Development of E-government in Russia: Problems and Prospects

Abstract

Introduction. The article gives an assessment of the e-government development in Russia from 2008 to 2018. E-government contributes to the development of the state’s information infrastructure, improves the effciency of public service delivery to the society and attracts the public to participate in the process of developing and adopting government decisions. The article presents a comparative analysis of the development of the electronic government of Russia with other countries. The key issues of improving e-government in Russia are identifed on the basis of the UN e-government development index. This indicator allows assessing whether the state is ready to provide electronic public services to citizens and what are its opportunities for using information and communication technologies in providing these services.

Materials and methods. Electronic government has become the subject of a wide range of disciplines, including political communication and sociology. Currently, scientists are paying increasing attention to the intersection of technological factors, equipment and culture in the adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICT), e-government research has begun to demonstrate some diversifcation. Russian scientists mostly focus on the statistic data of implementation of egovernment and consequences for governance and society. This investigation is based on following methods: 1) content-analysis of offcial documents of the Russian Federation concerning e-government; 2) declarations and interviews of offcial authorities; 3) monitoring of mass media; 3) international and national statistics data analysis.

Study results. Russia has relatively good indicators of e-government development in the world (according to UN e-Government Development Index), and the introduction of e-government is quite fast. But, in comparison with the leading countries, Russia still lags far behind in many respects because of: huge territory; low level of distribution of electronic services; low activity of mobile communication; weak dynamics of the increase in the number of Internet users; lack of the necessary law regulatory framework; low computer literacy of many government offcials.