One of the guests at Tuesday's Invex Forum conference was Ivan Pilip, Member of Parliament and ex-Minister of Finance. After the morning session the Invex Daily put a number of questions to him.

Information technology and the support of its development are the topics under discussion for the second day at Brno Exhibition Centre. What form, in your opinion, should this support take?

I would first particularly like to state that I am concerned that too much is expected from any change in legislative conditions. Legislation may level the playing field, but it cannot perform miracles. In this area the government may be able to do more than parliament. This relates, in particular, to implementing the plan for the state information system and the further liberalisation of telecommunications. It might be worth entering into negotiations with the majority holders in Telecom concerning the liberalisation of the market earlier than has been agreed. I can't think of any specific law off-hand, which needs to be passed or amended to aid more rapid development of IT.

Do you think that the IT legislation valid in the Czech Republic at the present time conforms with that of the EU?

If I remember the results of the screening of IT legislation for admission into NATO correctly, then there were no particular problems in this area. I do not, of course, mean by this that everything was exactly as it should be. We will certainly have to prepare for the trend toward greater liberalisation of telecommunications - an area in which the EU is well ahead of us. There weren't, however, any problems requiring special measures to be taken.

Mr. Dohnal, President of the Association of Municipal and Local Authorities, ended his lecture yesterday with the words "my feeling is that the problems associated with the development of IT in the Czech Republic lie neither in the legislation or technology, but rather with the people involved." Do you agree?

I think there's a lot of truth in that. I often feel that in this area those confronted with a problem they do not know how to solve, and who often do not even know what they want, try to hide behind legislative problems. This is probably true in twenty or thirty percent of cases. In other cases the reasons like elsewhere.

There has been a lot of talk about the preparation of a state information system. What's new in this area?

If the information at my disposal is correct, then the present government is still resolving the key problem of how the state information system will be organised; whether it will be a single super database, or divided according to key ministries into a number of different databases. As far as I know the new government does not have a united opinion on this matter. I would also like to add that the previous government did a fair bit of work in this direction. We closed extremely firm agreements among the key ministries and other important institutions, which could still form a firm base on which to build today.