Digital Government - What next?
By Laolu Akindele and Jaya Sreekeessoon
Associate Director - Risk Assurance Services, PwC Kenya | Senior Manager - Advisory Consulting, PwC Mauritius
Introduction
Digital government continues to evolve as citizens constantly look for increasingly personalized and seamless experiences. Also, the pandemic strengthened the shift towards digitization forcing governments to rethink their business models. Digital government has evolved through key stages, transitioning from the digitisation of individual government services in Government 1.0 towards the development of a citizen-centric model that provides services centered around citizens’ life events in Government 5.0.
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), increases in the Digital Ecosystem Development Index (which measures improvements in a nation’s digital infrastructure, production digitalisation and digital regulatory frameworks among other factors) will improve GDP between 1-3% across different regions.
Some of the digitization trends in the government sector are:
1. Adoption of Cloud technologies: Government institutions are assessing their current technology infrastructure landscape and identifying ways to shift to cloud enabled technologies. Cloud solutions provide flexibility, resilience, the ability for increased collaboration and will ultimately help government departments fulfill their digital transformation goals. It also brings about scalability without incurring significant costs.
2. Innovation through Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics Process Automation (RPA) and Machine Learning (ML): Analysis by PwC shows that AI could contribute up to $15 trillion to global GDP by 2030. Key trends include:
- Planning and policymaking: Government agencies leveraging AI and ML to gather public opinion by analyzing social media trends, which can help inform public policies;
- AI being used to support city planning by analyzing traffic flow, traffic signals, predictive patterns and anticipating infrastructure failure of utilities;
- AI powered databases for speeding up the diagnosis of diseases during a pandemic;
- RPA aiding faster immigration application processing – automation from human time-consuming tasks; and
- Citizen centric services like generating bills, processing payments, answering queries, routing complaints, issuing or renewing documents with digital signatures.
3. Analytics driven through Big Data: Governments are focusing on improving the quality and timeliness of data rather than just collecting volumes of data. AI and Big Data is being used for identification of criminals and minimising crime rate by tracking and managing big data generated by public surveillance devices and analyzing that data in real time for anomalies and threats. Statistics offices are also leveraging Big Data technologies to produce national statistics and advanced analytics for strategic government decisions.
4. Enhancing Security and Transparency using Blockchain: The Health Sector has started to build up on blockchain technologies for securing medical data, tracking of vaccines and drugs among others. While cryptocurrency is at a preliminary stage, other initiatives include enhancing food security, public records for storing of citizen life information, public funds management and land administration and valuation purpose. In Africa, the government of Mauritius is currently in the process of revamping the land administration and valuation process using blockchain technology. Other countries envisaging land reforms programs include Rwanda and Ethiopia.
5. Use of Digital IDs and eSignatures: According to the Biometrics – Global Market Trajectory & Analytics 2020, the Africa and Middle East biometrics market is forecasted to grow at an annual rate of 21%, with the global biometrics industry set to reach $82 billion by 2027. African countries including Rwanda, Mauritius, Zimbabwe, South Africa are now allowing citizens to register and obtain digital certificates to access government e-services. Digital IDs support online authentication during interactions with the government.
6. Climate Change: As a commitment to the Paris Agreement, governments are implementing MRV (Measurement, Verification and Reporting) platforms to track, monitor and report on climate change mitigation and adaptation actions. The Government of Mauritius has embarked on this project partnering together with PwC. This tool is a central repository for stakeholders to collaborate and contribute on climate change indicators. Stakeholder awareness is key to make it happen.
7.Smart cities: Governments are using data and technology to make cities smarter. Areas where this is being used include traffic monitoring, water level monitoring (to detect potential floods), smart street lights , surveillance, smart parking, and connected public transport. This can boost citizen well-being and help deliver more efficient, sustainable and inclusive urban services.
Conclusion
For digital government to have the necessary impact, the following must be prioritized:
- A holistic governance framework should be put in place to ensure digital transformation is happening in a cohesive manner across various government agencies. This should include governance of digital platforms.
- Legislations and policies need to be developed to accelerate the transition to digital government.
- Digitisation should be considered as a mandatory transformative element embedded throughout the service delivery lifecycle. This approach necessitates a focus on digital technology, digital skills and digital culture. Rather than digitizing existing manual processes, governments need to exploit new technologies from digital transformation to enhance service design and delivery processes.
- Government and departmental silos should be broken down to enable better integration of systems and data sharing;
- Governments should move from traditional operating models to more agile models to support digital government transformation;
- Government infrastructure and platforms should be built such that other user-centric services can be developed on top of them;
- Policies and regulations need to be developed around data privacy with the information age in mind;
- Cybersecurity controls and regulations should be put in place to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of government’s digital services;
- Citizens should be educated on digital government to enable better participation and engagement; and
- Lastly, digital skills should be enhanced to account for increased demands for digital transformation.
Achieving these requires collaboration across government institutions and partnerships with other participants in the ecosystem.
