Czech Republic takes unique approach to forcing official business onto electronic highway

The Czech Republic has launched an ambitious and in some ways unique project to get all public institutions and businesses onto the electronic highway for the purposes of official communications. But the launch of the so-called data box project has been accompanied by indifference from users and some teething problems.

The Czech data box project started functioning fully from the start of November. All official communication from then on between public institutions such as courts, police, local councils and tax offices and around 350,000 firms should be by this route alone.

The project is part of the government’s drive to push electronic communication with and between public institutions. The government says this is speedier than the traditional method of sending and receiving recommended letters and official documents and could save the state around 200 million crowns a year.

But the government has taken a uniquely forceful approach to getting public institutions and companies onto the electronic highway for official correspondence by giving them no alternative. Other countries, such as Denmark and Austria, have allowed companies to decide themselves if they want to deal with all official correspondence electronically or stick to letters and or so-called snail mail.

The Czech Post office has been tasked with running the system. And the man responsible there, Petr Stiegler, says that everything went fairly smoothly on the first working day.

“From the point of view of the operator of the data box system, we managed the first day fine. We sent about 11,000 official items of data and had about 50,000 connections an hour. We did not have any problems. The problems that have been referred to by the media were not caused by the system but by the users and were problems caused by their internal information systems”

Czech media reported that the first day of full functioning brought its own fair share of teething problems. Many courts were reportedly unable to access the system. Other institutions and users complained that the system worked painfully slowly. For some, this is early proof that warnings of insufficient preparations are coming true.

But Mr. Stiegler maintains that the Ministry of Justice should be able to iron out the problems facing various parts of the legal system fairly fast.

Ahead of the big switch over, the signs had not been so promising for the Czech project. Very few firms used the four month test period to get to grips with the new system. Less than a quarter of companies and less than a third of institutions had taken the step of activating their data boxes themselves before the November deadline. That meant that they had to be turned on for them.

From the start of January a further expansion of the data box system is planned. From then it will be possible for business to business, citizen to citizen and citizen to business communications with, for example, the possibility of sending bills.

By then it should also be a lot clearer if the Czech approach of forcing institutions and companies onto the electronic highway is working or looks like being a blind alley.