“Although we are a public institution, we have built our organization completely according to the private sector because efficiency, success and quality are essential here.”
Dr. Cebrail Taşkın, Director General of Information Technologies at the Ministry of Treasury and Finance, stated that digital transformation provides huge prospects if used correctly, and that success comes naturally in an environment where employees are at the center of attention and work gladly.
Technology frameworks in Turkey’s governmental sector have shifted recently. Could you tell us more about this procedure?
A Ministry used to have a lot of General Directors. There was an IT Department under each General Directorate. Many different structures performed similar work. Maintaining quality in terms of both human resources and management style was difficult. A new structure was implemented with the Presidential Government Administration system. The Ministry of Treasury and Finance was among the first to undergo this restructure, and the Ministry of Treasury and Finance’s General Directorate of Information Technologies was founded in 2019. I’ve been the General Manager of this organization for roughly 17 months. I previously worked in the private sector. I am really delighted and excited to be working in government now. I strongly advise all trained personnel in our industry to do so. I encourage my peers my age who have acquired a particular level of maturity and experience to work in the public sector and serve our state and country.
You mentioned that each general directorate used to have a department head. How did this change with the establishment of the BTGM (General Directorate of Information Technologies)? Could you please explain the hierarchical structure to us?
Our DGIT organization included all of the Heads of IT Departments who were formerly in our Ministry’s general directorates. As a professional IT organization, we built the organizational chart in this manner. The General Director reports to three Deputy General Directors. The Software Directorate, Network and System Management Directorate, Cyber Security Directorate, Data Management Directorate, Administrative and Financial Affairs Directorate, and Human Resources Directorate are all reporting to them. In addition, we have built a Project Management Office Directorate in the public sector for the first time in Turkey. On the other hand, we are witnessing another first: the Transformation Office. This is the beginning of a new structure. There was a need for both a transformation of the public sector’s current infrastructure and a road map for this transition. As a result, we initially appointed a team leader to the Transformation Office and are now carrying on with our work.
Another innovation that we introduced for the first time in both the public and private sectors is the Chief Happiness Officer (CHO). Despite the fact that we are a public institution, we have structured our organization entirely in the private sector because efficiency, success, and quality are critical here. In order for this to happen, the organization must be properly set up. We have established a framework in accordance with international norms for how an IT organization should be handled, and we are making good progress.
You are trying to manage this structure not like the private sector, but as it should be, according to the conditions of the day. Can you tell us a little bit about the benefits of this?
When I took office, the pandemic was at its peak. On my first working day, we had an online meeting with our entire team of 374 people. I told all my friends that I would guarantee one thing: Happiness. I promised them that they would come to this organization happy and go home happy, and I didn’t leave it at that. We now have a Chief Happiness Officer who is solely responsible for employee happiness.
We are the first public institution in Turkey to receive the “Great Place to Work” certificate. We applied for the first time and received this very difficult certificate in a short period of 6 months. The key point here is a solid foundation and well-defined mission, vision and values. The rest comes by itself like a sock. If you put the employee at the center and make them feel valued, success and happiness come by themselves.
The “Great Place to Work” certificate added a lot of value to us. We suddenly became a star among public institutions and became an institution preferred by IT specialists working in many places in the public sector. We receive a lot of applications not only from the public sector but also from the private sector. We attract good talents from both the private and public sectors. In this way, we have undertaken very valuable and big projects.
It is necessary to plan well when starting a business. In the first two weeks of my tenure, we have drawn up the mission, vision and values of our institution together. We have positioned employees as stakeholders in our values.
We also endeavor to take our Ministry to the next level in the field of technology. For this purpose, the first application we made was the technology lectern. Every Wednesday at 10:00 am, we broadcast to all of Turkey. On Tuesdays, we organize topic-independent chats. We create special times where we listen to anyone who wants to talk about a topic. For example, one of our friends talked about the life of a spider. Another friend talked about motorsports, another about minimalism. In short, when we give them the opportunity, young people take the stage and we have very pleasant and productive conversations together.
In addition, we also started a garage initiative within the DGMM. The purpose of the garage initiative is to support the R&D formation here. Because we produce projects, we do projects, but we also need to think freely and follow innovations. We called this garage organization ‘BTGM Guru’ and we will create the Apple, Microsoft and Google of the future here.
Dr. Cebrail Taşkın, Director General of Information Technologies at the Ministry of Treasury and Finance, stated that digital transformation provides huge prospects if used correctly, and that success comes naturally in an environment where employees are at the center of attention and work gladly.
Technology frameworks in Turkey’s governmental sector have shifted recently. Could you tell us more about this procedure?
A Ministry used to have a lot of General Directors. There was an IT Department under each General Directorate. Many different structures performed similar work. Maintaining quality in terms of both human resources and management style was difficult. A new structure was implemented with the Presidential Government Administration system. The Ministry of Treasury and Finance was among the first to undergo this restructure, and the Ministry of Treasury and Finance’s General Directorate of Information Technologies was founded in 2019. I’ve been the General Manager of this organization for roughly 17 months. I previously worked in the private sector. I am really delighted and excited to be working in government now. I strongly advise all trained personnel in our industry to do so. I encourage my peers my age who have acquired a particular level of maturity and experience to work in the public sector and serve our state and country.
You mentioned that each general directorate used to have a department head. How did this change with the establishment of the BTGM (General Directorate of Information Technologies)? Could you please explain the hierarchical structure to us?
Our DGIT organization included all of the Heads of IT Departments who were formerly in our Ministry’s general directorates. As a professional IT organization, we built the organizational chart in this manner. The General Director reports to three Deputy General Directors. The Software Directorate, Network and System Management Directorate, Cyber Security Directorate, Data Management Directorate, Administrative and Financial Affairs Directorate, and Human Resources Directorate are all reporting to them. In addition, we have built a Project Management Office Directorate in the public sector for the first time in Turkey. On the other hand, we are witnessing another first: the Transformation Office. This is the beginning of a new structure. There was a need for both a transformation of the public sector’s current infrastructure and a road map for this transition. As a result, we initially appointed a team leader to the Transformation Office and are now carrying on with our work.
Another innovation that we introduced for the first time in both the public and private sectors is the Chief Happiness Officer (CHO). Despite the fact that we are a public institution, we have structured our organization entirely in the private sector because efficiency, success, and quality are critical here. In order for this to happen, the organization must be properly set up. We have established a framework in accordance with international norms for how an IT organization should be handled, and we are making good progress.
What projects have you completed in the Ministry so far, and what do you have planned for the future?
We are doing substantial transformation projects in the sphere of information technology under the guidance of our valued Minister Nureddin Nebati. Mr. Nebati, please. Thanks to our Minister, who offers us with all types of assistance, and with his faith in us, we are fast and enthusiastically realizing our projects.
We have tax offices all around the country, as you are aware. In addition, we have an online tax office. Our people can file declarations and pay their taxes online. Recently, collections to the online tax office have nearly equaled collections from tax offices. This is fantastic, and we are rapidly approaching full digitization. In addition, our Ministry has treasury information systems where accounting transactions are processed. This project is being rewritten. We are rewriting it in a micro-service design, using open source code and choosing these platforms, rather than relying on licensed products from foreign firms.
The Integrated Public Financial Management Information System, which we operate in collaboration with the General Directorate of Accounting, is one of our Ministry’s most valued programs. The Financial Management Systems project was rewritten, and the e-signature was implemented. We created the Common Payment Point project in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade. The Public-Fleet initiative was then begun. We placed all public-sector vehicles in an electronic system so that we could track their maintenance and fuel costs. Furthermore, the public will be able to rent vehicles from a single location by identifying surplus vehicles in a common pool.
The Incentive Support Information System is another initiative. Previously, each Ministry provided support within its own organization. All incentives and supports are collected in a unified database using the software we designed. As a result, any incentives and assistance provided to provinces or institutions can be pulled one by one at any time. We presently have 66 projects in the go. 29 of our projects have recently begun or are currently in progress. We are investing in software, infrastructure, system administration, and cyber security. Our Cyber Security Operation Center was developed. We’re putting money into the cloud. We had set aside a considerable budget to establish our own data center, but we reached an arrangement with one of Turkey’s main operators and built up the Disaster Recovery Center in a specific region of their data center. As a result, we saved a lot of money. Building a data center alone will not solve security issues. To accomplish this, you must carefully execute security rules, construct infrastructure to international standards, and form a strong team.
Furthermore, our Financial Crimes Investigation Board (MASAK) is doing very important work. We have really significant software that is in use here. We are preparing MASAK for the future; we have started and are continuing very good projects in the big data environment to enable us to take faster actions and choices. On the other hand, at our General Directorate of Accounting, where we perform accounting for the entire country, we can solve everything with electronic signatures instead of wet signatures, and we can instantaneously reveal the figures connected to public financing. We get business requirements from the General Directorate of Accounting and provide them with the relevant technology solutions. We also work on projects like public asset management and inventory management. In the near future, we will begin a massive project. With the e-procurement project, we will centralize all procurement processes. We will now incorporate direct purchases into the system. As a result, we will create a new platform where we can swiftly make every expenditure in the public sector in the procurement environment. In this way, we will make better use of public resources while also ensuring efficiency and openness. We will have a massive platform from which we will be able to monitor both procurement and procurement processes.
The 1 Million Employment effort is our most valuable effort for society. Mr. Berat Minister produced this proposal, which our President declared to everyone of Turkey. In this project, we are collaborating with BTK Academy. Our project’s goal is to train one million young people for careers in information technology.
The availability of information technology is insufficient. We need to address the sector’s needs, but how can we do so? With the help of online schooling. There are almost 200 trainings available in 33 distinct categories. The first and only free training and job initiative in Turkey. Both obtain training and are hired. We are about to meet our project’s target number. As members of our system, 910 thousand young people are being trained, and 370 thousand young people have completed a training program and reached a specific level of competency. When I took over this project, I noticed two flaws: there were no employers in the system. Within three months, our team created an employer portal. We invited CEOs, investors, and partners from significant organizations in banking, finance, e-commerce, and telecoms to learn about our idea. We requested that they support our employer portal, and we currently have over 200 firms in our system. We compiled a list of persons who had received the most training for our project and hired one of them as our General Director. The second flaw I noticed in the project was the lack of a measuring and evaluation mechanism. We reached an arrangement with both an international and a domestic exam system provider. We evaluated the system’s question quality and administered the exam to our young folks. As a result, we assessed the level of our youth. We will enable our young people to take the exam at the online exam center by involving the Ministry of National Education in our proposal. This will make it easier for our youth to find work. We wanted to incorporate all of our ministries in this endeavor, so we went through them one by one. This initiative is being carried out in collaboration with the Ministries of Youth and Sports, Transportation and Infrastructure, Industry and Technology, Labor and Social Security, and National Education. As a result, this has become a state initiative. This, I believe, should continue. This year, we also earned the best project award for our 1 Million Employment project.
