Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 31st NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG3: Public Administration Reform in CEE and CA Author(s) Diana Nicoleta Vlaicu Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca Romania Buda Daniel, Ranta Ana Elena, Title E-governance and public service delivery: The case of Cluj County File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract E-governance defined by the European Commission as the use of technology to improve and facilitate government services aims to facilitate the interaction between public authorities and civil society in a more friendly, transparent, inexpensive and even in a cross border way. Moreover, it is considered that E-governance in the public service delivery provides a lot of advantages among which we mention increasing the efficiency of public authorities, improving the relation between public authorities and citizens, greater transparency and accountability, cutting red tape and corruption, cost reductions and last but not least, the simplification of administrative procedure. In addition to this, E-governance has a big influence on good public governance and on administrative capacity building, being at the same time one of the tools to support the public administration reform. Nevertheless, practice showed us that there are a number of impediments in the implementation of e-government and the digitalization of public services such as the lack of internet access and/or low levels of technological readiness, lack of financial resources to implement the ICT necessary to facilitate and improve the delivery of public e-services. In addition to these, in the Eighth Report on Economic, Social and Territorial Cohesion published by European Commission it is highlighted that there are notable differences between Member States in relation to the use of e-government, Romania being one of the countries with a low usage of e-government services. In this context, the aim of this study is to examine and identify the factors that influence and affect the utilization of e-Government and the process of digitalization of public services provided by local public administration authorities from Cluj County. Interviews were conducted among representatives of municipalities from Cluj County in order to collect the data. The main objective was to establish exactly the present status of the E-governance implementation at the level of the municipalities from Cluj County and to identify the challenges encountered by the public servants in using the e-tools. In the end, the pursued goal was to identify some directions to follow in order to ensure the successful implementation of e-government in the field of public services, our recommendations being stated at the end of this paper. As an example, we reached the conclusion that it is necessary for public authorities to organize some training courses for their employees in order to raise their level of knowledge in this area and also to help them overcome the resistance to change, explaining that providing public e-services will make them more efficient and their work will be simplified. Moreover, it should be noted that citizens’ awareness must be improved because only if there is a high demand coming from the citizens side, the authorities will feel obliged to level up the quality of services provide. Keywords: digitalization, e-governance, public authorities, public services.
