[Exclusive] "Even Civil Servants Act Swiftly"... Direct Reporting from Deputy Director to Vice Minister

Section Chief → Team Leader → Manager → Policy Officer → Division/Department Head → Deputy Minister → Minister
Breaking the Vertical Reporting Chain... Reporting Order Eliminated up to Deputy Minister
'What Was the Font Style Again?'... Elite Officials Wasting Time
Cumbersome Repetitive Tasks Automated... AI Drafts Reports

The government is completely overhauling the way work is conducted in the public sector. President Yoon Seok-yeol has urged civil servants to “innovate their work methods.” The vertical and hierarchical reporting system, which used to take five steps including vice minister review, will be drastically reduced to a single step. Drafts of administrative documents will be created by artificial intelligence (AI), and the closed-off departmental barriers will be removed to allow easier access to documents from other departments.

According to the ‘Top 10 Administrative Document Innovation Tasks’ obtained by Asia Economy on the 25th, the government is pursuing this policy under the vision of a “government that works well and is trusted.” The core is to integrate the latest digital technologies into administrative documents and enhance efficiency, openness, and scientific rigor through data-driven scientific administration. A government official explained, “Policy, messaging, and decision-making are more important, but current work practices are overly focused on formality, and we want to change that.”

Vice Ministers Review Simultaneously with Grade 4 Team Leaders; AI Drafts Government Documents

The biggest change is in the reporting system. When civil servants create a policy, they usually draft it, print it on paper, and then conduct meetings and internal reporting. Once the processing policy is finalized, the person in charge submits an official draft through the government’s electronic approval program called ‘Onnara.’ The review process proceeds in the order of team leader → manager → policy officer → division/department head → vice minister. After all reviews are completed, the minister gives final approval.

Because the reporting system is vertical, work speed was slow and the process inefficient. If someone in the approval line was absent or busy, policy decisions were often delayed indefinitely even after all reviews were completed. It was common for reports to be prepared again from scratch due to revision instructions from the vice minister, even after passing all middle management reviews. Confusion over who gave revision instructions led to file names being repeatedly labeled with terms like ‘Gwasu (revised by manager)’ or ‘Guksu (revised by department head).’

Going forward, a ‘parallel review’ method will be introduced, allowing the approval process to skip all reporting steps for finalized matters. Regardless of rank, vice ministers will review documents at the same stage as team leaders. This means that a vice minister will receive reports directly from the officer who drafted them. To prevent confusion, the document management card will record the time when the review was reported to the reviewer. The changed work method will be applied to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety as early as next month and expanded to all ministries next year.

Development of an AI administrative secretary is also officially underway. The AI secretary will learn from administrative document data produced by the government and draft documents that civil servants need to write themselves. Initially, a pilot service will be created using publicly available press releases, speeches, legal data, and information disclosure request manuals. Subsequently, a government-owned AI system will be built using private-sector large-scale language models for practical use. This system will first be applied to the Onnara work management system and then expanded to other tasks and systems.

The government expects the introduction of the AI administrative secretary to significantly increase work processing speed by eliminating unnecessary simple tasks. Until now, civil servants have had to open each previously published press release to write the background of initiatives included in reports. They also spent considerable time searching for laws and data to support initiatives. A government official said, “Even just skipping formatting tasks like fonts and underlining could greatly reduce work hours.”

Lowering Departmental Barriers and Activating Data Sharing Within Agencies

Departmental barriers will also be drastically lowered. When civil servants produce documents, they enter the scope of disclosure, and 76.2% of all documents are ‘department-disclosed.’ This means that even within the same agency, information is inaccessible if it belongs to a different department. Therefore, the default disclosure scope will be changed to ‘agency-disclosed.’ If a civil servant insists on department-only disclosure without agency disclosure, they must enter the reason for the change. Since about 81% of respondents in an internal survey of civil servants supported this policy, it will be implemented across all ministries next year.

On February 7, President Yoon presided over a Cabinet meeting at the Government Sejong Complex and emphasized, “If the mindset of public officials does not change, it will be difficult to survive the economic war,” and “The way public officials work and think must also change boldly.” He also criticized the slow work speed of the public sector, citing the SK Hynix semiconductor plant construction in Yongin, which took longer than competing countries. He ordered that the government must become “agile and flexible.”

The development of large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) technology has also become an opportunity for work innovation. Within the government, there is a consensus that actively utilizing administrative documents produced and held by the government as data is important in this digital transition era. The number of documents in the Onnara work management system has gradually increased from 11.4 million in 2017 to 14.68 million in 2021, and it is analyzed that creating a foundation for quality data utilization is essential for realizing a successful digital platform government.

When ChatGPT became a hot topic earlier this year, President Yoon evaluated it during the Ministry of the Interior and Safety’s work report in January, saying, “I had an acquaintance who knows this well have ChatGPT write the 2023 presidential New Year’s address, and I received it. It was plausible. Really excellent.” Referring to the fact that civil servants worked until midnight for two weeks preparing for a newly appointed minister’s press conference, he mentioned, “If we had something like ChatGPT, we wouldn’t have to stay up all night for two weeks; we could prepare in just one day.”