Diia and the disappearance of the queue

When I started working here, an administrative task meant a person going somewhere. A registration, a permit, a certificate, an extract from a register: each was a building, an opening hours sign, a queue and usually a second visit because something was missing the first time.

A company budgets for that. Not in fees — in staff hours. We had people whose working week was substantially made up of standing in queues on behalf of the business.

What changed, in order

The registers came first, and they are the actual reform. A company register, a property register, a land cadastre, a court register — digitised, unified and made queryable. Nothing else is possible until the underlying data is in a database rather than in a filing cabinet.

Then electronic identity: a signature that a state system will accept, held by an ordinary person on an ordinary phone. Then the services built on top, which is the part people see.

The measure I use

Not the number of services available. The number of times someone from my office has to physically go somewhere. That number fell by most of its value over about six years, and it is the clearest quantification of the reform I can offer.

A second effect, harder to measure and possibly larger: a queue is where discretion lives. When a document is issued automatically against a database query, there is no official to persuade and no conversation to have. A great deal of low-level corruption did not need to be fought. It was designed out.

What it was built on

Two things Ukraine already had: very high mobile penetration and a large domestic software industry that could be hired to build it. This was not a reform imported wholesale. It was assembled from capacity that existed.

I take the same measure: not the app but the hours it deletes. In 2015 I set aside a day for a certificate; today I obtain the same certificate on a phone, and that is the most concrete gain of the decade in between. Most people arguing about digital government reform look at the interface; what should be measured is the length of the queue.