One of the pillars of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) promoted by the European Union is related to the development of a digital, smart and resilient economy. €160 million have been allocated to reach this objective.
In this context Malta is focusing on the deepening of the digital transformation through policy reforms with a focus on reducing the digital divide, promoting more digital skills, implementing a smart specialisation strategy focusing on fostering business research and development, and strengthening public and private cooperation.
Malta’s RRP places a strong focus on the digitalisation of administration, following from the digitalisation of business and the improvement of human capital in digitalisation.
In order to improve the digitisation of public services, the plan is to host services on more responsive platforms and to set up registers for data sharing and reuse purposes, also for the clearance of good and property transfers to reduce the administrative burden for citizens and for business.
The investments also consist in designing and implementing solutions that will improve security by improving capacity and resilience of data centres. Digitalisation and modernisation of public administration will provide better customer experience to citizens and business, also thanks to the extension of online services.
Referring to the digitalisation of business, the main challenge is the digital gap between small and big enterprises.
Big enterprises perform well, but more work needs to be done to engage smaller businesses in this process of transformation.
Malta’s Recovery and Resilient Plan places a strong focus on the digitalisation of administration- Julian Dingli
During a webinar hosted by Europe Direct CORE Platform, during which this topic was discussed, it was pointed out that often a lot of attention is given to technological innovations, without thinking that many micro companies have yet to take their first steps toward digitalisation.
It is important to make sure that the basic processes are all digitised, but also that people acquire the digital skills needed to use new technologies, so that they can be more easily absorbed into the labour market as well.
When we talk about SME digitisation, we refer to small and medium-sized enterprises, but it is important not to leave behind micro enterprises, which are equally relevant in the Maltese economic landscape.
Malta’s RRP also envisages investments to improve the digitalisation of the justice and health systems. With regard to justice, the creation of a judicial portal with dashboards, the mapping and designing of processes, as in the Justice Agency, will lead to an improvement of this system.
With regard to health, machine learning and automation will increase efficiency in the outpatients and the operations management processes, while the acquisition of modern machines will improve radiotherapy services.
The European Commission is implementing the Digital Decade Policy Programme which has three main elements – the first introduces a monitoring and reporting mechanism to measure progress towards the Digital Decade targets; the second is a governance framework that obliges member states and the Commission to work together in order to identify gaps and joint action to achieve these targets, by means of multicountry projects; while the third element refers to a new mechanism to set up and implement multicountry projects.
Multicountry projects are very relevant, especially for a small country such as Malta. During the webinar it was highlighted that it is important to bring this concept of cooperation down to the citizens’ level, since it would be useful to raise awareness about the benefits associated with increased cooperation among European states.
One thing that was also pointed out was the necessity of the EC to pay more attention to the regional differences of member states, with the aim of achieving more effective results, including through better cooperation with local authorities.
Digitalisation is a challenge not only for Malta but for all member states. Malta is at a good starting point but there is still much to be done.
Most of the RRP funding under this component is being allocated to the government digitalisation and online services; however, efforts also must focus on the reduction of the digital divide among enterprises, and to make the new digital tools usable and understandable to the entire population, leaving no one behind.
The COVID-19 pandemic has kick-started this digitalisation process, especially in the work environment. Now that people are more open to change, it is important to provide them with the tools to best move forward into a changing world that will increasingly require digital skills.
Julian Dingli is the founder and director of ShipOne Agencies Ltd.