“The first meeting of the Digital Development Council, chaired by First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva, is, in my view, the beginning of a qualitative change in our country’s digital policy. The model in which individual agencies developed their own platforms in parallel had reached its natural saturation point: although each system was functional in itself, the lack of interconnection between them placed an additional burden on citizens and resulted in duplicated costs for the state. The Council’s decisions are aimed precisely at eliminating this fragmentation — shifting governance from an agency-centric model to a citizen-centric, data-driven one. The coordination of the digital agenda at the highest level of state governance guarantees that this transition will be carried out consistently and effectively,” Samir Orujov, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at ADA University and PhD in Mathematics, said in a statement to AZERTAC.
Samir Orujov noted that, within the framework of the Action Plan, the phased consolidation of government agencies’ digital services on the mygov and mygov Business platforms will bring about three concrete changes in practice. First, the number of entry points will decrease: instead of dozens of separate portals, citizens and entrepreneurs will gain access to all services through a single digital identity. Second, the "once-only" principle will come into effect — the state will no longer ask citizens to provide information it already holds, as inter-agency data exchange will supply it automatically. Third, and most importantly, the very logic of service delivery will change: in a number of cases, services will be provided proactively, at the moment an entitlement arises, without requiring citizens to submit an application.
“As a statistician, I would add that the least discussed, yet perhaps the most valuable, outcome of a unified ecosystem lies precisely in the field of data. In fragmented systems, the same indicator is recorded by different agencies using different methodologies, creating inconsistencies in state statistics. Integration eliminates these inconsistencies at the technical level: administrative data built on unified identifiers, standardized classifications, and common quality standards provide a more reliable foundation for both policymaking and regulatory oversight,” he noted.
Speaking about the risks, Samir Orujov said that centralization, while offering significant advantages, also creates a new risk profile, and a professional approach requires managing these risks through measurable indicators rather than general statements.
“The first risk is cybersecurity: the concentration of personal and commercial data within a single infrastructure creates an attractive target for cyberattacks. The solution lies not only in technical safeguards but also in system architecture — the principles of data minimization, access logging, and the traceability of every request must be incorporated from the design stage. The second risk concerns the transition period itself. During migration from legacy systems, there is a possibility of data loss or distortion. Therefore, formal quality criteria to verify data integrity must be established for every stage of the migration process. The third risk is social in nature. Uneven digital literacy across society may make access to services more difficult for certain groups, particularly older people and residents of the regions. Addressing this challenge begins with user-centered interface design, but does not end there. Alternative service channels must be maintained, while digital literacy programs should be implemented in parallel. Finally, since proactive services rely on algorithms, the issue of algorithmic transparency comes to the forefront. Citizens have the right to know which decisions were made and on the basis of what data, and this right must be embedded into the system from the outset. We believe that, as a result of the implementation of the current projects, the average service delivery time will decrease, the share of proactively delivered services will increase, user satisfaction will improve, and Azerbaijan’s position in the relevant international rankings will rise even further,” he emphasized.
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Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: AZERTAC, 12.07.2026
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