants in the use and understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

'Alongside infrastructure we are building something even more important, namely a culture of digital public service. In the near future, very soon, there will be a national training programme implemented by the National Agency of Civil Servants for understanding Artificial Intelligence, with its limits, its benefits and its risks when applied to decisions that are highly sensitive for citizens. We must establish rules before scaling the use of AI. But technology alone is not enough. We must talk to people, we must provide information directly to people, and for this we launched four days ago the platform fara-hartie.gov.ro, where people can report all the bureaucratic blockages they experience in their relationship with the state. In the first 25 hours we received more than 1,000 reports. This is not a success story, it is a diagnosis and it tells us that we have a lot of work to do in the coming months and gives us a map. The vision is clear: we must build a modern administration centred on the citizen, aligned with the EU Digital Decade framework and supported by investments from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan,' the deputy prime minister stressed.

Gheorghiu added that the authorities' aim is to apply the 'once only' principle in relations with citizens, meaning that personal data should not need to be provided twice to different institutions.

'We want to achieve the ‘once only' principle for citizens so that no citizen is required to provide data twice to different institutions. We are also making progress in cross border compatibility, the implementation of EU-ID (European Digital Identity, ed. n.) is advancing. This will help establish a single point of contact for citizens and businesses and will accelerate interoperability across borders. Romania wants to be a digital hub on the European stage, but for this we need a real partnership between the private and public sectors, to build together,' Oana Gheorghiu said.

AmCham Romania, AmCham Moldova and AmCham Ukraine, together with representative organisations from the IT industry - the Employers' Association of the Software and Services Industry (ANIS), the Association of IT and Communications Companies of Moldova (ATIC) and the IT Ukraine Association - are organising on Friday the third edition of the AI & Big Data Conference - Regional AI Valley. AGERPRES (RO - writing by: Daniel Badea; EN - writing by: Adina Panaitescu)