Context
The Government Decision 1328/2020 on the adoption of the medium-term National Anti-corruption Strategy and action plan for the period 2020–2022 required the development of an automated system to improve the transparency and controllability of the decision-making processes, and thus to ensure the corruption-free process. Based on this, the project ‘Development of the Automatic Public Administration Decision-Making (automatikus közigazgatási döntéshozatali – AKD) System building block’ was launched in the beginning of 2021. In the past years several reusable e-government building blocks were developed in Hungary to help the Hungarian Public Administration bodies to digitise their services in an interoperable way. For the sake of increasing transparency and cost-effectiveness, a general demand started to emerge to digitise the entire administration processes.
Objectives
The goal of the AKD project was to develop an integrated building block service for algorithmic decision-making that can be reused by any public administration body, and with which, by integrating it to the administrative process, the administrative steps can take place without human intervention. The essence of the AKD service is to execute a process to align the decision logics set, according to the steps and the decision rules, which are recorded via a graphical user interface that does not necessarily need more than basic IT skills. The service also includes a set of elements that can be reused in several processes for further simplifying the planning and automation of processes, and preconfigured calls for machine-to-machine data exchange.
Implementation
The project has been carried out by a five-member consortium led by the Ministry of Interior. The development of the AKD framework was carried out by the 100% state-owned company IdomSoft Zrt., and the 10 automated pilot services within the project were provided by the Ministry of Interior and the Hungarian State Treasury. The total budget of the project was HUF 977.5 million (~EUR 2.5 million). The modularity of the solution is characterised by the fact that later on, probably in the context of a future project, it is possible to integrate service elements assisted by artificial intelligence or a robotic process automation solution into the system.
As a result, the proportion of human resources used in the process decreases, which is beneficial in the current labour shortage environment, as well as increasing predictability and reducing the potential for corruption.