At present, there are many, almost a hundred, channels constantly employed to supply data within the system. Each department possesses data of different quality focused on different tasks. Our task is to collect data from different sources, order it (because the quality of the data often varies), and turn it into an analytical product to help the Government make decisions on complex issues, move things along more quickly, and experiment, if necessary — Dmitry Godunov, First Deputy Head, Analytical Center for the Government of the Russian Federation.

We must move towards the consolidation of currents (messages from citizens, data flowing through the Government coordination centre, situational centres – ed.), because now they exist in parallel, and they must complement each other. We meet with the governors, interact with them, and many say that there is a social economy, there is your data, and we cannot make a decision on the basis of one, without taking into account, for example, the appeals and opinions of the people, and we also cannot make an objective decision based on people’s opinions without socio-economic information — Kirill Istomin, First Deputy General Director, Dialogue Regions.

I can say that a multiplicity of channels exists even today, given that the level of Internet involvement on the part of residents of the Far East and Kamchatka Territory is considerable. By and large, as a governor, I can communicate with every resident of Kamchatka — Vladimir Solodov, Governor of Kamchatka Territory.

There’s power in data. In order to make the right management decisions and act predictively, we need a large amount of data, and we need to respond in a timely manner. In this case, I see that we can work together with business to great effect [...], when we can also provide additional data that can be useful for making managerial decisions — Ekaterina Reznikova, Vise President, Member of the Management Board, Head of the Digital Business Unit, MTS Bank.

Of course, the basic problem for regions like us in the Kamchatka Territory is the accessibility of basic infrastructure, especially the Internet. We talk about how people should have services of uniform quality irrespective of place of residence, but we cannot provide it until there is a stable Internet connection — Vladimir Solodov, Governor of Kamchatka Territory.

I would like to talk a bit more about how doubts often surface concerning how prepared the residents of the Far East are for services of this kind, given the number of remote regions where digitalization is not so developed, and where there may not even be any internet — Ekaterina Reznikova, Vise President, Member of the Management Board, Head of the Digital Business Unit, MTS Bank.

Vladimir Solodov spoke today about how important it is to ensure seamlessness, so that no client is able to receive a service in one place but is then forced to switch over to another site to continue, which would seem very relevant for payments — Ekaterina Reznikova, Vise President, Member of the Management Board, Head of the Digital Business Unit, MTS Bank.

What we can see now [...] is the absence of a normal algorithm for integrating one platform into another. We have a great number of interesting platforms, but then it turns out later that the analysis, the administration across these platforms is fundamentally different, and they really don't fall in to line. We aren’t creating a platform world right now, but ecosystems of individual platforms — Elina Sidorenko, General Director, Platform for Working with Entrepreneurs’ Enquiries.

You must always understand that digitization can’t replace the management system itself; it can only improve it. It certainly changes the quality, but the basis of management nevertheless remains in a clear understanding of what we do ourselves, and what we delegate. Unfortunately, the heads of many officials are now filled with illusions of digitization magically turning manual control into an effective system. It doesn’t. It’s great that digitization can help to solve the problem of hot meals in schools, but it’s awful that it’s being solved on a federal level. [...] You can’t use digitization to try to drive in every loose nail across the country — Dmitry Alexeev, General Director, DNS Group LLC.

The RGCs (Regional Governance Centres - Ed.) are wonderful places, direct contact with citizens is wonderful, but you have to understand that this is a surrogate for a political system that we’ve trampled underfoot. You create an automatic “complainant” system, but a citizen and a “complainant” are two different things. When you create an automated complainant system, you get a castrated citizen. A citizen is a person who participates and makes decisions, upon whom something depends, as a result of which the citizen acquires a corresponding responsibility — Dmitry Alexeev, General Director, DNS Group LLC.

We talk a lot about cybersecurity, but at present cybersecurity is a matter of developers’ consciences. [...] If a developer is conscientious, he will put a good security system in place, but if he isn’t conscientious, he will just wave his hand at it. As a result, there are pretty much just two articles in the Criminal Code to deal with these problems, and the punishment is insignificant. So, the question is: who should be held responsible? — Elina Sidorenko, General Director, Platform for Working with Entrepreneurs’ Enquiries.

If we look at even just the Far East and Siberia, we can see that many regions lack a basic index of information infrastructure sites. It hasn’t been created, and we can’t place it under criminal legal protection — Elina Sidorenko, General Director, Platform for Working with Entrepreneurs’ Enquiries.

We now have a centre in every region that deals with feedback. These are comprised of two main systems: Incident Management, which collects problems and messages from citizens in open sources in social networks [...], and there is also a second service, the State Services. Solving Problems Together system, which is for official appeals — Kirill Istomin, First Deputy General Director, Dialogue Regions.

You need to pay where you receive the service. In this regard, the decision we took for mos.ru is extremely relevant: it is a white label decision that does not require that you visit a bank; it is fully integrated into the regional government service portal — Ekaterina Reznikova, Vise President, Member of the Management Board, Head of the Digital Business Unit, MTS Bank.