ISSS 2013–the 16^th year of the conference is successfully over

Praha, Česky

On Tuesday 9 April in the morning there finished the 16^th year of the conference ISSS in the Aldis Congress Centre in Hradec Králové. A tow-day event, which was accompanied already for the tenth time by the V4DIS conference, a meeting of public administration representatives of the Visegrad Four countries, was participated according to the preliminary statistics again by more than two thousand registered guests from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland as well as from other European countries–registration records show that though the total number of participants has slightly decreased, the number of deputies from public administration has increased (approximately by 100 persons). In the course of the two days of the conference there were delivered over two hundreds of presentations and within the programme there took place also a number of significant meetings, negotiations and discussions–a Sunday colloquium of the Government Council for Competitiveness and Information Society and ICT Unie, a Monday ICT Summit, a meeting of secretaries of municipal and local authorities, a meeting of members of parliament with representatives of local and municipal governments dealing with especially three issues–tourism, education and informatics or a meeting of academia and representatives of ICT industry.

The ISSS conference has been already for years an important platform for meeting of tops of national political scene, ministers, representatives of public administration from CR as well as from abroad, independent experts or top managers of renowned companies and this year was not any exception. The event was granted official auspices by the Prime Minister of CR Petr Nečas, minister of the Interior Jan Kubice, ministers Martin Kuba, Leoš Heger and Kamil Jankovský as well as the Association of Regions of CR. The Visegrad conference was traditionally granted auspices by the Vice President of the Senate of the Parliament of CR Přemysl Sobotka. In the Aldis Congress Centre there turned up a whole number of members of parliament and senators, heads of state authorities, regional presidents, city lord mayors and other important persons.

“I hope that this year of the conference will help the participants and the broad public realize that in the past years there were finished a large number of projects, which we can be proud of and which–I mean for example our back-office solution–represent a real European top,” says Tomáš Renčín, executive director of the ISSS conference. “Only a few people realize that these projects, which are in reality not discussed at all–and again I repeat that there are quite a lot of such projects–are in fact the most successful, because they simply work and the image of e-government that is presented to us by media does not exactly reflect the reality.”

The most attended part of the two-day programme was as usual the Monday morning gala opening–this year moderator was Jakub Železný and on the stage there were many well-known persons. The opening salute was delivered by the lord mayor of Hradec Králové Zdeněk Fink and the Vice President of the Senate of the Parliament of CR Přemysl Sobotka. It was followed by a speech of the minister of the Interior Jan Kubice and his “shadow colleague” Jeroným Tejc. Then the executive vice president of the Government Council for Competitiveness and Information Society Zdeněk Zajíček delivered a speech of the Prime Minister Petr Nečas, who could not take part in the gala opening of the conference due to his busy working schedule, and it presented five main propositions that should solve a number of existing problems in the area of informatization of public administration (full wording of the Prime Minister’s speech is available). Towards the end of the official part of the gala opening the president of the Vysočina region Jiří Běhounek representing the Association of Regions of CR delivered his speech and the opening part was closed by a video salute of the Vice President of the European Commission and the commissioner in charge of digital agenda Neelie Kroes. In the popular “coffee room” discussion, which filled the following hour, the attendants could hear opinions of a number of important persons among whom there were deputies Pavel Kolář and Petr Solský (MI), Jiří Žák (MT), Daniel Braun (MRD), František Korbel (MJ), Petr Nosek (MFA), Vojtěch Munzar (ME), Jiří Jirka (MT), presidents of regions Lubomír Franc (Královéhradecký region) and Jiří Běhounek (Vysočina region), vice president of COSMC Karel Štencel, “digital champion of CR” Ondřej Felix, Cyril Čapka representing the Union of Towns and Municipalities of the Czech Republic, members of parliament of CR Jaroslav Krupka and Václav Horáček, president of ICT Unie Svatoslav Novák, head of GBS division IBM for CR, SR and Hungary Vladek Šlezingr, country manager of the VMware company Michal Stachník and director of the ISSS conference Tomáš Renčín.

The following programme of the 16^th year of the conference was dominated by topics connected with the current state of development of the national e-government, but it was far from being only summing up of what has succeeded and what has not. More often there were discussed concrete steps concerning further continuing of the overall reform of public administration. There was much discussed harnessing the EU sources in the following programming period (2014+), the contribution of the present key projects of public administration informatization and their efficient implementation into the administration procedures as well as the modern tendencies including cloud solutions, outsourcing or virtualization or distribution of communication infrastructure. Apart from traditional expert blocks such as e-tourism or e-health there was for the first time allocated more time also for the academia, especially regarding the need for better interconnection between education, science, research and practice. The Monday discussion meeting was attended by almost two tens of representatives from universities, Ministry of Education, public administration and experts from the ICT industry and the results exceeded the expectation, on Tuesday morning the academia block continued by a series of presentations.

In the course of the Monday gala social evening of the conference there were as usual announced the results of the popular competitions Golden Crest, Biblioweb, Eurocrest and JuniorErb (JuniorCrest) and there was awarded a prize of the Minister of the Interior for development of information and communication technologies. Already the day before there was within the VIP evening in the Klicpera theatre presented also this year winner of the competition Czech At. The entire results of all competitions are available on www.isss.cz.

The main organizer of the conference ISSS/V4DIS 2013, which was traditionally held in support of the hosting city Hradec Králové, was the company Triada, coorganizers were Czech At, Ponca and the magazine Obec a finance (Municipality and Finance), the conference was also prepared by a number of other subjects and organizations. The general partner of the conference was once again Česká spořitelna, main partners were companies Atos, Cisco, Česká pošta (Czech Post), IBM, ICZ, Oracle and VMware.

Prokop Konopa, communication manager