State and society: information competence

Notion of informational competence of civil servants and legal basis for its development. We should emphasize that the issue of informational competence of civil servants gains its significance within democratic and administrative reforms and rapid general changes in social life which distinctly characterize modern Russian society. Some scientists directly point out that it is the state personnel policy focusing on high qualification of the staff that enables to cope with problems of public management professionally [12].

It should be noted that recently in Russia the issue of informational competence of civil servants is not being deeply researched in scientific politics and law, besides this problem is rarely concerned in scientific publications.

The Thesaurus of Russian Language edited by Professor Dmitry Ushakov defines the concept «competence» as «awareness, authority» [14, 1427].

By this definition the authors uppermost imply common knowledge of computer application, capability to use PC and other IT including basic Internet services such as e-mail, and implementation of this knowledge in professional activity. Considering given interpretation we suppose that at the present stage of informational development of Russian society and state institutions informational competence of civil servants is the basic element of general competence of state personnel and the factor defining the degree of skill.

Note that professionalism and competence of civil servants constitutes one of basic principles of civil service embodied in the Civil Service Federal Act of Russian Federation of July 27, 2004 [1; 2; 3; 8, 42– 44; 9, 30–34]. Article 12 of this Act states that the set of qualification demands placed on civil service posts includes the requirements to the degree of professional education and record of work in government service (other civil services) or record of professional activity along with requirements of professional knowledge and skills essential to perform official duties; this implies in particular the requirement to the level of informational competence (Art. 12, §1). According to §6 of the mentioned article of the Civil Service Federal Act “…qualifying standards of professional knowledge and skills necessary to accomplish official duties are defined by the statutory act of state authority with consideration of its tasks and functions, and are included into official regulations for civil servants».