Abstract
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The public administration in Romania has been going through a modernization process after 1989. It had to adopt the social and economic realities of the country and on the other hand had to prepare the administrative structures for the EU adherence. One of Romania’s responsibilities, when joining the e-Europe network, was defining the logistic and legislative framework, for the implementation of its own e-administration programme. In order to assure access to public information and to provide public services for natural or legal persons, the legislator set up The National Electronic System (with the Romanian acronym SEN). The National Electronic System is a unitary system composed of “The E-government System” and “The E-administration System” .
In 2008, the National Agency of Informatics in Public Administration (ANIAP) realized a benchmarking on IS (Informational system)/IT (informational technology) in public administration in Romania. The results show that public administration proof that started to implement the e-administration concept
E-Administration, in Romania is defined as the public utility information system for using by the authorities of the local public administration of the applications based on information technology, representing the access to services of electronic administration and to electronic administrative forms of local public administration . E-administration is a way of expressing directly and lively the participation to setting up of local democracy.
Statistics Canada defines Public Administration as “the establishments of federal, provincial and municipal governments primarily engaged in activities associated with public administration” in order to attain the public good (StatCan, 2009). Most nation-state government sites demonstrate adherence to this principle.
Today e-public administration is a somewhat amorphous entity consisting primarily of an e-commerce platform to implement e-procurement of government resources, a tendering process aiming to award contracts for both services and goods, and a citizen informing service regarding laws, regulations and tax revenue collection.
E-public administration in this context is the government side of electronic commerce, depending heavily on NII (National Information Infrastructure) and e-skills both on the part of government agencies involved and the public (L. Pook, 2008).
To explore if there is any relationship between e-skills, k-skills and e-public administration, if so what that relationship is, we will examine in the paper the role information, software and hardware play in an organization first. An organization’s information infrastructure (OII) is based on its system platform (hardware and software), its organizational database(s), user tailored services, and information procedures, where all of these components work together seamlessly (Karljsberg (2001), Pook (2009)).
Furthermore the volume of information moving through the OII by some estimates is growing at an annual double digit rate (IBM, 2009). It may be observed then that OII’s are among the most important resources for decision making.
Similarly in concept to OII, National Information Infrastructure (NII) is a robust collection of widely used media for the creation, dissemination and use of basic information [where] NII forms the foundation of sophisticated information services often disseminated via high technology equipment such as computers (Meso, Peter, 2000, and Pook and Pence, 2004) to national decision makers. National Information Infrastructures (NII) sustain a level of importance several levels greater than an OIIs by virtue of the fact that they serve the needs of an entire nation. It is important to note then that both OII and NII are the structures by which information reaches organizational and national decision makers respectively.
The term e-skills consists of several competencies determined by task, work environment and organizational context (EU 2004, and Dragomirescu, et. al. 2008). Some authors include knowledge as part of the definition of the term as well though Pook underlines that it is preferable to treat differently the e-skills and knowledge skills ( k-skills).
Clearly, then e-skills are highly dependent on both of the previous infrastructures for success and the relationship can be weakened only to the detriment of organizational and national success in this competitive market environment.
Knowledge skills, or k-skills, “should be understood as a competency framework, along with a collection of tools and abilities acquired through experience and study, meant to support personal development, career progression, problem solving, and decision making (Dragomirescu, et. al., 2008)”.
This paper presents the legal environment for supporting the development of e-administration and the analysis of the current situation in Romania, the level of harmonization with the European law.
The study also intends to indicate the relationship between NII and e-skills, k-skills and e-public administration. The knowledge work in Romania will be compared with the neighbour countries and with Western Europe.
An empirical study based on questionnaires will be included also.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that using the IT&C resources in public administration represents a true revolution which will allow essential changes of form and essence, that will lead, as the effects of the industrial revolution, to the transformation of bureaucratic administration in an information electronic and sometimes home administration.
Based on the literature and data our opinion is that there is a strong relationship between NII, e-commerce, e-skills, and k-skills. E-public administration, however, by virtue of the fact that to date it has been primarily an informing process is yet to demonstrate its need for appropriate k-skills. In brief, it has been an informing field rather than a knowledge generating field, an important role indeed.
K-skills then go hand-in-hand with e-skills; that is e-skills support k-skills. While e-skills are technology dependent, k-skills are part of the skill set of the knowledge worker and are mostly self-developed and are “based mainly on tacit knowledge acquired individually, through informal/unformal learning”. K-skills are acquired over time through experiential learning. K-skills then are a step beyond e-skills. K-skills and appropriate NII are the essential ingredients of a knowledge economy.
The data suggest that knowledge work in Romania is at a relatively low level as compared with Denmark and Finland. These countries and other peer countries in the region spend more than twice the GDP percentage of Romania on tertiary education.
Recommendations:
Need to the increase of access level of population to the information public services.
Need to improve penetration of information technologies to improve the public administration in Romania.
Need to increase the residences with access to the Internet
Need to increase the companies that use the Internet as the main mean of interaction with the state institutions.
Need to extend the number of villages that have access to the communication networks on broadband.
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