October notes from abroad : Digital Government
This time some recent developments in Italy, Singapore and Thailand, as well as short highlights from Australia, New Zealand, Peru and the US.
Update: Just after publishing I saw today’s announcement that the Australian Digital Transformation Office is becoming the Digital Transformation Agency, now with stronger role and mandate. It’s new remit is to accelerate delivery of digital services and provide a more strategic management of the agenda and take digitisation anywhere and everywhere in government. It now includes control over digital, ICT and ICT procurement which previously sat under Finance. Much more detail on that published on the Mandarin.
Italy
In my last Digital Government round-up I noted the imminent arrival of Amazon exec Diego Piacentini as commissioner for Digital Italy, working alongside Paolo Barberis.
Piacentini is now in post and at the end of September issued an open call for bilingual Italians with digital skills to come and build a better digital government for Italy, inviting ‘missionaries’ with courage to challenge the status quo, a philosophy he has brought with him from Amazon.
“The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.” Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO
Thousands have responded. Barberis notes with delight that they have been ‘flooded’ with applications — over 3500 CVs in 12 days.
It’s not hard to understand why.
Taking the goal for digital government as a complete transformation of government from the inside out, means bringing in Piacentini’s experience, and giving him a mandate from the top, is an incredible opportunity for the Italian government. Amazon is a lean and efficient operation, lessons from which could help transform the back-office of government. And lessons from the effectiveness of it’s technology and content platforms could bring much needed modernisation to the way it manages technology, data, and digital services.
We’ve been talking about O’Reilly’s concept of “Government as a Platform” for a long time — Italy now has as good a chance as any of making it a reality.
Piacentini gets straight to heart of how and why things must be delivered differently. He says that public digital infrastructure in Italy has been built with outdated technology, insufficient attention to user experience, poor integration and a lack or interoperability, which I’m sure will sound familiar to anyone working in government.
His team’s operating principles include: data driven decision making, modern design patterns and an obsession with making things simpler for citizens, and he is looking for a multi-disciplinary digital team to get delivery started.
People will tell us “you don’t comprehend how the public administration works”, “many already tried and failed” and “in Italy it doesn’t work this way!”
The job descriptions ask for confidence in the ‘government as a platform’ concept and experience in developing payment platforms, so I expect to see platforms that tackle enterprise level issues like some of the current GDS work aims to (GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK notify), rather than web consolidation.
Singapore
At the beginning of October Singapore officially launched it’s new Government Technology Agency (GovTech), aimed at supporting it’s smart nation agenda and improving government services through digital transformation.
It’s a restructure of existing agencies, and the new focus of the agency will be driving change in the public sector.
GovTech is all about “people, businesses, and public sector employees working together as one to transform the nation”
GovTech has a wide remit touching on how Singapore works as a digital nation and economy as well as transforming public services. It includes:
- transforming the way government delivers public services through the use of technologies such as data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
- deliver whole-of-government and national-level ICT projects.
- creating platforms to enable citizen and industry co-creation of citizen-centric digital services.
- improve public sector technical capability in application development, cybersecurity, data science, geospatial technology, government ICT infrastructure and sensors and IoT.
Thailand
In September the Thai government announced plans to establish a new “Ministry of Digital Economy and Society”, replacing the “Ministry for Information and Communication Technology” founded in 2002, motivated by a desire to stay competitive on the world stage and meet international standards. It also approved two plans on the digital economy and digital government for the next three years.
The plan for digital government includes improving services and, following a number of jurisdictions, moving them onto a single government site.
The aims of Digital Government (PDF link) are described as:
- Reintegration: Integrating agencies’ work to create more effective public administration
- “Needs-based holism”: Creating public services centred around the needs of the citizen
- Digitalisation: including replacement of traditional working methods.
[Not exact quotes as a little is lost in translation]
Will be interesting to see if this is or becomes more than just a name change.
In brief: other digital government developments
The Australian Digital Transformation Office has launched it’s Digital Marketplace, working in close co-operation with the UK’s digital marketplace team. At the moment the DTO marketplace offers digital specialist services.
Statistics New Zealand are developing a new way of estimating and forecasting the population, and have released the beta code on GitHub for others to contribute.
Peru is following some its Latin American neighbours in announcing an open data portal, as part of efforts to modernise the relationship between the citizen and the state.
And finally, I love this example of the 18F acquisition services team in the US helping the State of Mississippi to upgrade its child welfare information system in a better way, helping to save taxpayers money and deliver better results for children in Mississippi.
Rather than a “classic waterfall approach: Spend several years gathering requirements then hire a single vendor to design and develop an entirely new system and wait several more years for them to deliver a new complete solution”….they are starting with a “simple prototype based on a single user story, a set of data, and a few requirements”, then releasing smaller contracts over time to build different sections of the system.
