SLOVAKIA’S IT Association (ITAS), as in previous election years, organised a pre-election discussion round table on February 7 devoted to the theme of those topics that most concern IT companies in Slovakia. Five political parties accepted invitations to participate. Alexander Barna represented Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), Peter Mach the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), Roland Sill Most-Híd, Ivan Štefanec the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ), and Ján Počiatek Smer.
The theme of the Slovak government’s Operational Programme Informatisation of Society (OPIS) and e-government opened the event. This topic remains high on the agenda of IT companies as each change of government in the past has meant a halt and reassessment of related processes. They pointed out that it is high time to move on as Slovakia only has a limited time to draw allocated EU funds in the current programming period.
While the politicians at the event declared their support for the process of informatisation and the removal of political influence from the process, they presented different ways to reach this goal. Štefanec and Barna called for adoption of a law on e-government and Počiatek called for the creation of a ministry for EU funds. All of those present described the current procurement law as insufficient and called for its amendment. They also criticised the atomisation of powers related to the informatisation processes.
ITAS president Juraj Sabaka appreciated the consensus among the political parties on the basic questions concerning the informatisation of society and expressed his belief that these would not remain pre-election promises.
“ITAS regards the realisation of e-government as critical, and Slovakia cannot afford any other losses caused by time-consuming reassessment,” said Sabaka. “Continuity is a key theme and we believe that those who set up the cabinet will realise this very well… I would like to believe that the difference between declared plans and deeds will be smaller than it was in the past.”
The other topics debated were education, the ACTA treaty, imports and recycling.
