6. Cementing building blocks and shared services for improved capabilities
This chapter analyses and assesses the approach to cementing building blocks and shared services for improved capabilities using pillar 3 of the OECD’s Framework for Service Design and Delivery. The chapter considers the availability of enabling resources and tools that help service teams to respond to the needs of their users at scale, and with pace, while retaining quality and trust. These include guidance and good practice, governance processes, the omni-channel strategy, working on digital inclusion, investing in common components and briefly considering both public sector skills and data although these are the focus of Chapters 4 and 7. The chapter concludes with considering how these building blocks supported Türkiye through the COVID-19 pandemic
The politics, structures and organisations behind the design and delivery of public services are complex and historic. Countries have thousands of services supporting citizens, businesses and visitors to go about their daily lives. In Türkiye, the institutions that completed the survey in support of the Review indicated the total number of services they provide to citizens, businesses and other public sector actors was almost 21 000.1 A high proportion of these are concentrated in just a few organisations with 79% (81/102) of organisations providing fewer than 50 services.
Services are administered by different organisations with varying governance, accountability to democratic structures or quality. As the ambition for digital transformation is improvement across the public sector, this makes it essential to find ways to design and deliver high quality services at scale and with pace as opposed to slow, expensive and inefficient piecemeal approaches. Consequently, the OECD advocates for “Government as a Platform”, presented in the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework (2020[1]) as offering the opportunity for:
These opportunities are not mutually exclusive but are sequential in reflecting an iterative approach to digital transformation and the ambition for open government. As discussed in Chapter 5, there are some limitations in the current state of “Open by default” practices in Türkiye that do not reflect the ideas of reimagining democracy captured by the most mature level of “Government as a Platform” thinking. However, there is much to be commended in how Türkiye is already creating an ecosystem to support service teams to meet needs, and the potential to develop this as a market place for public services.
One of the misconceptions about “Government as a Platform” is that the focus is solely on questions of technology. Such a focus is in line with a culture of e-government and not digital government because it engages less with the value of creating the enabling environment which will better meet citizen needs. Seven different areas (see Figure 6.1) have been identified as helping to effect changes to culture and philosophy while scaling the capacity to design and deliver public services that meet user needs.
Source: OECD (2020[2]), Digital Government in Chile – Improving Public Service Design and Delivery, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/b94582e8-en.
“Government as a Platform” ecosystems are the critical foundations that support and equip service design and delivery teams to meet the needs of their users. Building such foundations is not glamourous, it is not quick and because the returns are not immediate, it is harder to get the financial or political backing to do it. Bringing these vital enablers of a digital state to fruition therefore needs committed leadership to champion a long-term vision and secure the necessary resources to create and iterate them over time. Around the world, “Government as a Platform” ecosystems showed their worth in ensuring that countries could respond to the challenges presented by COVID-19. Where governments could draw on these resources they were a powerful demonstration of long-term digital government leadership and associated strategies to secure transformation (Welby, 2019[3]).
As with Türkiye’s long-standing narrative around user-oriented and end-to-end service design and delivery there has been a visible commitment to thinking about developing a “Government as a Platform” ecosystem of building blocks and enabling resources for several years. The 2016-2019 National e-Government Strategy and Action Plan established an objective to implement common systems in response to several challenges (Ministry of Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications, 2016[4]). These challenges included the recognition that a lack of common approaches was responsible for inconsistency in the quality of services received by the public as well as leading to increased costs from duplication and the lack of standardisation. Moreover, it was understood that too often institutions were operating in isolation from one another without identifying mutual solutions and holistic processes.
This chapter will consider the situation in Türkiye as it concerns best practices and guidelines; governance, spending and assurance in the context of service design and delivery; the channel strategy; the common components and tools; and digital inclusion. While the topics of data and talent and skills will be touched on briefly in terms of their role to enable the transformation of services, their full discussion can be found in Chapter 4 for digital talent and skills, and Chapter 7 for data.
As discussed in Chapter 4, there is considerable talent employed in-house within the Turkish public sector. The first area to explore how distributed knowledge and insight can be brought together into commonly agreed understandings of “what good looks like” in terms of designing and delivering quality public services. Materials can include style guides for content, documentation for APIs or more comprehensive Service Manuals, such as the UK example discussed in Box 6.1, detailing everything involved in the digital transformation process. These efforts provide a twin focus in helping to disseminate useful guidance throughout the public sector and in so doing create a consensus view of quality that allows for greater comparability from one organisation to another.
The Digital Transformation Office (Dijital Dönüşüm Ofisi, DTO) is responsible for co-ordination with ministries and developing shared resources. Currently, the DTO response to the survey indicated that they are not providing centrally standardised formal models relating to project management, change management or the application of agile methodologies in data, digital and technology projects.2
Efforts to create this guidance predate the creation of the DTO with the Interoperability Essentials Guide (Birlikte Çalışabilirlik Esasları Rehberi) first published in 2009 and most recently updated in 2012 (Ministry of Development, 2012[5]). Additionally, the Public Web Site Guidelines (Kamu İnternet Siteleri Rehberi, KAMİS) were first created by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu, TÜBİTAK) in 2006 and updated in 2018 which provide detailed explanations and examples related to accessibility and usability. The guidelines take TS EN ISO 9241-15, WCAG 2.1 and ISO/IEC 40500:2012 as a reference, Similarly ISO Standards, including those concerning Web User Interface or Web Content have been recognised in different organisations. However, these efforts have not enjoyed widespread adoption due to a lack of overall guidance or any mechanism for continuing to develop and iterate their application in the context of Türkiye in consultation with other parts of the public sector.
The United Kingdom has a mandated 14-point Service Standard3 to facilitate a cohesive and co-ordinated approach to service design and delivery, including principles and approaches around understanding user needs, problem-solving, omnichannel, simplicity, inclusiveness and accessibility, agility, openness and reliability. The Service Standard underpins a common approach to agile delivery and embeds a culture of regularly releasing new or improved services through user-driven iterations.
Alignment with the Service Standard is supported through the guidance contained within the Service Manual4 covering team management, user research, service design and delivery and measuring impact.
The content for the Service Manual is produced by members of the different communities of practice responsible for these areas of activity as a collaborative and cross-government exercise. Additional guidance is also developed by dedicated central teams covering areas such as the guidance on making sure technology, infrastructure and systems are accessible and inclusive for all users.5
Source: Welby, B. and E. Hui Yan Tan (2022[6]), “Designing and delivering public services in the digital age”, https://doi.org/10.1787/e056ef99-en.
Nevertheless, the OECD team observed a broad consensus during the Review that the DTO is seen as being effective in understanding and identifying common needs and that it responds well in terms of ensuring the viability and success of projects. Should the DTO decide to develop formal models in the areas that are currently lacking, Box 6.2 suggests there would be enthusiastic adoption with many organisations believing that centrally developed guidelines and standards do exist to cover several important topics. However, only 23% (26/111) of service providing organisations considered that access to shared guidance and documentation was an enabler in their service design and delivery efforts.6 This was the lowest proportion for any of the enablers identified in this question and perhaps reflects that Türkiye does not offer an obvious focal point for these materials such as Colombia’s Arquitectura TI, Slovenia’s National Interoperability Framework, or the United Kingdom’s Service Toolkit.7
Arguably the most important piece of shared guidance is the Public Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Project Preparation Guide (Ministry of Development, 2017[7]; Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2021[8]). The guide has several objectives including identifying and avoiding potential duplication of projects and ensuring that project proposals follow current national strategies and their associated action plans. This document guides organisations through the processes for securing funding and ongoing reporting through a collection of templates, guides, checklists and sub-guides depending on the nature of the investment application being made. Currently the guide and its associated documents are all separate PDFs and there could be merit in applying service design thinking to the internal operational culture and approach to this process of securing funding.
There is scope for a central collection of guidance and good practices to collect not only central government guidelines but to amplify the work of sectoral teams who are producing materials that would benefit their colleagues elsewhere in the public sector. For example, the Public Procurement Authority (Kamu İhale Kurumu) is actively producing guidelines and support materials for helping people (albeit with a greater focus on the functionality of the Electronic Public Procurement Platform (Elektronik Kamu Alımları Platformu, EKAP) than on procurement to support digital transformation).
A further opportunity to develop guidance and shared good practices is in the area of personal data protection. The Turkish public sector has a very high awareness and focus on the Personal Data Protection Law (Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Kanunu, KVKK) No. 6698 (Republic of Türkiye, 2016[9]). Organisations need to understand a myriad of manuals and content in order to operate in a proper way. There could be an opportunity to present this material in a more user friendly and digestible format. In addition, several organisations indicated that there was an opportunity to reach a common approach to the use and language of disclaimers, clarification and consent texts that could be centrally tested and iterated in response to user research.
Good practices do not only come from a single organisation or sector, which makes it important to create communities of practice, reflecting the multi-disciplinary model discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, where practitioners can collectively develop a shared understanding and approach to leading the conversation forward in their specific professional domain. One area that may lend itself well to establishing such a cross-government community of practice is content design. One of the most important tools in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic has been the importance of clear, concise and reliable information to ensure government messaging is well understood, services are obviously signposted, and demand on the channels needed by the most vulnerable is reduced. Content design as a discipline should not be neglected. Preparing good content is an active exercise, informed by data and evidence, to communicate clearly. The language of information and transactions shapes how easily users find services, and whether or not they can successfully answer their problems when they do.
It is always preferable to encourage people with the right tools and skills to be autonomous, and so guidance and good practices can be a valuable enabler in organisations where the service design and delivery culture discussed in Chapter 5 is well established. However, as organisations work towards that change in mindset it may be helpful for central co-ordinating actors, such as the DTO, to play a more directive role in establishing rules, and other control or audit mechanisms that encourage a particular set of outcomes. Chapters 2 and 3 discussed the governance model and policy levers that exist for digital government in Türkiye overall and there are particular ways in which these elements can be building blocks for achieving a user-driven and proactive approach to service design.
As discussed in Chapter 3, the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Digital Government Strategies recognises that business cases are critical for achieving sustainable digital government (OECD, 2014[11]). As countries consider their approach to digital government investments, it is important that funding is available to achieve services that can be iterative, agile and able to focus on meeting whole problems that cut across organisational boundaries.
In theory, Türkiye has a governance process to approve and then track the procurement and execution of digital projects of any value and particularly those above a budget of TRY 30 million (Turkish lira) (Ministry of Development, 2017[7]; Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2021[8]). This figure was revised in 2021 from the previous threshold of 10 million which removes a potentially significant number of digital projects from closer scrutiny. The Public ICT Project Preparation Guide (discussed in Chapter 3) has a clear aim in ensuring that project proposals are consistent with current national plans and associated strategies. It provides a range of resources consisting of templates, guides, checklists and sub-guides depending on the nature of the investment application being made. However, despite the general acknowledgement of the DTO’s role and mandate in leading digital government, only 19% of surveyed organisations (22/113) registered an awareness of this guide and its standardised model for data, digital and technology projects.8
Despite reportedly low levels of awareness for the Public ICT Project Preparation Guide, it represents an important effort in governing a wide range of operational challenges for digital, data and technology projects. However, the organising principle is to present projects in terms of investment type (such as technology, infrastructure, data or capacity building) and emphasises the needs of stakeholders and technology as the focus rather than being a mechanism to encourage the consideration of user needs and responses to user research. Responding to a well-understood need and addressing ‘whole problems’ (as discussed in Chapter 5) requires a multi-disciplinary, crosscutting approach that considers different categories of activity (whether software, hardware, organisational structure, data, infrastructure or capacity building). The guide reflects the existing operational reality in Türkiye but if investment types are considered in isolation and discrete teams work independently on different work packages this may embed siloes and reinforce unhelpful structures rather than helping to achieve the overall ambition of equipping organisations to respond comprehensively to the needs of their users.
One of the other characteristics of the governance for service design and delivery in Türkiye is the prominence of Total Quality Management (TQM) and International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standards. Many of Türkiye’s public sector institutions have established processes and models for understanding service design and responding to these international benchmarks that involve external accreditation. These activities are not mandated across the public sector and respond to agreed international and corporate approaches without necessarily considering what might reinforce the strategic approaches set out in Türkiye’s National Digital Government Strategies or reflecting emerging best practices from public sector actors around the world. As such, there is a high proportion of organisations that are evaluating the performance of their services and considering how they might be improved but few of them are doing so according to a shared definition and understanding of ‘good’ in the context of the public sector. Türkiye may find it valuable to adopt a ‘Service Standard’ detailing its expectations for how services are produced that draw on the Good Practice Principles developed by the OECD (see Box 6.2) and which would then require an assurance process where teams have their progress assessed against the Standard.
The OECD Good Practice Principles, consisting of three fundamentals, nine principles and 68 sub-principles, provide the basis for using digital technologies and data to improve the design and delivery of public services, in every administrative environment or level of government.
They were developed through the ongoing collaboration of the OECD Working Party of Senior Digital Government Officials (E-Leaders) Thematic Group on Service Design and Delivery and the OECD Secretariat.
They represent a composite built from service standard approaches identified from around the world.
Build accessible, ethical and equitable public services that prioritise user needs, rather than government needs
Deliver with impact, at scale and with pace
1. Create conditions that help teams to design and deliver high quality public services (plus eight sub-principles).
2. Develop a consistent delivery methodology for public services (plus eight sub-principles).
3. Curate an ecosystem of enabling tools, practices and resources (plus nine sub-principles).
Be accountable and transparent in the design and delivery of public services to reinforce and strengthen public trust
1. Be open and transparent in the design and delivery of public services (plus five sub-principles).
2. Ensure the trustworthy and ethical use of digital tools and data (plus eight sub-principles).
3. Establish an enabling environment for a culture and practice of public service design and delivery (plus seven sub-principles).
Source: OECD (2022[12]), “OECD Good Practice Principles for Public Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age”, https://doi.org/10.1787/2ade500b-en.
The most tangible moment of experiencing the relationship between a citizen or business and the state is the channel through which government services are delivered and consumed. The origins of transactional government services are in paper and face-to-face exchanges, which over time have given way to telephone based and digital channels. Although the needs have not changed the evolution of the service experience to meet them has not happened evenly with people needing to navigate paper-based, physically in-person, telephone or digital elements to see their ‘whole problem’ addressed.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that fully remote approaches to providing services are essential, the pre-pandemic reasons why digital by default approaches should be avoided remain. As such, it is vital to establish a clear omni-channel strategy (with the necessary mandate) to account for and understand the interplay between different channels in order to enable public service teams to respond most effectively to the needs of their users. Such a strategy forms an important part of a Government as a Platform ecosystem as it facilitates and depends on establishing tools to support services that bring the physical, offline and digital elements of a service together, ensuring the same experience for all users, in all contexts, through all channels.
The strategy in Türkiye places the emphasis on the digital channel. The Eleventh Development Plan stated the priority of transferring services to the e-Government Gateway to increase usage, cost effectiveness and security (Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2019[13]). The e-Government Gateway is the most important mechanism for integrating the online experience for citizens, ensuring co-ordination between different elements of government and replacing paper and many in-person interactions. In 2017, the e-Government Gateway had 35m registered users and worked with 400 organisations to provide 3 000 services; 5 years later, the website helps 920 organisations provide over 6 600 services to 61m registered users.9
* 2022 reflects data through to 9 November 2022.
Source: Data provided by the DTO and available on the homepage of https://www.turkiye.gov.tr.
However, alongside the e-Government Gateway, each public sector organisation continues to operate their own web presence, branding, data and services. Distinct mobile apps and institutional or sectoral approaches to websites, face-to-face and telephone-based interactions are recognised as important elements of the channel mix by a number of organisations.10 Indeed, the later section of this chapter focusing on sector-specific components highlights teams and software solutions apparently operating in parallel. The strategy for the e-Government Gateway to co-exist alongside organisational and sectoral approaches is not the same as limiting the number of government websites and creating a unified user experience as pursued by fellow OECD members such as Brazil, Greece, Ireland, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.11 Moreover, the e-Government Gateway is not complemented with a strategically aligned in-person counterpart such as the experiences of Service Canada in Canada, ChileAtiende in Chile, KEPS in Greece or Citizen Shops and Citizen Spots in Portugal. This highlights the importance of developing a clear omni-channel strategy that understands and plans for the full landscape of service provision in terms of how different channels should or could work together effectively whether or not they remain as independent as they are today.
From the digital point of view there is momentum behind migrating to the e-Government Gateway with many organisations, including commercial enterprises, detailing how the majority of the services they provide are already available, or in the process of being migrated. However, some organisations are caught between maintaining their own digital infrastructure and a full migration to the e-Government Gateway. Being in a position of maintaining organisation-specific infrastructure alongside operating in the context of the e-Government Gateway introduces obvious challenges in terms of ongoing maintenance, security considerations and the relevance of long-term investment. This is particularly true for the organisations with the desire to move more quickly, but which are facing organisational constraints in terms of funding, access to skills, or having the leadership and vision to pursue full migration. Furthermore, service providers whose activities are critical to the functioning of Turkish society, such as the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) or the Land Registry and Cadastre (Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü, TKGM), stated a willingness to migrate while holding the position that they could only do so partially because of what would be involved in achieving a full consolidation.
Because some organisations are operating dual infrastructure, they are able to compare and contrast their experience and provide feedback to the DTO and Türksat on the operation of the e-Government Gateway. One organisation reflected that if their motivation was about their own autonomy and moving at their preferred pace then they would favour their own independence. However, they had a clear appreciation for the shared vision and corporate benefits of using the e-Government Gateway, particularly in its contribution to creating a more integrated public sector.
Nevertheless, the residual multiplicity of digital channels means that the starting point for the strategic conversation around the online experience of service design and delivery in Türkiye is one of divergence and autonomy rather than federated collaboration. From the perspective of service providing institutions surveyed for this Review, their own websites remain the primary focus with 96% of organisations (107/111) indicating that at least some of their transactions were handled through this channel (in contrast to 71% (79/111) doing so through the e-Government Gateway).12 As a result, this introduces a greater overhead in terms of co-ordination and challenges in terms of solving whole problems and designing end-to-end services as well as the approach to security, standards and quality.
Overall, the 110 service providing organisations that provided figures for annual transactions as part of the survey gave a cumulative total of 379 billion for 2020-21. Of this total, the Social Security Institution (Sosyal Güvenlik Kurumu, SGK), accounts for 300 billion.13 This organisation overwhelms the analysis of the channel split across the country as a whole and so it is more helpful to consider the range of channels being used without this outlier. When considering the distribution and weighting of the 79 billion transactions reported for 2020-21 by the remaining 109 organisations then organisational websites continue to be the primary destination for users, handling 21.5 billion (27%) while the e-Government Gateway takes responsibility for 13.8 billion (17%).14 The third most popular channel are the mobile applications developed by individual organisations.
Online interactions represent the majority of all transactional activity between citizens, businesses and the state with 47% of the activity involving these 109 organisations coming through websites and a further 13% coming from mobile apps. However, this leaves a significant minority of interactions that are not available online. Indeed, the SGK handled 35% of its reported 300 billion transactions for 2020-21 in person in its own offices (20%) or in shared centres (15%). A further 20% of those contacts were handled by telephone, evenly split between their own service and a shared helpline. Among the remaining 109 organisations, telephone and in-person channels account for over 25 billion transactions in total. In 2020-21, face-to-face provision accounted for 14.6 billion transactions (18% of the total, comprising 11% in standalone organisation specific offices and 8% through shared centres) and telephone provision reflected 10.8 billion transactions (14% of the total, comprising 11% in shared centres and 3% through standalone channels).
The review team heard about several examples of in-person service locations functioning as administrative outlets for different government departments and agencies. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, these physical services were a highly appreciated part of the infrastructure for the public sector, as citizens knew that they could be helped in-person with minimal friction and no cost. One of the most prominent networks is that provided by the General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs across 973 district centres and 81 provincial centres through which they manage the issuing and renewal of passports, driving licences and digital identity. Within the Land Registry and Cadastre (Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü, TKGM) there are 974 land registry offices, 81 cadastre offices in each province and 24 regional directorates. All of these offices and directorates are supported by a dedicated call centre. While there is the suggestion that 70% of citizen contacts could be transferred to a digital environment there remains a need for real signatures to take place in these offices.
The omni-channel approach does already exist in Türkiye, particularly at the municipal level where interactions with the public are often more wide-ranging and frequent than found in the context of central government. In general local government services are offered online but there will always be physical channels, which means that these organisations are already thinking in terms of an omni-channel approach. The municipal governments were quite insistent that their focus is ensuring access to services and that convenience means different things to different people. The Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality has established the Communication Co-ordination Centre to collect feedback through all available channels and help deliver better services to their community by being able to understand their needs and demands.
Türkiye is achieving a good level of digital adoption and while there are ambitions to see this level increase, efforts to introduce a “digital-by-default” approach that removes offline access can exacerbate digital divides and fail to respond to the needs of particular sections of society (as discussed in the section on digital inclusion). Moreover, not every service, or its individual elements, is suitable for digital transformation. During the review, the team heard about several different constraints on fully migrating online, which included:
Paper-based or in-person processes are set out in legislation.
The complexity and expense of redesigning the service is not a priority compared to easier and cheaper options.
The nature of the service itself will require human interactions such as those which take place at borders or in the context of physical goods.
The need for public servants to engage with the built or natural environment under field conditions.
Making sure that the public is not excluded through removing any offline channel.
It is therefore important to recognise that non-digital channels must always be recognised in the context of the service design and delivery experience. This presents two problems. First ensuring that users can find, access and understand the different elements that might be involved as part of a service. Second, that no matter the channel someone chooses, they should always be able to access a consistent, joined-up and high-quality service (OECD, 2020[2]; 2022[12]). A clear omni-channel strategy is needed to ensure that all offline and in-person experiences should benefit from digital technology and data as an enabler for making these experiences as seamless and as effective as possible.
For digital transformation to be equitable and successful, it must make sure that participation in the life of society is not constrained by access to the internet. While the previous section has discussed the importance of ensuring that all service channels operate in concert, one of the enablers for improving the capability of a country to meet the needs of its society in the digital age is digital inclusion. The coverage, speed, reliability and affordability of the Internet as well as access to devices, the right assistive technologies or the necessary skills will all determine whether any increased focus on the Internet may exacerbate social inequalities. Digital government efforts should never make the digital divide worse and, with a mandate to consider the full role of digital in Turkish society, the DTO is well positioned to build strong links between the agendas of digital government, digital infrastructure and the digital economy.
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic throughout the world brought greater prominence to the use of digital technologies and data in the design and delivery of public services. It would therefore be easy to conclude that the Internet has become ubiquitous for all. However, in some cases the impact of the pandemic may well have made things harder for those lacking the necessary skills or requiring additional, in-person support.
As noted in the previous section, 58% of interactions with government are carried out online, which supports the idea that there is a high level of digital sophistication in Türkiye. However, that still leaves a sizeable proportion of services being accessed through non-digital means. As has been discussed there are various reasons for this including the preference, requirements or capability of users. Chapter 2 considers the socio-economic factors in the Türkiye, including in terms of digital literacy. The offline experience cannot be overlooked in Türkiye as Figure 6.4 demonstrates that people in Türkiye are less likely to choose the Internet to fulfil a need than they are in the European Union with only 49% of the population purchasing something online in 2021 compared to 74% within the EU27. There is also a marked generational element within Türkiye with 17% of Turkish individuals aged 55 to 74 purchasing something online in 2021 compared to 50% of those aged 25 to 54. This underlines the importance of ensuring an omni-channel strategy that accounts for the full breadth of service experiences in Türkiye.
A further important area of consideration in understanding the digital inclusion landscape in Türkiye concerns the country’s foreign-born population. While there are those who have chosen to migrate to Türkiye and make a new life for themselves out of choice, Türkiye is home to one of the world’s largest refugee and asylum seeker populations, people whose presence in Türkiye is largely as the result of the conflict in Syria. While measures have been taken to ensure access to public health, education and social services, this segment of Turkish society may well experience exacerbated challenges in terms of access and affordability as well as the potential for language or cultural barriers that need to be considered in developing public services and responding to their needs.
Source: Eurostat (2021[14]), Internet Purchases by Individuals (2020 Onwards), https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ISOC_EC_IB20__custom_2962106/default/table?lang=en (accessed on 22 June 2022).
According to the DTO, the priority given to digital inclusion in terms of national strategies is somewhat low15 and the peer review team assessed that there is complacency on this topic. Although Türkiye has been a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities since 2009 and revisions were made to the Law on Disabled Persons in 2014, there may be a need to revise or strengthen the provisions and any supporting activity to ensure accessibility for more vulnerable users (OHCHR, 2006[15]; Republic of Türkiye, 2014[16]). One organisation reported that when a service is made available online all other channels are closed. When asked to consider their responsibility for digital inclusion, 28% (32/113) of organisations indicated that they had initiatives in this area but when asked to elaborate many simply indicated the digital inclusion was the same as having services available online.16 While there were some exceptions (see Box 6.3), such a response indicates a collective lack of understanding and awareness of the challenges of digital inclusion within the Turkish public sector. It could be valuable for Türkiye to consider developing a more coherent, cross-cutting and comprehensive strategy for digital inclusion that includes connectivity, accessibility, affordability and capability with the example of France’s approach discussed in Box 6.4.
The Republic of Türkiye’s Industry and Technology Strategy 2023 considers ‘Human Capital’ as one of five critical areas in order to build digital skills and competencies throughout the workforce (Ministry of Industry and Technology, 2019[17]). To support the increase of digital activity, the Ministry of Industry and Technology (Sanayi ve Teknoloji Bakanlığı) offers training targeted at industrialists as well as activities to support women, youth, children, SMEs, start-ups and entrepreneurs.
The Ministry of Labour and Social Security (Çalışma ve Sosyal Güvenlik Bakanlığı) is working to remove barriers to employment for young people through the National Youth Employment Strategy 2021-2023. The strategy includes a focus on “Jobs of the Future” (Geleceğin Meslekleri) which hopes to increase knowledge and skills amongst young people to ensure their participation in the current and future labour market. The General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs (Nüfus ve Vatandaşlık İşleri Genel Müdürlüğü) is responsible for issuing passports, driving licences and digital identities. To support those with access needs a mobile service can visit users in their homes.
The Ministry of Youth and Sports (Gençlik ve Spor Bakanlığı) provides public access to Wi-Fi and training through youth centres and in dormitory education centres to help develop the digital competencies of young people.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Tarım ve Orman Bakanlığı) carries out initiatives to support the digital transformation of farming and the capabilities of farmers.
The Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure (Ulaştırma ve Altyapı Bakanlığı) partners with non-governmental organisations to carry out training in the use and application of digital services for those who work on the sea or are involved in carrying goods on land.
Source: Compiled from information supplied during the interviews and surveys conducted as part of Ministry of Industry and Technology (2019[17]), 2019-2023 Sanayi ve Teknoloji Stratejisi, Sanayi ve Teknoloji Bakanlığı, Republic of Türkiye.
The French National Plan for Digital Inclusion (Plan national pour un numérique inclusif) was launched in September 2018 as a strategic action by the French State Secretary for Digital, part of the French National Agency for the Cohesion of Territories (ANCT).
Its aim is to support the digital transformation of businesses as well as the development of a safe and human-centric digital society in France. Objectives and priorities relate to the provision of support and training to 1,5 million people in topics relevant to digital technology and 21st century competences and combatting the digital divide. Another strong focus of the plan is achieving digital inclusion for at least one third of the French population over the next 10 years. According to the estimates of the Agency, this translates to equipping a total of 4,5 million French citizens with basic digital skills.
Actions under the French National Plan for Digital Inclusion are launched within the framework of the 2030 targets put forward by the European Commission's Digital Decade, which aims to see 80% of European citizens develop basic digital skills in the next decade. The national plan also operates within the context of the four pillars of the European Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition: digital skills for citizens, for the labour force, in education, and advanced skills for professionals in the ICT sector. Actions and upskilling initiatives target the following societal groups:
Digital skills for all citizens
Training and reskilling people to develop basic digital skills and promote the use of digital technology for everyone.
Support citizens and improve existing digital infrastructures.
Strengthen capacity-building of all citizens and enable their participation in the digital society.
Support people in difficulty, jobseekers and the unemployed, as well as disadvantaged societal groups, left behind digital innovation processes.
Promote the use of the online public service PIX, which offers a self-assessment tool for evaluating one's digital competence.
Creating and promoting the use of digital passes and credentials on national level.
Digital skills for the labour force
Supporting the labour force through consistent investment in upskilling initiatives on digital skills.
Promoting the need for businesses to invest in digital skills training so they can capitalise on economic spin-offs.
Build digital resilience with a special focus on providing support to public sector employees and capacity-building for professionals engaged in the care sector.
Coordinating and streamlining between local actors, stakeholders, and communities.
Other initiatives and actions launched within the French Strategic Plan aim to modernise existing education and vocational education and training systems and help institutions and students understand the type of skills required in the future, as well as training initiatives and projects which aim to support the development of advanced digital skills for professionals in the ICT sector and other digital experts.
Source: Digital Skills & Jobs Platform (2021[18]), France - National Plan for Digital Inclusion, https://digital-skills-jobs.europa.eu/en/actions/national-initiatives/national-strategies/france-national-plan-digital-inclusion.
The Eleventh Development Plan calls for the development of basic information systems, common infrastructure, services and standards (Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2019[13]). Common components and tools are an important building block in helping the teams responsible for designing and delivering public services focus on the unique problems facing their users rather than devoting effort to challenges others have already addressed. Investing in a ‘design system’ for the Turkish public sector can not only reduce the overhead for developing new services but build greater public trust as a result of having a consistent look and feel for government services. Similarly, ensuring that the underlying architecture of websites is consistent, and content and data are published with semantic properties, can enable syndication and re-use (whether manually, or due to its machine readability). A sound and resilient technical infrastructure as the foundation for digital government efforts is an essential enabler to being in a position to reduce duplication, minimise overheads and unlock the potential to experiment with emerging technologies.
A Government as a Platform approach to common components and tools has a particular attraction for Türkiye in a context where several interviewees highlighted the uncertainty of procuring software or infrastructure solutions from non-Turkish Lira denominated suppliers due to exchange rate fluctuations. Encouraging open source and Türkiye-developed solutions have been identified as a strategic aim as part of the Eleventh Development Plan and the National Technology Move while the DTO is carrying out a circular study to consider what commercial software could be replaced by open source alternatives (Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2019[13]; Ministry of Industry and Technology, 2019[17]).
The value of central teams addressing common problems is an opportunity for exploring collaboration between government institutions within a country, or across borders. The use of open-source code and open standards can mean the investment made by one country can provide teams in other countries with either a complete solution or the ability to reduce the development time involved in creating their own solutions.
The investment involved in developing these resources needs to be recognised as a long-term commitment and accompanied with the ambition for teams at every level and in every sector of government to choose to adopt these elements with minimal central intervention. This aim relies on adopting the same philosophy to the design and delivery of common components as to public-facing services.
Having a product mindset to the provision of these common components means that adoption reflects the quality of the user experience and the ease with which these elements can be introduced rather than through an enforced or mandated adoption. In this way, it is necessary to spend time addressing impediments to adoption such as by revising legal arrangements, offering low-tech options, providing good documentation or removing any cost overheads. To this end, the idea of a ‘service toolkit’ as a single destination allowing for service teams to browse all the available components and tools could be a valuable development to explore.
The COVID-19 pandemic has further underlined the importance of having readily available and scalable solutions with shared data infrastructure, shared cloud and technology services, and common technical solutions being most frequently prioritised as a result.17 Figure 6.5 indicates that Türkiye has a mixed experience in terms of the enablers that are on offer. Overall, only four organisations reported that they used none of the enablers, and six reported using all 13. The average number of enablers reported as being in use was five. In terms of the frequency with which individual enablers were reported, two in three organisations (66%, 73/111) report using a common solution for notifications with shared data centre infrastructure having a similar response rate. There is then a cluster of technologies including base data registers, common platforms, digital identity, common data architecture and payments, where adoption was reported by around 50% of the organisations. For shared cloud services, common interoperability framework, and support for the use of open source software, one in three organisations reported their use but only 13 organisations identified themselves as using all three.
The following section will discuss the different common components and tools that were identified during the Review. These include the e-Government Gateway, KAYSİS, the country’s trust and identity services, web infrastructure and hosting, geographic information systems (GIS), e-Municipality, notifications, paperless government, payments infrastructure and several sector-specific components.
Accounting and financial management
The financial management systems underpinning the public sector are well suited to considerations of common components due to their ubiquitous nature. As discussed earlier in Chapter 3, Türkiye has developed the Integrated Public Financial Management Information System (Bütünleşik Kamu Mali Yönetim Bilgi Sistemi, BKMYBS). This project has developed a common technical architecture for integrating those central systems which are used for executing financial transactions across the public sector.
BKMYBS has made it possible to introduce common functionality into central government institutions that replaces localised solutions and more siloed approaches. Two examples of this are the Government Accounting Information System and the Expenditure Management System which are both built according to a microservice architecture using open source code by the Ministry of Treasury and Finance (Hazine ve Maliye Bakanlığı). They enable the centralised, digital management of all public accounting and expenditure management. The accounting system includes modules covering functionality including e-Invoice, e-Guarantee, e-Payment, e-Collection, and e-Documentation.
Appointment booking
An omni-channel approach to services involves enabling citizens to book appointments in a variety of channels. This is particularly important where in-person interactions are essential, such as in the context of medical. The Central Physician Appointment System (Merkezi Hekim Randevu Sistemi, MHRS) provides appointment booking for particular physicians or in selected hospitals as well as integrated with the e-Nabız platform (discussed later in this section). In-person meetings are also an important tool for the General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs (Nüfus ve Vatandaşlık İşleri Genel Müdürlüğü). Their internal solution for booking appointments sees on average 300 000 appointments made every day.
There is not currently a commonly available component for handling appointment booking shared among other organisations but this existing tool could provide the basis for exploring either an open source project to be reused elsewhere, or the basis for developing a common component for all.
e-Government Gateway
The e-Government Gateway is the focus for the efforts to provide digital public services in Türkiye. There is a clear and well-understood strategy for the e-Government Gateway to act as the organising platform for the digital user experience.
In 2018, Presidential Decree No.1, gave the DTO responsibility for establishing and managing the e-Government Gateway (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye, 2018[19]). The DTO subsequently authorised the Türksat Company, a public enterprise, to develop and operate the e-Government Gateway. Started in 2008, the e-Government Gateway originally offered 22 services from a handful of public institutions. Over the subsequent years the platform has grown and matured to now host over 6 600 services provided by 920 institutions. As the site has become more established its presence in the public consciousness has risen and there are now over 61m registered users and daily traffic of 9.4 million visits.18 In this way the consistency of user experience within the services offered by the e-Government Gateway provides a model for considering the most valuable approach to developing a ‘design system’ for the Turkish public sector.
The team behind the e-Government Gateway work to ISO standards for both accessibility and user experience that means the site is not just focusing on the quantity of transactions made available but their quality too.
The e-Government Gateway is a critical common component for the work of service teams across government wishing to migrate their transactions and develop integrated services that solve ‘whole problems’. The creation of the e-Government Gateway has created the opportunity for organisations to share data without having to rely solely on mutually secure VPN connections. Although it has not replaced the widespread reliance on integrating via VPN, one of the benefits of the e-Government is its role in handling data sharing and integration between organisations through the Public Application Center, a management platform for simplifying data sharing between institutions. Data sharing in Türkiye is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.
However, there are some reported challenges in the model. In some cases, there has been internal resistance to exchanging organisationally managed and controlled solutions for the e-Government Gateway. The peer review team was told of one case where the process to secure internal approval took over four times as long as it subsequently took to complete the migration of the first service. A more frequent challenge is that caused by an organisation handing over their responsibility for a service to Türksat for delivery and management. Various institutions identified a role in specifying requirements that Türksat then turns into code. As such, there is not a shared and mutual process for user research to feed into the design and iteration of the service as a partnership between Türksat and the responsible organisation. Therefore, more than one organisation identified that the way in which the e-Government Gateway enforces a structure over data and the user journey does not necessarily reflect either user or organisational needs and can result in poor outcomes as a result.
Electoral systems
One of the most critical aspects of a well-functioning democracy is the electoral process. There is no consensus about the relative strengths and weaknesses of online approaches to the ultimate act of democracy in terms of casting a vote at the ballot box. However, in the context of the entire electoral process there are clear opportunities for digital government approaches to reimagine the role of technology and data in reducing the overheads and ensuring the trustworthiness of the process.
In Türkiye, the Election Information System (Seçim Bilgi Sistemi, SEÇSİS) ensures that the activities of provincial and district election boards during an election cycle are supported by a transparent, secure, impartial, and fast software platform.
SEÇSİS operates through its own private and encrypted network, that also meets the infrastructural needs for several other web services, and offers the following goals:
To eliminate duplication in the electoral roll by maintaining a single, correct, up-to-date, and consistent database of every Turkish citizen, both at home and abroad, with voting eligibility verified by ID number.
Providing a transparent, secure, cost-effective, easily auditable, and streamlined electronic environment in which to conduct election tasks and processes.
Ensuring the rapid and secure transmission of election results from polling places to the Supreme Election Council (Yüksek Seçim Kurulu, YSK).
Publishing election results in real-time and thereby allowing the public and political parties the same level of access.
The underlying foundations for SEÇSİS are provided by several systems operated by the General Directorate for Population and Citizenship Affairs (Nüfus ve Vatandaşlık İşleri Genel Müdürlüğü, NVI) under the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı). Since 2008, the Central Population Management System (Merkezi Nüfus İdaresi Sistemi, MERNİS), the Identity Sharing System (Kimlik Paylaşım Sistemi, KPS), and the Address Registration System (Adres Kayıt Sistemi, AKS) have been integrated with datasets held elsewhere in government to ensure the integrity of the electoral roll.19
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
The Turkish National GIS (Türkiye Ulusal Coğrafi Bilgi Sistemi, TUCBS) is another well-established common component launched in 2011. The creation of this infrastructure to support geographic information was included in the Information Society Strategy and Action Plan (2006-2010) as a responsibility for the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre (Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü, TKGM) (State Planning Organisation, 2006[20]). Today TUCBS is under the responsibility of the General Directorate of Geographic Information Systems (Coğrafi Bilgi Sistemleri Genel Müdürlüğü). TUCBS is a response to the need for a national platform for GIS as well as complying with the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) European Union Directive to ensure that spatial data infrastructure is compatible and usable within the country and across borders (EU, 2007[21]).
Although Türkiye does not yet have a singular open government data portal, TUCBS provides a focal point for accessing the geographical data and metadata produced by the public sector with the platform recognised as being particularly valuable for organisations from the energy and mining sectors. There are currently some challenges in terms of the quality and standardisation of the data it holds but in making address and land data available, TUCBS has helped to develop underlying services that would otherwise not be possible.
Recent developments have included a focus on features that help citizens with mapping rather than remaining as an internal tool for government officials as well as continuing efforts to support the sharing of geographic data among public institutions by developing the underlying technological infrastructure of this common infrastructure.
Hosting and network infrastructure
Web infrastructure plays a significant role in enabling the design and delivery of government services in the digital age. The lack of reliable, flexible, and secure infrastructure will undermine efforts at user-driven, agile and iterative service design. Infrastructure needs can be particularly acute for small organisations where the overhead of developing modern infrastructure is prohibitive in terms of upfront investment and ongoing operational overheads.
The Turkish public sector has a well-established and mature approach to hosting services that relies on organisation specific data centres and in-house skills and capability to maintain on-premises solutions. There are also several examples of providing network connectivity between different parts of the Turkish public sector, including the Turkish National Research and Education Network (Türkiye Ulusal Araştırma ve Eğitim Ağı, ULAKNET), National Academic Network (Ulusal Akademik Ağ) which provides Internet and network connections to universities, military and police academies, libraries, research and development organizations and some governmental organizations. While this has served the country well, 41% of organisations (46/111) recognised the need to prioritise shared cloud infrastructure.20 Greater strategic use of a cloud-based model for hosting could allow for the more effective use of web operations talent, an often in-demand skillset, as there are currently 78 organisations employing these capabilities with teams ranging from one to as many as 55 people.21
One example of a well-established and multi-purpose cloud suite was developed by the TÜBİTAK Informatics and Information Security Research Center (Bilişim ve Bilgi Güvenliği İleri Teknolojiler Araştırma Merkezi, BİLGEM)’s Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Laboratory (B3LAB) in 2016. The Safir suite comprises several different cloud-based resources including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through Safir Cloud Infrastructure (Safir Bulut), as a cloud platform forked from OpenStack in 2016. Additionally, Safir Depo, provides a suite of tools for secure file storage, sharing and collaboration.22 Safir Depo enables public sector employees to work on documents, pictures, audio, and images in a secure environment that can be accessed from desktop computers as well as mobile devices. Finally, Safir Zeka (Safir Intelligence) offers “Machine Learning as a Service” enabling access to machine learning libraries for software developers.
Nevertheless, in wider Turkish society, the use of cloud services is lagging when compared to other OECD member economies. Data from the Going Digital toolkit indicates that only 11% of businesses in Türkiye purchase cloud services in comparison to the average OECD figure of 45%.23 One of the possible obstacles that incentivise the ongoing commitment to in-house hosting is the financial uncertainty associated with using USD-denominated services provided outside Türkiye, including software and infrastructure as a service. As will be discussed in Chapter 7, a further element concerns the legislative requirement for keeping data within national boundaries (data sovereignty) that necessarily limits the suitability of certain providers of cloud infrastructure. In this context, the government of Türkiye may wish to commit to developing a government-wide Platform-as-a-Service model relying on internal capability and locally supplied web infrastructure to meet as many needs as possible, with USD-denominated and non-Turkish cloud services reserved for any particular, exceptional, needs.
The COVID-19 pandemic had helped to emphasise the value of cloud-based solutions in certain organisations, particularly amongst those institutions that had been using a cloud model for some time. Nevertheless, there was extensive evidence of a resistance to migrating to the cloud with numerous organisations referencing their own data centres in preference to infrastructure as a service solutions and expressing uncertainty about whether cloud solutions could be secure enough for government. While there will always need to be exceptions, for example within the armed forces, the prevailing sentiment was that each organisation was a ‘special case’ warranting its own exception and therefore unsuitable for a common approach.
The Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Directorate of State Archives (Cumhurbaşkanlığı Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı) felt that cloud migration could be possible but that it would need a decision by central government to require this change to take place before it would be considered. This echoed the sentiment from several organisations, including the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı), who were broadly supportive of a common cloud hosting solution but that they would not consider it in the short-term and until they had confidence in any solution. In order to migrate societally critical services a clear roadmap and solution would need to be developed that built the confidence of the affected parties.
The current policy overseen by the DTO is to direct public sector institutions to use the cloud. In recognition that on-site hosting is often more expensive and introduces ongoing overheads it has been a priority for organisations to migrate with the DTO publishing materials to support these efforts. However, progress has so far been slow. A new cloud strategy is under development that will use legislation to shift the balance in favour of cloud provision. Rather than government developing its own cloud-hosting infrastructure, the ambition is to procure these services from the private sector and contribute towards a national commitment to developing the cloud hosting industry in Türkiye. As the Going Digital data suggests, there is an as-yet untapped market amongst the private sector which should offer a good justification for private sector investment and to increase the range of available options.
Identity and trust services
In the digital age, it is crucial to empower individuals with the tools to prove they are who they say they are and equip them with the control and visibility over the use, and re-use, their data. This means that identity and trust services are an essential common component whose value came to fore during the COVID-19 pandemic in supporting the imperative to shift towards digital daily life. Nevertheless, in order to be successful in realising the potential of digital identity, several challenges must be addressed including different technologies and levels of identity assurance, fragmented user journeys, legacy solutions, portability of identity across borders or with devices, and the importance of trust.
In Türkiye the first efforts to convert analogue processes, including those concerning identity, to a digital format date from the 1980s when the focus was on transferring the information held on paper documents to the electronic environment. In 2000, these electronic records were used to assign each citizen a unique identity number, reflected on their traditional identity card. Foreign residents were able to do the same with their Foreign Identity Number from 2007. Subsequently the process for converting paper documents sped up, supported by a network of offices at district and village level.
In 2005, the first efforts for bringing together the Identity Sharing System (Kimlik Paylaşım Sistemi, KPS) and Central Population Administration System (Merkezi Nüfus İdaresi Sistemi, MERNIS) were initiated to share information between different organisations via a secure network. This information exchange was handled through individual ‘protocols’ agreed between individual organisations rather than reflective of a common route for data exchange (as discussed further in Chapter 7). This laid the groundwork for the improvements offered by the e-Government Gateway, which, from 2014 onwards, has offered an integration for services to be able to access population and citizenship data.
In 2017, the country started to roll out an electronic ID associated with their identity card. Currently there is no mandate for people to hold this electronic ID and as of September 2022 around 18.5m people continue to hold the old version. Nevertheless, this places adoption at 79% of Turkish citizens, in part because it simplifies the ability for individuals to access services in person and online.
Türkiye’s identity documentation incorporate biometrics details including a photograph (for all those over 15 years of age) and fingerprints and can be used as a travel document instead of a passport. In order to obtain the identity card citizens need to book an appointment at one of the 973 district centres or 81 provincial centres operated by the General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs and pay the relevant fee. These appointments can also be used to obtain a passport and driving licence.
The use of digital identity is enabling services to be transformed. All procedures on the e-Government Gateway can begin with the Turkish ID number and many private sector organisations use an individual’s identity number within their transactions. The health sector makes use of the ID number with one noteworthy integration allowing identity documentation to be issued to newborn babies. Moreover, since 2021, it has been possible for municipalities to confirm marriages and send the certificate in a timely fashion with less risk of error.
Some organisations highlighted that there was more to be done in developing the use of digital identity to support greater transformation of the services they could provide. The Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change (Çevre, Şehircilik ve İklim Değişikliği Bakanlığı) indicated that although they had been able to migrate transactions to the Internet, the requirement to use e-signatures, as set out in legislation, was a barrier to the scope and scale of adoption.
Türkiye’s digital identity solution is not used universally with several of the institutions surveyed for this Review highlighting a range of alternative ways they used to authenticate their users that were largely dependent on their own infrastructure. The overhead of maintaining separate systems for authenticating users within an organisation rather than using a common component is significant due to the security considerations involved. This also leaves users with additional sets of credentials, which is not a desirable model. This indicates there are more opportunities to explore retiring legacy identity infrastructure.
Currently the Turkish digital identity solution does not support cross-border operations either in respect of foreign governments providing integrations for Turkish citizens resident abroad to access services, or for the Turkish government to recognise the digital identity solutions provided by other governments to their citizens. Nevertheless, in order to meet the needs of the significant foreign-born population residing or seeking refuge in Türkiye, authenticated access to public services, including those provided through the e-Government Gateway, is facilitated through a solution developed around the Foreign Identity Number.
KAYSİS
As discussed in the previous chapter, the challenge of solving ‘whole problems’ on an end to end basis requires the mapping of government organisations, data flows and the steps involved in individual transactions. The KAYSİS platform (summarised in Box 6.5) is a powerful common component for capturing these insights and mapping the service landscape in Türkiye. There is great potential to use the information it holds to redesign and rationalise the user experience of government across multiple sectors.
In particular, the Service Inventory Management System (Hizmet Envanteri Yönetim Sistemi, HEYS), one of the main applications of KAYSİS, is used as the basis for integrating services into the e-Government Gateway. As future work is carried out to further develop the catalogues of data and services it will be important for the DTO to consider the relationship between HEYS and the National Data Dictionary (discussed further in Chapter 7).
However, it remains a challenge for the data in KAYSİS to be kept up to date because it relies on organisations maintaining the information manually. As future functionality is developed it will be important to explore ways to synchronise the breadth of public sector activity with this central catalogue as well as finding ways to ensure consistent approaches are adopted by all institutions, such as through the Service Standard or assurance processes discussed earlier, to preserve KAYSİS as an effective reference underpinning the transformation of public services. Furthermore, the Public Legislation System (Kamu Mevzuatı Sistemi, KMS) provides a possibility for KAYSİS to be used as the basis for a more participatory approach to the development of legislation by being opened up for dialogue and discussion with the public in providing their feedback and input to legislation throughout the process of developing new legislation.
KAYSİS is an information management system documenting the entirety of the activity of the Turkish public administration. Its goals are to:
Standardise the identification of government institutions and activities.
Linking activities of public institutions to their legal bases in terms of articles/paragraphs/subparagraphs and identifying legislation that is no longer implemented in practice.
Record the historical evolution of the government organization in the digital environment.
Share official correspondence data, contact data, available services and implemented legislation.
In capturing the organisational structure of public institutions and organisations over time, detailing the services they provide, the documents involved and the legal basis in them, KAYSİS has the potential to allow the identification of redundant services and opportunities to address whole problems that previously were handled by different siloed organisations.
KAYSİS consists of four sub-modules:
The Government Organisation Central Records System (Devlet Teşkilatı Merkezi Kayıt Sistemi, DETSİS), which identifies all central, rural and foreign public organisations, are listed according their hierarchical structure. The DETSİS architecture includes their contact information, legislation relevant to the institution, the services rendered by the institution, and the documents used in service delivery.
Service Inventory Management System (HEYS) details the services rendered by public institutions and organizations.
Authorised Signatory Module (İmza Yetkilileri Modülü, İYEM) is a system that details the managers and their contact details for each of the organisations defined in DETSİS.
Public Legislation System (Kamu Mevzuatı Sistemi, KMS) is a database of all primary legislation from the Official Gazette as well as secondary legislation that has no obligation of being published. KMS contains bylaws, directives, circulars, communiques, rulings, main statutes, general specifications, and other texts on regulatory procedures.
Source: Digital Transformation Office (n.d.[22]), Electronic Public Information Management System (KAYSİS), https://cbddo.gov.tr/en/kaysis/4545/kaysis.
Municipal government
The e-Municipality platform is a project operated by the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı) and the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change (Çevre, Şehircilik ve İklim Değişikliği Bakanlığı) designed to equip municipalities at no cost with a standardised tool and a shared infrastructure for providing access to online local government services online. The e-Municipality platform was first proposed by the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı) in 2014 before being approved in 2017. The first modules, for electronic document management and license information, were made available later that year. The use of the system is now compulsory for municipalities by law (Republic of Türkiye, 2018[23]).
The e-Municipality platform consists of 67 different modules, some of which are provided by the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı) and others by the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change (Çevre, Şehircilik ve İklim Değişikliği Bakanlığı). These include geographical data, recruitment, marriages and identity sharing as well as the ability to take payments and send notifications, amongst others. Separately the platform integrates with the e-Government Gateway and systems relating to land ownership, population management and digital identity. It is designed with the intention of providing fast, secure and uninterrupted access to municipal services as well as enabling the development of mobile applications to further increase convenience for users. The e-Municipality platform reduces the overheads that they would need to invest in order to provide such services for themselves as it helps to avoid individual organisations investing in discrete software licenses, system hardware or integration.
Despite the provision of this central platform, there remains a mixed experience in terms of experience between different municipalities with a patchwork of service availability. The e-Municipality platform can play a role in helping organisations to provide services they would not otherwise be able to offer.
Nevertheless, each municipality must carry out the necessary enabling work to integrate these solutions and to migrate away from any existing tools. The challenge of adopting the e-Municipality platform instead of existing solutions is a challenge felt particularly by the larger, metropolitan municipalities who have been investing in their own digital transformation for many years. The development of the e-Municipality platform has focused on the needs of the smallest local authorities with limited access to skills, technology and funding. However, the interviews indicated that this had resulted in approaches that did not provide sufficient complexity to meet the needs of the larger authorities. One metropolitan municipality expressed the need for greater user research to be carried out with a broader range of municipalities to ensure that the different needs of district and metropolitan municipal governments were well understood and that the platform could iterate accordingly.
Operating systems (Pardus)
The need to be able to deploy solutions that are not reliant on international suppliers has been one of the motivating factors in the focus given to open source software in Türkiye. Arguably the most foundational technical solution of all is the operating system used to run computers and servers. This is an area where proprietary solutions are common place. Although servers are often running on open source operating systems, the consumer facing market is heavily dominated by Microsoft and Apple operating systems, where pricing and support is based on their position in a global market, rather than being localised to the context for Türkiye.
In 2005, TÜBİTAK began development of Pardus, an operating system based on the open source software project Linux. The Pardus project demonstrates a strong commitment from the government to the adoption of an open source operating system and is in use within the Ministry of Justice (Adalet Bakanlığı), the Ministry of National Defence (Millî Savunma Bakanlığı), the Ministry of Industry and Technology (Sanayi ve Teknoloji Bakanlığı), the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı), the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı), and the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı).
In recent years, ongoing investment in open source software has resulted in developments of the Pardus operating system to help ensure its resilience and suitability within a corporate environment. These include tools and functionality for system administrators to handle digital security as well as identity and systems management.
The experience of Pardus highlights the ongoing challenge within the Turkish public sector to achieve a common ambition for developing tools that can meet the needs of all organisations. Although several large organisations are using Pardus, the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı), determined in 2013 that its needs were better served by customising the Pardus project. Between 2013 and 2018 the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) developed its own version of Pardus called GIBUX and deployed it throughout the organisation. Well-funded and capable organisations like the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) are fortunate to be able to devote the time, money and people to carrying out these customisations but there is an opportunity cost in focusing solely on their internal needs in parallel to the collective effort of their partners across the public sector where a deeper level of collaboration could have produced something beneficial for all organisations. Furthermore, the ongoing maintenance and operational overheads mean that the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) has to necessarily take a bespoke approach to the system administration of the 37 300 desktop computers and 515 servers across 1 184 locations that run GIBUX.
Paperless government (notifications and electronic document management)
Historically, public services have been paper based. Whether through the original form to be submitted or in subsequent dialogue between government and the user the exchange of paper features very heavily. In the drive to modernise government the idea of ‘paperless’ government has featured prominently and inspired efforts to reduce paper-based interactions. In Türkiye, 79% of organisations (89/113), indicated that their strategic approach to skills emphasised taking paperless approaches.24 This is a twin ambition – to reduce the use and reliance of paper for government to government activity but also to take a more transformational approach to the design of public services themselves through increased use of mobile and digital solutions, including those associated with authentication and verification of identity.
Several technical interventions have been made to support this agenda. The Registered Electronic Mail (Kayıtlı Elektronik Posta, KEP) service is a secure form of electronic mail for providing legal evidence, including the sending and delivery of electronic messages. In addition, the e-Correspondence (e-Yazışma) Project exists to ensure official correspondence within government is carried out in a secure electronic environment and may provide the basis for expansion into correspondence between government and businesses in the future. These tools are currently used on an optional basis so there is an opportunity to explore how these tools can be developed in the future, including the extent to which they are made mandatory for use in the public sector as a whole.
Separately, Türkiye has organisation and sectoral specific approaches to managing documents electronically. The Istanbul Water and Sewerage Administration (İstanbul Su ve Kanalizasyon İdaresi, İSKİ) has developed its own internal electronic document management system, reflecting the needs for utility providers to issue bills and manage correspondence with customers that may not be suited to a common approach. In education and health, where the relationships within a ministry as well as among the multiple actors in the system reflect the need for a shared approach electronic document management systems had been implemented prior to the pandemic. Although electronic document management is one of the available modules for the e-Municipality platform, one of the municipal governments expressed concern about the functionality they would lose in migrating from their existing solution and called into question whether there was sufficient trust in this solution to achieve its broader aims.
A further route to achieving paperless government is to prevent correspondence being issued in the first place. However, there remains a need to keep users informed about the progress associated with their needs. Research conducted by the United Kingdom indicated that one of the biggest reasons for people calling government is associated with the anxiety of uncertainty about progress (Herlihy, 2015[24]; 2015[25]). The UK’s response was to develop the GOV.UK Notify platform, whose codebase is now used by other governments to make it as easy as possible to be proactive in sending emails, text messages and physical letters about any step in the user journey. Making it easy for services to send simple notifications can be transformative, even without revisiting any other step in an existing process. Indeed, 66% of organisations (73/111) indicated that they benefit from such an approach, including all the municipal governments where the e-Municipality platform provides them with this functionality.25
For both document management and notifications there is a clearly expressed need. Organisational and sectoral solutions exist but there would be benefit in assessing whether there is scope to consolidate these solutions into a single tool for public sector institutions to use and to benefit from the associated economies of scale and scope.
Payments infrastructure
Payments is another area where countries are approaching a common challenge by offering centrally provided services to make it easy for citizens to pay government, such as pagoPA in Italy, PaySG in Singapore and GOV.UK Pay in the United Kingdom (Welby and Hui Yan Tan, 2022[6]). In Türkiye, work is underway to incorporate a common payments infrastructure into the e-Government Gateway which will make one of the benefits for migration the immediate access to this common component.
Sector-specific components
The public sector in Türkiye has well-established maturity in several sectors where common solutions exist to meet a particular set of needs for multiple organisations. The most notable examples observed during the peer review are platforms to support education, health, immigration, justice, procurement, social security and taxation.
Education
The education sector in Türkiye has been the subject of a concerted effort to develop various tools and resources that help to transform the experience for both teachers and students (of all ages). The primary way in which this has been done is through the Education Information Network (Eğitim Bilişim Ağı, EBA), which is operated by the Ministry of National Education (Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı) and provides the backbone to the education system in Türkiye. The network offers national integration of the education system and provides online access to course materials and teaching. This project was initiated in 2012 with the expectation of rooting the education experience of every student in digital approaches. As such, EBA provided the basis for supporting a collaboration with the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation to switch to a fully remote form of education, supported by television content, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The existence of EBA prior to the pandemic meant that students and teachers were familiar with its functionality and some of the risks associated with the digital divide were already understood. In order to respond to needs identified during the pandemic, 180 mobile units and over 15 000 support units were deployed to ensure access for as many people as possible. Additional measures included distributing more than 664 000 tablet devices and working with telecommunication providers to secure free or reduced cost data allowance for those who did not have internet access at home. Between March 2020 and June 2021, more than 14 million students and 1 million teachers were actively using EBA, resulting in over 300 million lesson hours of synchronous Virtual Classrooms, 18 000 hours of EBA TV being broadcast and 11 000 video lessons being prepared.
EBA provides several different features that have been developed in response to the needs of its users. The authentication system is now integrated with the e-Government Gateway through the Identity Sharing System (Kimlik Paylaşım Sistemi, KPS). Additionally, the use of QR codes added to textbooks could immediately connect users to the associated materials within EBA. Furthermore, EBA contains robust live meeting and video conferencing capabilities that have been used more widely within the Ministry of National Education (Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı).
Beyond these technical features, EBA’s function as a platform for education extends into helping students in their decision making process and planning their educational careers. A smart guidance feature connects the preferences for university study with their current academic achievement level and identifies the subjects they need to study to achieve their ambitions.
Alongside EBA, there are several other initiatives and components to support education more broadly in Türkiye whether in terms of supporting teachers with their professional development or their resources in the classroom, targeting a particular subject matter, or focusing on the needs of universities.
In order to support the professional development of teachers, the Teacher Information Network (Öğretmen Bilişim Ağı, ÖBA) was developed and launched in January 2022. The ÖBA platform hosts Professional Development Communities and associated programmes, which include practical professional development studies and aim to support the development of schools by increasing co-operation between teachers. ÖBA has supported greater collaboration and knowledge exchange between educational establishments through its Teacher-Manager Mobility Programmes. Finally, ÖBA offers an infrastructure to support synchronous training with a "Library" containing extensive content to support teachers. To date, training sessions on ÖBA have been attended over 6 million times with more than 900 000 teachers successfully completing at least one training.
As well as investing in professional development for teachers, efforts have focused on the hardware available to them in the classroom. In 2013, TÜBİTAK and the Pardus community developed the Interactive Board Interface Project (Etkileşimli Tahta Arayüzü Projesi, ETAP) with over 100 000 boards operating in Turkish schools. By building on the national operating system and developing bespoke modules for use with these boards, the ETAP initiative has created an ecosystem of resources and knowledge for transforming the educational experience in the classroom. Meanwhile, the Movement of Enhancing Opportunities and Improving Technology (Fırsatları Arttırma ve Teknolojiyi İyileştirme Hareketi Projesi, FATİH) Project has provided over 500 000 interactive whiteboards, organised 1 750 information technology classes and distributed 550 3D printers in the last three years.
In addition to these practical tools for supporting efforts in the classroom, there have also been subject matter specific developments such as the Mathematics Digital Education Platform (Matematik Dijital Eğitim Platformu), offered by the Ministry of National Education (Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı) and launched in August 2022 to support students with games, animations, videos and other interactive content to reinforce what has been learnt in the classroom. Another targeted is Koha. Developed in 2014, Koha is an open source library management system that is used by schools, academic institutions and government ministries including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Tarım ve Orman Bakanlığı).
Universities have also developed common components to support their work. One of the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic was YÖK Virtual Laboratories (YÖK Sanal Laboratuvarı, YÖKSANLAB). The Council of Higher Education (Yükseköğretim Kurulu, YÖK) worked with TÜBİTAK and the private sector to develop a remote solution for conducting physics and chemistry laboratory-based courses. The system was used by 38 universities in its first year and enabled 6 000 students to continue their studies despite not being able to physically attend university premises. Another national resource developed to support universities is the Higher Education Information System (Yükseköğretim Kurulu Bilgi Sistemi, YÖKSİS) which details the data related to university employees, students and alumni. YÖKSİS provides the basis for the creation of Higher Education Statistics for reporting purposes as well as offering access to graduation certificates and academic transcripts through integration with the e-Government Gateway.
Health
The digital transformation of healthcare in Türkiye was accelerated from 2014, partly in recognition of the need to be prepared for the outbreak of a pandemic. This foresight has been a successful component in Türkiye’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic with health systems being mentioned by multiple organisations indicating that not only is this activity a platform for the sector, but for the country as a whole.
Several components support the ongoing management of organisations across the health sector. These include the Integrated Corporate Operation Platform (Entegre Kurumsal İşlem Platformu, EKİP) that captures information about all personnel employed across the health sector, provides access to training, and offers meeting and networking functionality as well as features that allow physicians to collaborate in the diagnosis and care of their patients. The health sector also has an electronic document management system that records documents created by the central and provincial organisations of the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) as well as affiliated and related organisations.
When it comes to the citizen experience of health, the most prominent element is e-Nabız. This is used by both citizens and health professionals to access health data from individual institutions. By bringing together records from all providers of healthcare, e-Nabız offers a single platform for the management of health information. The data it contains can be managed and shared, by the citizen and is secured behind the Identity Sharing System (Kimlik Paylaşım Sistemi, KPS). Other patient focused tools include the Health Tourism Portal for people travelling to Türkiye for healthcare as well as, crucially, the Life Fits Into Home (Hayat Eve Sığar, HES) app discussed in Box 6.6.
The Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) took the lead on designing and developing the Life Fits Into Home app as the basis for Türkiye’s contact tracing as well as providing visibility of the health situation for family members.
The HES app was then developed into the mechanism for capturing proof of vaccination and, through the HES code, became deeply integrated throughout Turkish daily life.
The HES code, demonstrating whether someone had COVID-19 or the state of their vaccination, was used by utility companies to manage appointments, in the education sector to determine whether exams needed to be sat in quarantine, and in public transport to disable travel cards for people with symptoms amongst others.
While the capability to develop such integrated and proactive services is to be applauded, it is important that such mechanisms are accompanied with suitable checks and balances to safeguard trust in government and the civil rights and freedoms of the public.
Immigration
As has been highlighted before, Türkiye has a large foreign-born population, with one of the largest refugee populations in the world. This situation means that the country has needed to develop solutions that can support the varied and complicated policies and processes that support migration flows into, and out of, the country. The solution, implemented in 2015, is GöçNet.
GöçNet provides a central and web-based software architecture that operates in all the offices of the Ministry of Interior, Directorate of Migration Management (İçişleri Bakanlığı Göç İdaresi Başkanlığı). It provides digital processes to support border activities such as visas and residence permits as well as deportation and administrative detention. Having all this information in one system means that applications can be processed more quickly and with greater accuracy. Over time, further functions have been added to include the ability to carry out registration in areas without internet access (which later synchronise when connected), integration with the call centre and connection to the passenger information systems of transport companies and carriers. GöçNet has also developed specific tools to help combat human trafficking and protect its victims.
A critical element of GöçNet is its ability to integrate data from across the public sector. Having immediate access to the data that informs decision making allows for a quicker and more accurate process. Data is exchanged with more than 30 public bodies including the General Directorate of Security (İçişleri Bakanlığı Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Dışişleri Bakanlığı), the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (Çalışma ve Sosyal Güvenlik Bakanlığı), and the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) in addition to all other relevant institutions and organisations.
Finally, GöçNet is the foundation for the e-Residence (e-Ikamet) service which responds to the needs of foreign-born individuals who settle in Türkiye. e-Ikamet handles applications for residence permits as well as their ongoing management online. This has enabled a much quicker and less cumbersome process for foreigners as they no longer need to visit the Provincial Directorates of the Immigration Authority in person, Nevertheless, e-Ikamet appears to be a further example of a standalone service developed for particular sectoral needs that could be more closely integrated with the e-Government Gateway to help simplify the user experience for applicants.
Justice
As with both education and health, the preparation for creating a digital justice system began many years ago and came into its own during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Türkiye, the National Judicial Network Information System (Ulusal Yargı Ağı Bilişim Sistemi, UYAP), developed in-house within the Ministry of Justice, is the foundation for administrative, civil and criminal justice in the country and has been developed on a digital by design basis.
The initial development of UYAP began in 2002 with the objective of facilitating secure access to documents and the judgment process. In 2009 all courts were connected to the system and since then further developments have been made to turn UYAP into a virtual justice system for 81 million citizens and 130 000 lawyers in all aspects of the justice process, including fully virtual hearings for civil cases.
The critical functionality that makes virtual hearings possible is the Audio and Visual Information System (Ses ve Görüntü Bilişim Sistemi, SEGBİS). For criminal proceedings, SEGBİS allows convicts and detainees to link to courtrooms from their cells, allowing them to participate in hearings without incurring the costs of transportation, fuel, or staff time. There are now over 4 000 locations where SEGBİS makes it possible to carry out court activity without requiring in-person presence of those in detention.
Various administrative and judicial functions in the Turkish public sector continue to engage with the ongoing development and integration of the UYAP system. These include the Capital Markets Board (Sermaye Piyasası Kurulu), the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (Hâkimler ve Savcılar Kurulu) and the Court of Cassation (Yargıtay Başkanlığı) amongst others. Although these are all entities involved with judicial system in Türkiye their needs are not identical. This highlights the importance of adopting a user needs led approach discussed in Chapter 5 and applying those ideas to developing services and systems that reflect the purposes of public sector institutions and support the internal experience of public servants as well as the externally facing elements that are designed for members of the public.
The public certainly benefit from this considered approach and the way in which UYAP simplifies, accelerates and secures the judicial process through its integrations with multiple systems. These integrations include having the information about legal boundaries for land disputes, calculating interest rates for awards in civil cases and communicating with customs and borders to prevent someone leaving the country.
In addition to the modules relating to different court proceedings, UYAP provides a training environment for authorised users allowing them to receive technical or personal training through the UYAP Academy e-learning platform at any time and from any location. This acts as a resource to “train the trainer” for those providing training in vocational high schools and related departments of universities as well as direct support to those newly hired into judicial or legal roles.
Procurement
Türkiye also has long-standing and mature efforts in terms of public procurement that were first initiated in 2004 and then further developed through legislation in the following years with 2008 marking the original call for the creation of the Electronic Public Procurement Platform (Elektronik Kamu Alımları Platformu, EKAP). There have been subsequent amendments to procurement legislation that have further cemented the use of EKAP, including provisions made under an amendment to the Public Procurement Legislation that makes the use of e-procurement compulsory in all open and negotiated procedures (Republic of Türkiye, 2022[26]). As EKAP becomes more central to the procurement activity in the Turkish public sector, its associated regulations can be used to provide a lever for encouraging particular purchasing habits, for example in terms of cloud computing.
EKAP was launched in 2010 and the Public Procurement Authority (Kamu İhale Kurumu) has continued to improve it over time such that is now capable of conducting nearly all procurement activity from initial tender, through receipt of proposals and their evaluation, to the awarding of the contract itself as well as the capacity for the submission of complaints to the Public Procurement Authority by using e-signatures since July 2021. All public procurement activity has to be entered into EKAP and published in the public procurement bulletin with the result that, as of August 2022, almost 240 000 companies (economic operators) and a further 47 000 public administrations (contracting authorities) are registered, and there are almost 500 000 active users of the platform.
In another example of the importance of developing coherent strategies that help the public sector operate as a collective, the efforts of the Public Procurement Authority (Kamu İhale Kurumu) sit alongside the work of the Directorate General of State Supply Office (Devlet Malzeme Ofisi, DMO) who are working to respond to a different set of needs for their users in the procurement space. The DMO has created two online marketplaces (the e-Sales Portal and Healthcare Market) where government buyers are able to access catalogues containing the resources and materials they require from a single source and through the approved framework agreements. With EKAP designated as the default route for capturing public procurement activity this makes it vital that there are integrations between EKAP and procurement platforms such as these in order to simplify the process for public servants and ensure the accountability and integrity of audit trails.
Social security, assistance and insurance
Another sector where digital technology and data are providing valuable solutions that work across organisations and meet user needs is that of welfare, in terms of social security, assistance and insurance. At the heart of the sector, providing support for the disabled, elderly, children, victims of domestic abuse, martyrs and veterans is the Family Information Service, operated by the Ministry of Family and Social Services (Aile ve Sosyal Hizmetler Bakanlığı) since 2015 and which consists of roughly 35 different modules responding to different social service needs. These include social and economic support, adoption, home care and identity cards for disabled people, violence against women and the Family Social Support Program (Aile Sosyal Destek Programı, ASDEP).
The Family Information service works alongside the Integrated Social Assistance Information System (Bütünleşik Sosyal Yardım Bilgi Sistemi) which electronically facilitates all the steps involved with managing the financial support provided to help with areas such as energy or family expenditure. The system was built by TÜBİTAK for the Ministry of Family and Social Services (Aile ve Sosyal Hizmetler Bakanlığı) in 2010. Since 2010, 116 million applications for social assistance have been processed, resulting in a total disbursement of 332.8 billion TRY (approximately 18.3 billion EUR) by the Ministry of Family and Social Services, General Directorate of Social Assistance (Aile ve Sosyal Hizmetler Bakanlığı Sosyal Yardımlar Genel Müdürlüğü).
The system manages the operations for the entire Ministry and contains social, economic and demographic data for nearly 58 million people (17.7 million households), integrates data from 28 public institutions and collects together 112 different web-based elements to handle the end-to-end process, including the application, identification of eligibility, disbursement of funds, and auditing. In addition to supporting the needs of Turkish citizens, the platform also offers support to foreigners living in Türkiye, including the significant refugee population displaced from Syria through the Emergency Social Safety Net and the Conditional Cash Transfer for Foreigners.
A further platform is managed by the Social Security Institution (Sosyal Güvenlik Kurumu, SGK) to address the social security, social insurance and pensions operations of public institutions, citizens, employers and health service providers.
The integrations between these different platforms are brought together through the e-Government Gateway in a way that indicates how the internal complexity and differing responsibilities of government organisations can be hidden from view to simplify the user experience. As has been seen in other sectors and in Türkiye in general, there is a need for a clear omni-channel strategy to ensure that different systems and routes to accessing services for users are clear and straightforward without the potential for any confusion created by having different systems operated by different organisations.
Taxation
The final area in which sector specific activity is taking place is tax management. The Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) is responsible for implementing state revenue policies and administering the taxation lifecycle and all its associated services.
The Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) has been at the forefront of the use of technology and data within the Turkish public sector having launched the Internet Tax Office in 1999 as a platform allowing tax professionals to conduct their business, or that of their clients with the government across a range of different tax activities. Complementing the Internet Tax Office is the Interactive Tax Office, launched in 2018 and providing over 200 services directly to taxpayers without going to the tax office or requiring the involvement of a tax professional.
As has been noted above, the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) has developed its own version of the Pardus operating system to support its activities and the services provided through physical tax offices, its website and mobile applications. These reflect over 80 applications that have been developed to enable users to conduct their business either in person or online whether in terms of completing applications, requesting information, issuing documents or making payments. The Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) shared with the OECD team that many of these systems have been developed in line with an Agile methodology in terms of delivery. Nevertheless, there is still an unrealised potential in developing multi-disciplinary teams that can work towards more a inclusive relationship with users by taking a more participatory and collaborative approach to understanding their needs and responding accordingly.
Some of the Revenue Administration’s services are available through the e-Government Gateway but while the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) co-ordinates with the DTO and contributes as part of the wider discussions, there is no formal commitment to fully migrate. Indeed, work has started on the Digital Tax Office project, which will enable access to all services offered by the Revenue Administration through a single platform. This is a further example of where there are opportunities to strategically consider the overall approach and how sector-specific solutions might contribute to wider outcomes and how common components or platforms could be developed to obviate the need for organisations and sectors to develop their own, bespoke, solutions.
Chapter 7 provides a detailed analysis of the data-driven public sector in Türkiye. Nevertheless, data is a critical component of the ecosystem to support the design and delivery of proactive, joined-up public services. The effective use of data can mean governments avoid maintaining multiple datasets, handling repeated requests for data and requiring citizens to supply their information multiple times. To realise the potential of data as an enabler for service teams it is necessary to consider how tools, platforms and resources can support greater access to and sharing of data, both within the public sector and via Open Government Data (discussed in Chapter 7).
Although there was little emphasis placed on Open Government Data, the Turkish Central Bank (Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası) demonstrated the use of the Electronic Data Delivery System (Elektronik Veri Dağıtım Sistemi, EVDS) to capture and surface statistical data produced within Türkiye. Beyond Open Government Data, there was a general awareness of the importance for developing a more mature approach to data in the context of designing and delivering public services. Data does flow within the Turkish public sector but not always in the directions where it is most required and certainly not without overhead for the parties wishing to exchange data. The review team noted that in general the challenges with the current model favour larger and more established organisations and that this means things are not as agile as they might be.
Several organisations identified that they felt it was more important to focus on the quality of data before rushing into developing services and finding that the underlying data was insufficient to support the ambition for transformation. The Turkish Court of Accounts (Sayıştay Başkanlığı) appears to have developed effective models and technology through the Unified Data Transfer System (Birleşik Veri Aktarım Sistemi, BVAS) to manage the collection of financial data and statements of almost 3 000 public administrations in line with standards defined in legislation (Republic of Türkiye, 2020[27]). The BVAS then relies on the Data Analysis System (Türkiye Sayıştay Veri Analiz Sistemi, VERA) for controlling the accuracy, integrity and compliance of the data.
Data sharing between institutions is generally carried out over mutually secure VPN connections between institutions, usually facilitated by the KamuNET network (discussed in more detail in Chapter 7) rather than through an interoperability platform. However, as has been noted, the e-Government Gateway plays not only an important co-ordinating role between different entities but also, through its integrations with the Public Application Center which enable data sharing among institutions that help to achieve the reuse of data among government organisations with citizen consent. These data lookups are enabled by digital identity and do not involve data being duplicated or replicated. However, this exchange continues to be carried out on a case-by-case basis rather than through a smoother and more frictionless model.
Although Türkiye has no practical tools that support citizens or businesses to gain visibility of the data held about them or the way in which organisations are using them, the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) provides an interesting exemplar for how such tools could be developed. The e-Nabız platform gives direct control of user data to users. On this platform, users can manage and share their data as they wish and, if necessary, request the deletion of the relevant data. In addition, users can see from which IP addresses their data is accessed.
The shift from e-government to digital government represents a paradigm shift that means government does not always have the necessary talent and skills at its disposal. The OECD Framework for digital talent and skills in the public sector identifies that addressing this challenge involves creating an encouraging environment, defining the necessary skills and taking steps to source a suitable workforce (OECD, 2021[28]). The full analysis of this topic in Türkiye is covered in Chapter 4 but it is necessary to recognise that talent and skills are a critical priority in supporting the development of services.
Many organisations in Türkiye indicated that they had sufficient in-house capabilities for delivering on their ambitions for digital government. Certainly, the existing model of recruitment and employment has contributed to some very effective interventions in transforming the user experience of government. However, there is a need to consider introducing more dedicated roles that can specifically focus on practices that advocate for the needs of users such as in product management, service design or user research.
The Eleventh Development Plan recognises the challenge of improving and strengthening the processes and human capability within public institutions (Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2019[13]). However, in framing this as being a question of following technological trends and developments there is a risk of taking a technology-led approach rather than considering the holistic and multi-disciplinary approaches that are necessary to enable the transformation of public services.
Alongside efforts to revisit internal capabilities, it is also important to consider the role of procurement and the GovTech supplier ecosystem. In-house development to support public service design and delivery is not always the right model in normal circumstances but in a crisis when the demands of speed and scope may outstrip existing capacities it is even more important to be able to draw on external expertise. Therefore, an effective and trusted supplier base is an important long-term foundation as an enabler for service design and delivery. This supplier base needs to be operating in line with all the other elements discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 in terms of technical and commercial standards as well agreed quality standards and delivery methodologies.
The challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic presented opportunities for service teams to improve the way in which they responded to existing needs as well as requiring the development of new solutions to react to the crisis. Such a situation demonstrates the merit of having an ecosystem of enabling resources and tools that allow teams to maintain quality while still moving at pace. There were three areas where this ecosystem supported Türkiye’s response: 1) in activity going online, 2) in the value derived from earlier investments, and 3) in facilitating new and specific responses to the pandemic.
Migrating analogue activities online
One way in which organisations responded to the pandemic in Türkiye was in prompting the migration of analogue transactions to the Internet. Organisations reported that they had improved their electronic document management system for receiving documents from citizens and enabled digital payments as well as enabling online appointment booking processes. Many organisations also took appointments for in-person support, training or meeting online. The day to day internal to government activity was also changed with organisations choosing to publish reports online rather than printing them or ensuring staff in other organisations could access systems and data that would previously have required the exchange of correspondence.
The impact of these changes was felt quite markedly within the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre (Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü, TKGM). This organisation had previously provided a two-stage process with a first part carried out online but which ultimately required a signature to be made in an office. During the pandemic, the TKGM began to accept e-signatures and directing everything that could be completed online through their digital services with the result that 70% of pre-pandemic citizen contact was no longer taking place.
A further way in which enabling resources and tools helped maintain the continuity of the public sector during the pandemic was in the day to day operations of public sector organisations. Several organisations highlighted how important it had been for them to have robust and resilient infrastructure, including Virtual Private Networking and good quality mobile devices, to be able for staff to switch their base of operation from their offices to their homes. The internal hardware and software requirements of public sector institutions also saw applications deployed to support people working from out of the office and remote access to existing systems enabled.
One of the essential developments during the COVID-19 pandemic was the use of video conferencing tooling to allow for remote meetings whether within government or with external parties. According to the Human Resources Office (İnsan Kaynakları Ofisi) the national video conferencing application, CAM, that can be accessed via internet browsers without installing any plug-ins and whose servers are located in Türkiye played a major role in facilitating business management and operation. Nevertheless, several sectors and organisations spoke about how they had developed their own video conferencing capability despite the existence of this common resource.
Finally, the other area to migrate online was all organisational activities associated with engagement, education, training and support. Most notably of course was the EBA platform supporting the transition of education throughout the country but there were also changes in training for the police, traffic, the movement of goods and intellectual property. In almost all cases, the ability to provide virtual training materials meant organisations not only continued to operate as normal but also increased their capacity to meet the needs of more people.
The success of existing tools
A second area in which the ecosystem of enabling resources and tools supported Türkiye’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was in terms of how pre-pandemic investment allowed for the continuity of practice in certain areas, or allowed for a seamless and scalable transition to a digital model of delivery. Figure 6.6 shows that service providing organisations found that by far the most valuable enabler during the COVID-19 pandemic was the existing website, followed by telephone based access to services, common technical solutions, the national website and mobile applications for accessing services.
Note: Based on the responses of 111 institutions.
Source: OECD (2021[10]), “Digital Government Survey of Türkiye, Public Sector Organisations Version”, Unpublished, OECD, Paris, Q. 3.14.1.
A minority of organisations including the Turkish Competition Authority (Rekabet Kurumu), Turkish National Agency, Centre for EU Education and Youth Programmes (Türkiye Ulusal Ajansı, Avrupa Birliği Eğitim ve Gençlik Programları Merkezi Başkanlığı), and Public Procurement Authority (Kamu İhale Kurumu), reflected that they had to make no special effort during the pandemic due to earlier investments in digital transformation. In the case of procurement, the use of e-tenders rose from 30% to 60% of all tender activity because it was already possible to carry out the submission, evaluation and notification of offers in a digital form.
One award-winning success story of earlier investments had a meaningful impact during the pandemic, especially for potentially excluded groups such as the elderly, those living in remote locations or with physical accessibility needs. The Information and Communication Technologies Authority (Bilgi Teknolojileri ve İletişim Kurumu, BTK) is responsible for working with the various telecommunication providers to completely redesign the experience of contract termination.26 Previously subscribers needed to visit a store or send a fax to cancel their contracts but through the use of the e-Government Gateway and integrations with Turkish banks or the Turkish digital identity solution, consumers are able to cancel their services from the ease of their personal devices and the comfort of their homes, which was transformative given the lockdown requirements on businesses and individuals at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As discussed earlier in the chapter, the health, justice and education sectors have all spent many years developing digital platforms to support their activities. In the case of health, the challenges they overcame in 2020 and 2021 in terms of caring for people suffering from COVID-19 were unimaginable but because of previous investment, they could create more developed solutions and respond more effectively.
In terms of justice services, the infrastructure to support remote judicial activity through UYAP was already in place before the pandemic. In some respects, they turned the crisis into an opportunity in accelerating the development of certain features and increasing the number of video enabled locations from 1 400 to over 2 500 courts and over 2 000 courtrooms. The e-Trial System, which allows video and audio interviews to be conducted remotely enabled court hearings to take place without people needing to be in the same physical location, allowing for Civil Courts to continue functioning during the pandemic. While this technology was a huge enabler, the most important outcome from the pandemic period was potentially the shift of internal culture and habits for judges and other legal professionals in embracing remote working.
Within education, the EBA platform (discussed in more detail earlier in the chapter) formed the basis for continuity of existing practice as well as an opportunity to respond to the emerging needs created by the pandemic. The EBA platform was already well established prior to the pandemic and in use for remote learning. COVID-19 acted as a catalyst to turn what had been a relatively infrequently used novelty into an essential and ubiquitous feature.
Responding to the pandemic
Finally, the ecosystem of enabling resources and tools proved essential in enabling public institutions to react to the pandemic and develop new solutions to the newly identified needs brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As would be expected, there were many reports of health related services. These included those services that were created to meet medical related needs of physical goods such as supporting the supply of vaccinations or ensuring access to masks and other personal protective equipment. As was noted above (see Box 6.6), the development of the Life Fits Into Home (Hayat Eve Sığar, HES) app was conducted within the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) to support the needs of members of the public in terms of contact tracing and the COVID-19 status of themselves or their loved ones. In addition, internal tools were developed to support the needs of the contact tracing teams in collecting data from the field and following up with COVID-19 contact cases. Finally, the Ministry developed systems to support the management and distribution of vaccinations.
Open Government Data (OGD) does not play a prominent role in the digital government experience of Türkiye and is an area for future development. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for publishing more data not only through the dedicated website for COVID-19 but also in seeing public transport companies monitoring the occupancy rate of vehicles and communicating that.
One of the standing activities for government is the issuing of licences for businesses and citizens to carry out particular activities. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic many new licences and permits were required to support the implementation of new directives and measures to combat the virus. Within the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı), the e-Application system facilitated over 20 million applications for permits that involved various integrations and collaborations with other organisations. For example, by working with the General Directorate of Tea Enterprises (Çay İşletmeleri Genel Müdürlüğü, ÇAY-KUR) it was possible to provide a new travel permit that was only available for tea producing citizens while an integration with five organisations was necessary to develop the “Work Exemption Permit”.
Other areas of government responded to the pandemic by suspending the processing of particular licences or extending the validity of existing authorisations. This was evident in the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure (Ulaştırma ve Altyapı Bakanlığı) where regulations were altered to cover renewal periods, fines, capacity and the ability for foreign vehicles to cross borders.
Prioritising particular groups for support, such as how the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality suspended the unpaid debts process for those in certain vulnerable categories, demonstrates a flexibility to policy making to respond to the needs of society. This was also seen in the services developed to support those who found themselves unemployed and needing social assistance. The Small and Medium Enterprises Development and Support Administration (Küçük ve Orta Ölçekli İşletmeleri Geliştirme ve Destekleme İdaresi Başkanlığı, KOSGEB) developed a programme for micro and small enterprises that provided funding to continue their activities and maintain employment at their pre-pandemic levels.
References
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Notes
← 1. OECD (2021[10]), Question 3.1.2: “How many transactional services are offered by your organisation”.
← 2. OECD (2021[29]), Question 1.5.1: “Is there a standardised model for data, digital and information technology project management at the central government level?”, Question 1.5.3 “Does the central government have specific policies or initiatives for change management in digital government initiatives?” and Question 1.5.5 “Does the central government have specific guidelines or standards to apply agile methodologies in the implementation of these projects?”.
← 3. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard.
← 4. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/.
← 5. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/make-things-accessible.
← 6. OECD (2021[10]), Question 3.7.1: “Which of the following enablers does your organisation make use of to support the design and delivery of services?”.
← 7. Colombia: https://mintic.gov.co/arquitecturati/; Slovenia: https://nio.gov.si/nio/vstopna.nio; United Kingdom: https://www.gov.uk/service-toolkit.
← 8. OECD (2021[10]), Question 1.5.3: “Is there a standardised model/method to develop and present business cases or define a value proposition for data, digital and technology projects within the central level of government in your country?”.
← 9. Data correct as of 9th November 2022.
← 10. OECD (2021[29]), Question 3.1.6: “Please indicate the relative importance of each of the following channels in delivering transactional services for the central government”.
← 11. Brazil: www.gov.br; Greece: www.gov.gr; Ireland: www.gov.ie; Slovenia: www.gov.si; United Kingdom: www.gov.uk.
← 12. OECD (2021[10]), Question 3.2.3: “What percentage of the annual transactions involving your organisation do you estimate to be served by each channel?”.
← 13. OECD (2021[10]), Question 3.2.2: “Across all the services your organisation provides, what is the estimated total annual transaction volume?”.
← 14. OECD (2021[10]), Question 3.2.3: “What percentage of the annual transactions involving your organisation do you estimate to be served by each channel?”.
← 15. OECD (2021[29]), Question 2.3.1: “How would you score the level of priority given to digital inclusion in the national digital-related policies?”.
← 16. OECD (2021[10]), Question 2.4.1: “Is your organisation responsible for any initiatives to promote digital inclusion amongst citizens and/or businesses?”, Question 2.4.2: “Please provide details of these initiatives”.
← 17. OECD (2021[10]), Question 3.14.3: “Reflecting on the experience of your organisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, what aspect of the approach to service design and delivery are you now prioritising in preparation for future crises?”.
← 18. Data correct as of 9th November 2022.
← 19. These datasets include those relating to criminal records provided by the General Directorate of Criminal Records and Statistics (Adli Sicil ve İstatistik Genel Müdürlüğü) and the Ministry of Justice (Adalet Bakanlığı), health records from the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı), and the details of active armed forces personnel from the Ministry of National Defence Recruitment Department (Millî Savunma Bakanlığı İşe Alım Dairesi Başkanlığı).
← 20. OECD (2021[10]), Question 3.14.2: “Reflecting on the experience of your organisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, what aspect of the approach to service design and delivery did you feel could have been improved?”.
← 21. OECD (2021[10]), Question 2.2.2: “How many full-time equivalent roles does your organisation employ to work in the following areas?”.
← 22. https://safirdepo.b3lab.org/.
← 23. OECD Going Digital Toolkit, based on OECD ICT Access and Usage by Businesses Database, http://oe.cd/bus.
← 24. OECD (2021[10]), Question 2.1.3: “Does your organisation's strategic approach to skills emphasise any of the following areas?”.
← 25. OECD (2021[10]), Question 3.7.1: “Which of the following enablers does your organisation make use of to support the design and delivery of services?”.
← 26. The Contract Termination project was recognised as a category prize winner by the 2022 World Summit on the Information Society.