Building the ICT fundament for local E-government in Serbia - Municipality of Loznica example

Abstract

Recent legislative changes in Serbia, directed toward European integration, established basic framework for implementing the Egovernment management concept in municipalities of Serbia. In spite of the fact that there are significant ICT potentials (available technological solutions and personal expert knowledge), there is no awareness among the local governmental structures of benefits that this model can provide. So there is no strategy or programs for ICT central and municipality development. New Low on planning and construction initiated a production of numerous local municipality Spatial and Master development plans. One of these is Spatial and Master plan of municipality of Loznica, which is managed and performed by the team from Faculty of Architecture University of Belgrade. Since there are no actual obstacles for ICT governmental development, except lack of political willingness and determination, we recognized actual circumstances and our work on this plan as a grate challenge in sense of finding a "side" way for ICT implementation in municipal governmental work. This paper, at the beginning, will present our ICT local development plan and methodological concept of its implementation in governmental and local public structures (except in Loznica we also started with its implementation in more municipalities). In the next chapter the practical results will be presented along with analytical reviews of collected experience. After a first working year we can conclude that we successfully managed to make a first major step in municipality ICT development. We succeeded to get very positive reactions of all governmental and public structures. The planning process become publicly acceptable and transparent. On the achieved results base we made a new action plan for next working period. We hope that after finishing those pilot actions we will be able to produce a practical guidebook for ICT development of municipalities in Serbia under the local actual conditions. This can be one way to ensure more intensive decentralized local development and to increase local initiatives to the central governmental levels towards implementation of E-government management concept.