ROMANIA: Development of the Digitization Strategy for the Romanian Court of Accounts - identification of digitization needs in order to develop the New Digitization Strategy

The Romanian Court of Accounts is taking important steps in the development and implementation of a new institutional strategy that will be completed with a Digitization Strategy - for the period 2023-2027. The development of the Digitization Strategy is part of the DGREFORM Project – REFORM/SC2021/107, part of Framework Contract No. SRSS/2018/01/FWC/002, financed by the European Commission, thus, during the course of the project, the digitization needs were identified.

For the creation and development of the Catalog of needs, the MoSCoW method was used - (Mo - Must have; S - Should have; CO - could have; W - Won’t have), based on the risk analysis methodology, thus the structure of the catalog template was created, which can be further used in the following stages of the project.

For a better understanding and structuring of the needs in the catalog, they have been grouped into several categories and fields. The categories used for classification are:

• legal – the necessary changes in legislation;
• organization and governance – necessary changes in the organizational and governance structure of the Romanian Court of Accounts;
• operational – changes regarding the management, operational and support processes and policies of the Romanian Court of Accounts;
• applications and technologies – requirements regarding new functionalities, improvements, simplification of existing applications, interoperability, etc.;
• data and information – data classification, protection, management and governance requirements;
• human resources management - changes in the professional development plan and digital skills of employees;
• cyber security – requirements regarding the operational and IT protection of the environment in which the Romanian Court of Accounts operates against external threats and vulnerabilities.

These categories cover the main areas of a digitization strategy, as presented in the digital and technological maturity assessment, and also take into account the operational activities of the Romanian Court of Accounts and the main problem areas identified.

In the needs identification stage, the results obtained from the analysis carried out in the first phase of the project were used: the analysis of the digital maturity of the Romanian Court of Accounts, the evaluation of the maturity of the cyber security program, the analysis of the digital skills of the employees of the Romanian Court of Accounts and the SWOT analysis.

In the analysis of the current situation of the Romanian Court of Accounts, the project team identified several needs that must be addressed through the digitalization strategy, throughout the analysis carried out for the maturity of the Digital and Technological Capability of the Romanian Court of Accounts, the level of digital skills of the employees, cyber security program and SWOT analysis.

The evaluation of the documents prepared in the first phase of the project highlighted 130 defined needs. All these needs were classified into seven categories with impact on several areas of Romanian Court of Accounts operational activities. These needs were related to the availability of processes and procedures, application functionalities and digital skills for the employees of the Romanian Court of Accounts. 

After discussing and detailing the needs identified by the parties, a detailed analysis was carried out for the remaining 130 needs, as shown in the figure below:

When establishing the categories and areas for the classification of needs, the four levels of focus that will form the basis of the definition of the digitization strategy were followed.

• Strategic – the focus is on aligning the digitization strategy with the general strategy of the institution. During the definition of the vision of the institution's strategy, it must establish the expectations regarding how digital tools can help to complete and finalize the institutional strategy.
• Executive - the focus is on prioritizing IT projects, allocating resources and ensuring the realization of benefits for the institution.
• IT project/program governance and process governance – the focus is on establishing guidelines and rules for the IT function to execute processes in collaboration with business functions and to improve them.
• Operations – the focus is on defining the rules for managing core and supporting processes in order to reduce incidents and increase productivity.

Conclusion        

Based on the Catalog of needs and the definition of the needs included in it, the Romanian Court of Accounts has taken important steps in defining the Digitalization Strategy of the institution. In the future, we plan to have an evaluation type analysis of the differences between the existing solution and the proposed one starting from the defined needs.