Digital Government
Traditionally, private sector has always been linked with innovations and dynamism vs. bureaucracy and lethargy in public sector. In the book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths, Professor Mazzucato shows that the opposite is true: it is only after the entrepreneurial state has made investments, that the private sector finds courage to invest. He argues that the United States economic success is a result of public and state funded innovation in technology.
The role of the government in fueling innovations and creating strong tailwinds that shape markets of the future cannot be overemphasized. All the major technologies such as the internet, aircraft, railways etc. are creating lucrative scientific breakthroughs. Technological progress is an important factor to economic growth. It brings in significant benefits in the form of increased output per head of population, could lead to new discoveries such as availability of natural resources, or even better productivity from capital and resources. According to the World Health Organization, in less than 35 years, two thirds of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. The cities that will flourish most are the ones that have cutting-edge technologies, that creates opportunities for people and maximizes productivity of its resources.
Consider how London has become a public transportation dream with its Crossrail project. In addition to its core objective of connecting over 40 existing stations with brand new tunnels, it is expected to create over £20.1 billion in additional property values by 2026 as a result of luxurious new homes alongside the line. Or for instance a small nation in the Baltic country called Estonia. Estonia viewed e-governance as a critical imperative and got it done. The country that gave birth to Skype has been trying to pursue a near perfect digitized society for nearly two decades. E-Estonia is the single online platform that has provided its citizens the ability to file tax returns online way back since 2000. Today, citizens can do everything online, right from voting to even file for residency status. The Estonian ID card system assigns each citizen a catch-all ID that can be used for all purposes from electronic voting, disaster response to social security. With blockchain technology, they ensure that no-one including the government itself can manipulate the data and get away with that. In terms of R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP, South Korea is one of the leaders with 4.23% followed by Japan at 3.29%. This is the second highest amongst the member nations of the OECD and fifth highest in the world. Public sector share of spend is high at 23.6%.
The key digital government initiatives being followed by some of the most progressive states can be classified under the following objectives:
- Citizen engagement:
- Transforming internal processes, collaboration and decision making:
- Cybersecurity:
Local, state and federal governments are looking to significantly improve the lives of people. With solutions like IoT, they are looking to drive smarter cities. Built in sensors in street lights and traffic cameras are intended to drive efficient traffic management. Smart meters provided a consistent feedback loop to utility companies to save energy. The applications of IoT in government are many. In fact, some of the practical uses of IoT are as old as several decades ago. Consider how the Texas government – Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) started deploying sensors along the Colorado river in Texas to track stream levels that could lead to floods. Over a period of over two decades, they have now built over 275 connected sensors called Hydromet to monitor lots of data including stream flows, temperature, humidity, rainfall etc. to then provide alerts in case of any anomalies. As the next phase of maturity, they are now exploring how they could take advantage of the various innovations in hardware and other infrastructure to make it cheaper as well as more rugged. Also, how emergency responders can target the smartphones of citizens to send more accurate alerts or warnings based on their location, to ensure that their citizens are safe. Likewise, Los Angeles has invested a lot in IOT with over 145000 streetlights and 4500 intersections. They are also exploring how they could integrate information from smartphones and watches to gather streams of data that are situational aware and location intelligent. Florida’s Wildlife Conservation Centre has been using sensors to track various kinds of wildlife for at least 15 years. Other investments being made by governments in this area include voter registration, online platforms for taxes and other citizen services, building mobile platforms that align with citizen preferences and behaviors, technologies that increase participation in early childhood education and reducing street crime.
Automation of transactional processes is imperative to ensuring productivity and lower costs. Digitizing paper intensive, manual, volume intensive processes should be prioritized over others. Several governments have fully digitized their process for setting up a new company, shortening the time required to just 15 minutes and automatically issuing incorporation documents fully online. Minimizing reliance on paper, manual workflows, and siloed applications means having to redesign processes to make them simple and integrated, as well as digitization of the entire chain of activities. This transformation is best attempted in phases, wherein the processes that provides maximum benefits from automation is chosen first before other processes. Potentially, all business processes including those of finance, human resources and other people reliant functions can be put up for automation. With analytics, insights required for decision making could also be automated for functions like defense, social welfare, public safety, healthcare and fraud prevention. Germany’s labor agency for instance created a job platform to tackle youth unemployment. Its platform makes personalized job recommendations and refers suitable candidates to prospective employers.
Once information is consolidated, it becomes imperative to make them accessible to public o provide greater transparency and ensure better stakeholder engagement. Safeguarding information is imperative. Information privacy, risk protection and operational continuity needs to be well thought through and executed. With cyberthreats only getting more sophisticated, the attention and continuous investment in this area becomes more crucial. Breaches are very expensive and worse, it undermines the trust in institutions. Several ongoing threats and risks have been witnessed from time to time – the more recent ones of the likes of the ransomware attack in Atlanta where cyber criminals took over the city’s government data demanding $51000 in Bitcoin to decrypt the data. Protecting technology systems by devoting extra resources to protect sensitive and confidential information requires building a strong cybersecurity plan. Very strong engagement at senior leadership and decision maker levels, information security personnel and stakeholders responsible for regulatory and legal is required to put a fail proof strategy and execution. This is by no means a small task and deserves adequate time and attention.
Digital is high up on the agenda of governments. Countries that have performed well have a strong digital government blueprint and execution. While a lot is being invested in this space, governments are also very cautious about two major factors – cost and security. Costs are being monitored so as to ensure returns from investments. And so is security to address the entire spectrum of threats. What happens if some hacker shuts down air conditioning in a data centre causing millions of dollars of losses and damage. Like any transformation, the most important steps in this journey is awareness and commitment. With the right levels of both, the opportunities for transformation in this segment are very promising.