It is urgent to rectify formalism at the fingertips
2024-10-21
Recently, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued the "National Rectification Work Plan for Formalism at Fingertips" (hereinafter referred to as the "Work Plan"), which clearly stated that by the end of 2025, the focus will be on rectifying the problems of excessive and excessive use, multiple reporting, non-standard construction, and functional alienation in government applications, and deploying centralized investigation, self-examination and self correction, record management, and sound mechanisms. In fact, as early as December 2023, the Central Cybersecurity and Information Technology Commission issued the "Several Opinions on Preventing and Controlling Formalism at Fingertips", which has achieved certain results in various regions and departments, compressing the space for formalism. It goes without saying that the introduction and implementation of the 'Work Plan' this time is aimed at further optimizing measures, expanding effectiveness, and preventing rebound, in order to further solve a number of prominent problems caused by formalism. In recent years, with the development trends of networking, informatization, and dataization, "fingertip government," "digital government," and "digitalization of government services" have emerged one after another. This move is to keep pace with the development of the digital age and meet the public's expectations for a service-oriented government. However, in practice, due to various reasons, this move has also fallen into the trap of formalism in some places, resulting in some "adverse reactions". Firstly, the superficiality of government services. Some government departments and grassroots units have developed a large number of government apps to showcase their achievements, but these mini programs often have repetitive functions and low usage rates, which actually bring inconvenience to the public. A typical example is that some government elderly care projects are keen on designing smart elderly care mini programs that the elderly do not know how to use. Secondly, there is the 'negative empowerment' of technology. The digital equipment invested by government agencies with a large amount of funds and energy often leads to technological governance paradoxes such as "emphasizing construction over connotation", "fragmented application", and "inaccurate technology". These counterproductive phenomena not only deviate from the original intention of reducing the burden on grassroots, but also bring a series of negative effects. For example, different business departments often require grassroots units to submit a large amount of social and livelihood data through electronic means, but these data often only complete the reporting task and are not effectively utilized, increasing the burden on grassroots staff. Once again, there is a disconnect in user experience. The development and application of digital technology and social media have broadened the channels for citizen participation, helping more public demands to enter the government's vision. However, the rapid accumulation of public feedback information is not yet matched with the government's ability to use technology and the effective participation of the people. In practical operation, feedback opinions are often not handled in a timely manner, and related issues are not well resolved. Finally, there is the widening of the digital divide. Some government departments focus too much on formal digital reform and neglect the improvement of actual work, resulting in limited effectiveness of the reform. From the perspective of the government, different business departments have established multiple digital platforms, but due to the lack of unified data standards and sharing mechanisms, data cannot be interconnected, forming a 'data island'. From the perspective of interaction between politics and the public, although government departments have released a large amount of information, the quality of the information is uneven, lacking authority and accuracy, resulting in difficulties for the public to obtain information and low effective participation of the public. The formalism at the fingertips reflects some drawbacks in government management and services in the current digital age. Although digital technology has brought convenience to government services, if it only stays on the surface and ignores the actual effects, it will lead to problems such as resource waste and low efficiency. Therefore, it is urgent for relevant parties to adopt measures such as simplifying processes, data sharing, optimizing user experience, substantive interaction, and supervision and feedback to effectively avoid "formalism at the fingertips" and truly achieve the efficiency, convenience, and humanization of digital government. In short, in the wave of digital transformation and "streamlining administration, delegating powers, and improving services" reform, we need to not only update government services and governance technologies, but also pay attention to the government's own reforms. In this context, the Internet needs to add while the government needs to subtract. Only in this way can the development of digital government truly achieve the organic unity of instrumental rationality and value rationality, as well as the improvement of governance capabilities. (New Society)
Edit：Sun Jia Bin Responsible editor：Li Yi
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