In Hungary there are altogether 3,197 local governments, from which 3,178 are municipalities and 19 are territorial local governments (counties). The municipalities range from little villages to cities with county rights and the districts of the capital, Budapest, but their level of autonomy is practically the same, although since 2012 those having less than 2,000 inhabitants have to establish joint municipal offices with other local governments. At the moment 545 local governments have their own mayorÕs offices, and the other 2,633 municipalities form 738 joint municipal offices.
Due to the geographical, social and economic differences between local communities, different levels of digitalization have existed in the local government level in the past. Although there were several digitalization projects of the local level before, most of them resulted in isolated solutions, which contributed to the development of local government silos, and at the same time no real e-government services have been established apart from providing information online.
Based on the experiences of these former ineffective local government digitalisation projects, isolated back-office solutions and the lack of interoperability on the local public administrative level, the Government has decided that local government IT developments have to continue in a more centralised way. Due to the need of spreading unified technical quality standards and ensuring an optimal use of investment and operational resources, a centralised application service providing (ASP) model has been chosen as an appropriate solution to promote local government digitalisation in Hungary.
The goal of the Municipality ASP is to provide modern, integrated and cost-effective state of the art IT solutions in SaaS model for local governments, fostering standardised internal operation and a common platform-based provision of local e-Government services to the end-users (citizens and businesses). The advantage of the ASP model is that the user can access the software as a service provided by a remote service provider online via a simple web browser. This model is technologically and economically advantageous also for municipalities to support the wide range of their functions.
Between 2012 and 2015 ÒEstablishing a Municipality ASP centerÓ was implemented in the Central-Hungary Region with the use of EU funds as a pilot project, starting in 2015 with 55 volunteering local municipalities of Central-Hungary, further 39 joined from January 2016 from all over the country. Following the successful pilot, the Government decided to develop the service and extend it at the national level on a mandatory basis. The implementation started in 2016 within the project ÒMunicipality ASP 2.0Ó financed by EU funds.
Following the successful pilot the service has been extended country-wide between 2017 and 2019, as all 3,197 local governments were obliged to use the central solution from 1 January 2019 the latest, meaning that practically 100 percent of Hungarian local governments are now using the central Municipality ASP solution. (39 local governments could keep their former systems, that were more developed or integrated than those of the central ASP service, however they are also using the local tax management system and the e-government service portal of the Municipality ASP, and have to connect their back-office systems via interfaces to the ASPÕs data warehouse).
The goal of introducing a central solution was to provide integrated back-office software for local governments and a common platform for e-government service provision on the local government level, so that the end-users (citizens, businesses, organizations) can use unified local e-services all over the country as much as possible. This also resulted in enhancing the interoperability between the local governments as well as with other public administration levels.
The work of local governments is supported by the integration between the systems provided in the service, as well as by the external data connections and back-office and client-side electronic administration functionalities. The Municipality ASP also provides online form templates for local government reuse, that can be customised by the municipalities with the form management tool provided, and then published on the Municipality ASPÕs local government e-administration portal. The Municipality ASPÕs systems support the entire electronic administration back-office process, as well as the authentic electronic communication with the end-users via secure e-delivery. As a result of the project, a significant step has been made in the case of the connected municipalities at all levels of interoperability, former local administrative silos are gradually disappearing, making cooperation within the public administration easier.