The Effects of Economic Crisis on the Digitalization of the Greek Social Security

Economic crises repeatedly appear in market-based economies and have serious consequences on them. They are causing serious decreases of the sales revenue and therefor the financial resources of organizations, as well as of their operations and investments. However, they can have some positive effects as well, leading to processes’ rationalizations in important functions of them, improvements of their efficiency and better exploitation of their resources. In this paper we investigate the effects of the strong economic crisis that hit Greece between 2010–2018 on the digitization of one of the most important and costly domains of government activity: the social security. It has been concluded that during the economic crisis period there has been a large decrease of the ICT-related investment and operating expenses; however due to some improvement and rationalization of ICT-related processes and practices, as well as a better utilization of knowledgeable ICT personnel (mainly of the central ‘Electronic Government Center for Social Security’), a significant increase in the digitalization of the Greek Social Security has been achieved during this difficult period.