We all know that our young people are light years ahead of their teachers, parents and the Ministry of Education bureaucracy in their use of digital technology. They are all glued to their smartphones and tablets. This makes it hugely difficult to modernize the educational system, in part because so many teachers are deeply fearful of it. I believe you must encounter this in government as well."} 6b:{"position":15,"content":"“You are perfectly right; the responsibility of the government is to enable accessibility to the entire population. We worked on multi-channel accessibility. The traditional ones are service centers, phones and faxes, but we also worked on more advanced channels such as kiosks, mobile applications and Internet sites, social networks and more. We also ran a program called Lehava [Flame] to bridge the digital gap in the very low socioeconomic areas, aimed at young children and the elderly population, where we teach them the basics of how to use computers and basic software applications."} 6c:{"position":16,"content":"“As for the Ministry of Education, they do run some programs to train teachers to work with digital materials. They initiated an educational system based much more on the new unlimited capabilities technology can provide."} 6d:{"position":17,"content":"In terms of educating government officials, we planned to initiate an IT cadets program, to bring more tech-oriented and ‘Open Gov’-oriented people to the Civil Service.”"} 6e:{"position":18,"content":"How will the CIO make it easier for citizens to access services directly?"} 6f:{"position":19,"content":"“Well the CIO has the tools and budgets and know-how to implement processes and services in order to reduce bureaucracy and increase efficiency – even new services based on personalization, based on the new biometric smart ID. Also, I had under my responsibility the unit for improving service to the public, the unit that former minister

Getting future ready

Israel may be a land of hi-tech milk and honey but when it comes to public services it has yet to enter the 21st century.