Д.Медведев.Вступительное слово на заседании.12.02.09.Part 1

Opening Remarks at a Meeting of the Presidential Council for the Development of the Information Society in Russia.Part 1
February 12, 2009
The Kremlin, Moscow

Вступительное слово на заседании Совета по развитию информационного общества в России.
12 февраля 2009 года
Москва, Кремль

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Good afternoon colleagues! Please be seated.

Theyve already sent me a note, which obviously shows desire to work.

Good afternoon once again, colleagues! We are gathered here today to participate in the first meeting of our Council for the Development of the Information Society. The decree that established this Council was signed in November last year. Naturally I am counting on it to play a role in the development of the information society, in the development of our current strategy and in the formulation of specific plans for the future.

Today it is obvious that any sort of progress or modernisation is impossible without information technology. This is the case in the scientific and technical spheres, but not only there: it is also obligatory for dealing with administrative issues and even the strengthening of democracy in the country. Today it is impossible to imagine a single enterprise, a single company that does not use computers or an automated accounting system, to some degree at any rate. And its equally difficult to imagine ordinary business activity or our enterprises existing without the Internet. Telecommunication services are available in urban and rural areas, and it is encouraging that despite everything one in four Russian families has a computer.

In recent years, information technology and information services have become quite a substantial part of Russia's non-commodity exports, something approaching a billion dollars. So why have we established this Council and why are we meeting today? Whatever weve done is not good enough, because judging by all the key indicators we are still terribly far behind the most developed nations in this regard. As far as our international ranking is concerned, we werent even in 20th or 30th place, but closer to 70th or 80th! I myself was astonished by these figures. Moreover, historically we have always had a very high potential as far as general intellectual capacity is concerned, and there has always been interest in this area and a lot of programmers. Whats more the gap between us and the leading countries is not diminishing, which seems ironic given the fact that our economy and the everyday lives of our citizens are actually improving. Here are our rankings in the category of electronic government: in 2005 we were 56th and in 2007 92nd. What does this mean? This means that we dont even have an electronic government. All that is a chimera. Regarding our preparedness to enter the network world (there is such a rating), we had the honour of occupying the 72nd place.

As for electronic government, today virtually all federal structures are provided with modern computers connected to the Internet. Almost all state agencies have set up a database, but that is all that they have done. Our internal documents are all still circulated on paper, as they always have been. And computers are mainly used well, you know what they are used for. They are used as typewriters, only more convenient ones because you dont need to retype things over and over.

We are now in the fifth year of translating our work into a digital format. That means that we have been working with e-documents for the past five years. In fact its even more than that, because when I was working in the Presidential Executive Office six or seven years ago I tried to bring this in then, without success. Then we tried it with the government cabinet. Unfortunately, in this sense we have nothing to boast about.

We have no modern planning systems and no modern systems of financial and management accounting. Just distributing documents to departments concerning regulatory matters consumes tonnes of paper. And this is not the case in the developed countries. We are just rich, we have lots of forests and lots of paper.

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[LearningRussian1984]

These speeches are so useful to me. Thanks a lot for uploading them.