RESEARCH ON THE LOW UPTAKE OF ONLINE SERVICES IN AZERBAIJAN

State institutions in Azerbaijan have various online services available for citizens and business at national and local level, which provide services on their own portals. However, the overall usability of online public services is quite low.  The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development has since many years supported the modernization of public services at local level in Azerbaijan, and since June 2022 GIZ will through Eastern Partnership (EaP) Regional Fund Project “Re-Engineering of Public Services in the Eastern Partnership” provide advice to EaP countries, including Azerbaijan, on designing of projects on reengineering of public services and its components.

In the frames of this cooperation project, Sustainera supported the client to diagnose and analyze the existing situation. As a firm with profound and extensive knowledge and experience in business process analysis and re-engineering, we conducted focus group surveys with different groups of stakeholders and make recommendations how to increase the uptake of the re-engineered/online public services.

In the context of methodology, a qualitative research approach was selected with a focus on conducting focus group discussions (FGDs) with carefully selected citizens based in Baku, Sheki, Sumqayit, Aghdam, and Lankaran cities, and use (have used) any of the selected services in the past one or two years. The COM-B model has been employed as a central framework for understanding and assessing the factors that influence citizens’ online public services usage behavior. Overall, 8 FGDs were conducted to assess 5 public services, each having 6~8 participants.

The results of the assignment allowed to understand and identify the existing gaps, issues and challenges in online service provision and suggested recommendations to ensure higher uptake and usage of existing re-engineered online public services by the citizens.