The utilization of ASAN Bridge System proved to be more effective, in the sense that it eliminated the complexities and slow procedures existent in the traditional service delivery. The system addressed the shortcomings of the traditional practices by hindering the misuse of the data and ensuring security. Further positive aspects of using ASAN Bridge :

• Not dependent on physical equipment (card, token, etc.);
• Ability to work on all Operating Systems (OS);
• Timely detection and prompt elimination of any problems within the system through the monitoring module;
• Relevant permissions can be managed centrally while transferring information from one institution to another;
• Acceptance and transfer of all types of services (XML, JSON, SOAP, Restful);
• Versioning of services in order to increase the sustainability of transmitted services;
• The services can be divided into sub-services, and thus transfer only the necessary information from the transmitted data to the other party.

The ASAN Bridge project demonstrated huge success and attracted the majority of the government agencies into the process. As a convincing proof, the ASAN Bridge System became the winner of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) awards organized by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2022. In the competition, which was held in 18 categories, ASAN Bridge presented by Azerbaijan became one of the first 5 projects that received the highest number of votes in the category “Building trust and security in the application of ICT” and was awarded as a champion project.

Given all these factors, the ASAN Bridge System is at the stage of diffusing lessons. The project was implemented successfully and the experience as well as the knowledge gained from this process is being shared with the public organizations of other countries. Apart from this, the system is being improved constantly by the project team and the updated version will be available in the upcoming months.

Throughout the project, the majority of the public organizations in the country were attracted into the project as collaborators. The organizations provided the project team with the needed citizen-related as well as the operational data, Eventually, this cooperation assisted to coordinate all the resources and information from the database of government organizations which was critical for the creation of the ASAN Bridge System.

Since ASAN Bridge integrated all government entities into a single system, exchange of the data and rendering public services became a simplified task for the public employees. As a result of the innovated system, the public services became fast-paced, secure and more accessible to the citizens.

The results of the project:

• 54 government entities were integrated into the system;
• 426 root services are offered;
• Over 218 billion transactions were realized.

The overall impact of the project:

• During the decision-making process, public officials can use state database within their mandate,
• To perform business operations, companies can make use of the information in the state database within the mandate.

The Monitoring and Evaluation team employed following techniques to measure the results and impact of the project:

• Interviews with the beneficiaries - Evaluation of the new system, satisfaction level and feedback about the rate of the effectiveness
• Evaluation Surveys - Assessing the quality of the trainings for learning new system, new public service delivery, and coordination
• Statistics related to the project results

Expected results and impact of the project:

• Reducing paper waste
• Decreasing queue in public and private entities

Applying and adapting to the progress comes with its challenges. In the case of ASAN Bridge, the lack of relevant skilled staff and resistance to the progress by some workers generated obstacles throughout the implementation process. Given specific infrastructure requirements for the ASAN Bridge System, it was necessary to work with the employees who were aware of the modes of operation. Therefore, the following measures have been taken:

• Awareness and capacity-building activities for the staff of government institutions
• Advising and supporting the recruitment of skilled employees

Moreover, the existence of non-digital government structures posed a great challenge during this process. Eventually, we have been able to digitize the organizations through integration into the system. For this purpose, modernization of IT infrastructure was carried out.

The following measures were critical factors that led to the success of the ASAN Bridge System:

• Effective leadership and guidance - Experienced project managers and professionals were key to successful project completion.
• Proper communication between numerous state institutions - The usage of both formal and informal communication were ensured.
• Creation of the infrastructure to support information sharing - Generating the groundwork needed to alter the traditional service delivery methods was crucial in our case.
• Extensive monitoring and evaluation - Evaluating the results on a constant basis and checking the project progress were an integral part of the process.

Considering the infrastructure and resources employed for the creation of the ASAN Bridge System, the project is replicable, and can act as a useful example for other countries targeting digital transformation. Since the ASAN Bridge System encompasses the majority of the public organizations in Azerbaijan, the replicability of the project is plausible for the public entities out of the country.

For this reason, E-Gov Development Center signs Memorandum of Understanding with the governments who are in need of the exchange of experience and provides consulting so as to build the same system. The consultations cover the comprehensive analysis of organizational, financial and political aspects along with the technical elements. Currently, the implementation process for the beneficiary countries proceed with the help of these consultations.

In order to make needed adjustments and improvements, the following list of lessons were used as the reference points:

• During the implementation process, it was observed that the constant requests of government organizations led to the problem as the responsibility of each employee was not clarified and the requests were not directed to the particular accountable project member. For the purpose of addressing the issue, division of the workload and accountability area of every worker were specified, and the public organizations were informed accordingly.
• Another problem was the resignation of the project members, causing unawareness of the subsequent employee about the previous operations. For handling this problem, the new requirement of writing down all the operations was put into force.