JAN. 25, 2019

President Piñera presents Digital Transformation Initiative: “We want to make life simpler for people.”

Through its implementation, the state will save over US$1.44 billion per year. The initiative also seeks to make people’s lives easier, to generate significant savings of time and money and to accelerate the work of public institutions in the digitalization of their internal processes and the provision of their services.

President Sebastián Piñera launched the Digital Transformation Initiative on Friday. It is designed to simplify and digitalize processes for members of the public, eliminating long lines and wait times and saving significant amounts of money by decreasing costs to both the government and users.

“We are absolutely committed to taking on the challenge of ensuring that the Chilean State is modern, efficient, transparent and serves people, and we have formidable technological instruments,” the President said at an activity where he was accompanied by Minister Secretary-General of the Presidency Gonzalo Blumel as well as government officials.

Chileans completed a total of 32,163,009 processes in person during 2018, spending an average of 2.2 hours on each task, which translates into a loss of $215.679 billion pesos for Chile. This is based on the paid time that members of the public lost in transit, waiting in line and actually completing the task plus transportation costs (taking buses and the subway). While 87.4% of Chilean households have access to the Internet, only 30% of Chileans complete such processes online.

According to statistics provided by ChileCompra Analiza, the government spends US$108,358,811 on printer paper, photocopying, printing, folders, document storage and postage for certified letters. If one adds to this the fact that public officials spend between 12 and 50% of their time at work handling documents (looking for papers, organizing them, moving them and producing them) depending on their position, the cost of this work rises another US$1 billion per year.

The Initiative establishes timeframes for government implementation of the digital transformation plan through three specific policies:

  • Zero Lines: The goal of this initiative is to digitally simplify and transform public processes, eliminating unnecessary tasks and ensuring that the government does not ask for information to which it already has access.
  • Zero Paper: This policy involves digitizing internal processes for government institutions in order to make them more efficient and gradually eliminate the use of paper.
  • Digital Identity: The purpose of this initiative is to improve the quality of service in government online processes by eliminating the need to have different passwords to complete a task by using a single identification system for all institutions. The Single Password will be provided by the Civil Registry Service as the sole digital identification channel for the government.

 

“We want to make life simpler for people, and that is part of our commitment to modernize the government,” the President concluded.