The Romanian city of Arad, a core Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC) city, is making great progress on its thematic track of Citizen participation and digitalisation of public administration.
Arad’s City Hall recently embarked on an ambitious transformation by setting up an IT system to simplify its administrative procedures and facilitate services between the city and its citizens. To achieve this process smoothly, Arad will develop a new integrated platform that will allow the City Hall to carry out the following services:
- a new, easy to navigate website is responsive, accessible and assimilates the online services in use for citizens
- a portal for e-services that will completely eliminate the need to physically be present at the City Hall
- updating and extending the current solution used by the City Hall for managing documents, which also includes using QR codes and issuing digital documents
- e-archiving platform with automatic indexing
- training public workers to adjust to these novelties and be ready for when the system is officially launched to the public
This next step in becoming a digital city will allow citizens and employees to work smarter – with fewer paper trails, more digital interactions that are easy to use for all parties involved and more. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the necessity of doing digital even clearer and pushed Arad’s ambitions further.
By developing this new platform, Arad continues to put its 2019 Digital Transformation Strategy into practice. This project has become a reality after receiving European funds under the Administrative Capacity Operational Programme. The new platform will be operational by the end of February 2022, and the ICC looks forward to seeing it and sharing it with other ICC cities.