Public E-Service Conditions in Lithuania

Introduction

European Commission documents i2010 - A European Information Society for growth and employment and Europe 2020 a strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth is the base to renovate Lisbon strategy for economical development and creation of work places. There is forecasted in actions’ plan to involve all citizents in e-government, to provide for them modern, trustfull and acceptable services; to arise effectiveness and virtue of e-government, satisfaction of customers, to secure the main services of wide influence for citizents; to implement the main measures that let to create conditions for citizents to use the convient approach to public services in whole Europe (Codagnone, Wimmer, 2007).

Economic and social developments are heavily dependent on the development of the public administration. In order to provide better services to businesses and citizens, in the last decade most governments invested in the development of electronic government (Vintar, Nograšek, 2010).

E-government is the implemenatation of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for public sector activities to achieve the desired organizational change, providing consumers with new skills to improve the quality of public services, strengthen the ongoing democratic processes in country and increase citizens’participation in national policies (Heeks, 2006). Realisation of e-government’s projects will increase efficiency of administration system, reduce amount of state servants, improve quality and expedition of administration.

All European Union (EU) states members in its national reforms programmes stand on information and communication technologies; the main aspects are e-government, broadband connection and digital literacy. Problems of information and communication technologies are excluded as objectives in national reforms programs and that why wider reclamation of it is supported.

Information Society Development’s in Lithuania coordination process is inseparable from the European Union-wide processes. One of the main purposes of Lithuanian National Conception of Development of Information Society is to modernise the state government by using computerising information sources, improving e-government, supplying for citizens the opportunity to ease get information from all state and local government institutions. Improving e-government it is important to coherently develop electronic context, to stimulate service offering by electronic ways, to ensure for citizens and business subjects the opportunity to use such servises (Lietuvos e. valdžios..., 2009).

E-services focus on providing services through the Internet. E-services have been viewed as Internet-based customer service and online account management services and alternately as an overarching service-centric concept (Kim at al., 2003).

Public e-service covers the entire resident or business contacts with the public administration in cyberspace. The requirements for enforcement of common European e-services in cyberspace constitute improvement of services in public administration in Lithuania. The idea is that public administration in each EU country would not be different and public e-services are provided by the parallel service scenario. It can be argued that public e- service is more useful to the authorities: these are associated with an increase in the timeliness of service, customer satisfaction and reduced growth in staff costs and load (Augustinaitis, Petrauskas, 2002).

To Increase electronic provision of administrative services and their public accessibility, the State of Lithuania and municipal institutions and agencies have created E-governmentgateway, a portal of electronic public and administrative services, accessible at www.epaslaugos.lt. The portal contains a list of links to public institutions or wbsites of the public institutions that provide public services or public information. References are grouped according to what services are for businesses and residents. Currently, E-governmentgateway portal is the gateway to more than 400 links to electronically provided public services and administration.