Diia

The first and obvious benefit is the convenience of such a platform. Citizens can have a bunch of documents in their pocket, not being afraid to lose or damage them. And in every situation where it is needed, they can just open an app on their smartphones and show/check the document they need. But benefits lay even further than this. Diia contributes to the reduction of bureaucracy associated with public services, which in turn helps to fight corruption and increase government savings. Fewer people are needed to be employed in the public sector and fewer interactions are happening. With starting the program, already 10% of government employees were reduced, which contributes to hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, but besides this, the initiative also improves the speed, efficiency, and transparency of government services. In addition, the digitalization of the government sector helps to develop the whole IT industry in the country, people become more digital-aware and educated, this affects other sectors as well, increasing the spread of digital infrastructure and fasting the speed of overall digitalization.

In the data published by the UN for the e-government development index in 2020, Ukraine ranked 69th in 193 countries surveyed, this index assesses the capabilities of the government to integrate its functions electronically such as with the use of internet and mobile devices (UNDP,2011). Despite of its lower ranking in the e-government development index, Ukraine made a big jump on the e-participation index, which they ranked 43rd out of 193 countries from 0.66 in 2018 to 0.81 in 2020 (un.org, 2020), this shows that the government and its citizens are adapting the IT-based government functions.

The main goal of e-government according to Perez-Morote et.al. (2020) is to have accountability and transparency among the countries involved. But in order to do so, there are several challenges that a country should assess first prior to implementing e-government.

In the research written by Heeks (2001), the author identified 2 main challenges that countries face in the development of e-government, first is the strategic challenge which involves the preparedness (e-readiness) of the entire government system for electronic transformation and second challenge is the tactical challenge where the government must

design (e-governance design) a system where it can be understood by every user, it's important that the information that needs to be communicated to the consumers is received clearly.

For the first challenge (e-readiness), Ukraine has an internet penetration rate of 76% in 2020 and is expected to grow to 82%,[22] it is important that consumers have the internet access for it to enable the consumers to utilize the service. Another factor is the readiness of its institutional infrastructure, which means that the government has its own organization which is solely focused on implementing the e-government project, and in the case of Ukraine the e-governance team is led by Mr. Oleksandr Ryzhenko, the country e-governance initiative is even further strengthen by ensuring that the data infrastructure and legal infrastructure are already prepared. Ukraine has done this by modernizing their legislation that is more appropriate in the digital service, and the data exchange solution used by Ukraine is called Trembita. The human infrastructure is also being updated, as competent individuals must be the one doing the task, hence EGOV4UKRAINE was launched, this aims to get IT developers for developing a system for administrative services. These efforts by the Ukrainian government did not go unnoticed, as they have received an award from the e-Governance Academy as “partner of the year 2017”.

For the second challenge, which deals with the system design, the success of Ukraine can be seen on the latest data of UNDP, where it shows a high increase in the E-participation index whereas in 2018 Ukraine ranked 75th and in 2020 it ranked 46th (un.org,2020).

Therefore, despite the challenges of fully implementing e-government, the changes that Ukraine made have clearly made an impact on their position in their development of e-government.

Despite the visible success, the implementation of the e-government was accompanied by problems. Data leakage became the main one. In May 2020, the data of 26 million driver's licenses appeared in the public domain on the Internet. The Ukrainian government said the Diia app was not linked to a data breach, but it is impossible to say for certain. Any storage of official documents in electronic format is associated with the risk of their leakage. In addition, the Diia application still has data protection issues, as the required protection system has not been implemented. This is also compounded by the country's weak data protection legal regime.