Unlocking Innovation With Mexico City Key
Author: Eli Epperson, Master of City Planning graduate student, MIT DUSP.
Editing: Will Sullivan, Independent Editor; Carlos Centeno, Associate Director, Innovation.
Read the full case here.
A walk through Mexico City’s historic center reveals the temporal layers of one of the world’s oldest and most storied urban areas. These layers include the remnants of a nearly 700-year-old temple built by the indigenous Mexica people next to a Spanish cathedral from the late 1500s. Adjacent to these sites is the iconic Zócalo plaza, off which is City Hall. To remind yourself that time does not stand still here at the confluence of hundreds of years of history, you can peer down a narrow street at the northeast corner of the plaza and read the massive digital clock atop the city’s most iconic skyscraper, the Torre Latinoamericana. Tucked into a nondescript side street in this district is the headquarters of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (Agencia Digital de Innovación Pública, or ADIP). It is a brick and plaster building that has been renovated to include an additional floor, large windows, and glass doors, fitting for a city with a long tradition of reuse. I conducted interviews for three months in and around this building. But now its austere façade seems inconsistent with the transformative work that takes place inside, work that led to the creation of Mexico City Key (Llave CDMX), an online tool that has changed how over 5 million Mexico City residents, citizens and non-citizens alike, interact with the city government.
This article is a condensed version of a case study that describes the efforts of a particular government bureaucrat, Eduardo Clark, to create Mexico City Key, craft the legal environment that enabled it and ADIP, and simplify the process for accessing vital public services, from applying for a driver’s license to receiving public health and education aid. In this article, I explain the evolution of Mexico City Key, the benefits it provides, the public reaction to the tool, and key findings from the case study.
Origin of ADIP and Mexico City Key
In 2019, ADIP was formed by an act of Mexico City’s Congress under the auspices of the city’s newly elected mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum. Much of its day-to-day operations are handled by Eduardo Clark, who, when I spoke to him in the summer of 2023, was the agency’s director general for digital government. Clark was instrumental in shaping the structure and focus of ADIP. He worked with Mexico City’s legal department to draft foundational legislation called the Digital Operation and Innovation Law that gave legal backing to the agency and its work. He assembled the technical teams that developed mobile apps for the city’s residents. Under his leadership, ADIP facilitated access to the internet by adding thousands of public WiFi hotspots around the city. He is also the architect of Mexico City Key, with which residents of Mexico City can apply for public services using a single username and password. These services include dozens of social programs such as food assistance and education programs and hundreds of permits, licenses, and registrations, collectively called procedures (trámites).
Evolution of ADIP’s Mission
Mayor Sheinbaum appointed José “Pepe” Merino to be ADIP’s director and tasked him with developing an open data platform and receiving public engagement through new digital tools. However, Clark and Merino believed the focus of the agency should be more ambitious, encompassing what is instead referred to as “digital government,” or the use of digital technology to provide, enhance, and simplify a government’s services.
In particular, they conceived of a tool that would, on the front end, provide a simple user experience to facilitate residents’ interactions with the government, while, on the back end, allow government entities to communicate information related to those interactions between themselves.
For example, according to Clark’s early idea for a digital government tool, a resident could apply for a driver’s license on a government entity’s website, which could retrieve necessary information for completing the application, such as proof of residence, from a previous application sent to a different government entity.
To create a digital government tool of this type, Clark knew he would have to craft laws that would enable it, secure political support to pass the laws, and seek buy-in from the government entities he aimed to connect — not to mention assemble a multi-disciplinary team of lawyers, software engineers, and product designers.
The first step, however, was to convince Mayor Sheinbaum to shift the priorities of the agency to digital government. Merino and Clark explained to the mayor the benefits that the city’s residents would receive. But they centered their argument around the benefits that aligned with the mayor’s platform, namely, reducing government corruption. They were able to convince the mayor to support their work, in particular by citing the fact that replacing in-person applications with online ones would reduce the opportunities for bureaucrats to give preferential treatment to applicants in return for bribes.
Benefits of Mexico City Key: Equity, Simplicity, and Austerity
The crowning achievement of ADIP’s focus on digital government is Mexico City Key. The tool can be thought of as a single username and password that enables access to the government’s products, with its website serving as a one-stop shop to search for products. Here, a product is a public service that residents can apply to using Mexico City Key.
One major benefit of Mexico City Key is its social impact on low-income residents. In Mexico City, the majority of applicants to the city’s social programs, who therefore interact the most with the government, are low-income. In-person applications for a public service can be costly for this group because of the lost wages that may result from taking time off work. Mexico City Key allows users to skip many in-person application processes, and opt for a simpler, online application.
When compared to conventional paper applications, a technical advantage afforded by the tool is that data can be more easily shared between different government entities. And while it requires a relatively large up-front investment to develop the technical capabilities of ADIP, other government entities need not invest significant resources in terms of software development, database management, hiring technical staff, or updating legacy systems. Furthermore, because expertise is centralized, the marginal cost of performing technical tasks, such as developing software, can be reduced by maintaining a dedicated technical team. According to Eduardo Clark, since its inception, a core tenet of ADIP has been austerity. He firmly believes that making a large up-front investment to bolster the agency’s technical capabilities, rather than splitting investment across government entities or contracting out services to private companies, will pay off in the long-run.
Responding to an Unfavorable Public Reaction
When Mexico City Key was first launched, the initial public reaction was not as favorable as Clark had hoped. He explained that the root cause of this reaction was in the public’s misconception that Mexico City Key was a product, rather than a tool to interact with products.
Mexico City Key was launched a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic, connecting users to a handful of the products that ADIP had worked to digitalize in their first months of existence, including one related to Covid-19 testing. The Mexico City Key website was never intended to offer Covid-related services. It was merely a way for a user to set up their username and password. ADIP intended for residents to use their Mexico City Key credentials to access Covid-19 services on the city’s public health website. But some logged in to the Mexico City Key website and became frustrated when they could not find services there.
Clark recounts that for months afterwards, Mexico City Key remained misunderstood. In response, ADIP added a catalog of products accessible through Mexico City Key on the tool’s website. The catalog included descriptions of products accompanied by which government entity websites to visit to access them. This helped dispel the misconceptions and left Clark with a better understanding of how to market the tool.
Key Findings Included in the Case Study
The case study describes the evolution of Mexico City Key in greater detail. It also includes sections directed to other important findings, such as the role of ADIP in redesigning public services, how the legal landscape of digital government in Mexico City has changed since ADIP was founded, and the possible repercussions of having the broad powers granted to it by the Mexico City Congress. More specifically, the case study includes the following sections and findings:
Evolution and Advantages of Mexico City’s Single Sign-on System explains why Clark decided to modify an early design for Mexico City Key, one based in part on an Estonian digital government system called X-Road, after discovering that this type of digital government system would be incompatible with the technical capabilities of Mexico City’s municipal government.
Redesigning Public Services discusses the reason why Clark directed members of his team to focus on redesigning services soon after ADIP was founded. Redesigning a service in this context refers to simplifying the process of applying to a public service. Redesigning services enjoyed broad support across political parties, allowing Clark to increase the agency’s credibility. He believes that choosing which application processes to redesign and when should be based on which services have the greatest potential to improve a user’s experience, but should also reflect current social needs. Political needs are also considered, given the agency’s role in executing the agenda of the mayor. This section further explains how Clark is able to leverage the agency’s proximity to the office of the mayor to push for broad redesigns.
Legal Backing: the Agencia Digital de Innovación Pública focuses on ADIP’s roles and responsibilities as established by the 2018 Digital Operation and Innovation Law. Had the agency had access to a legal team that included members with backgrounds in technology, this work would likely have been easier. This section further discusses the broad powers granted to the agency by the 2018 law.
Potential Changes to ADIP’s Legal Landscape presents the possibility that the agency’s broad powers could be abused by bad actors within ADIP’s leadership. In particular, the section highlights the agency’s power to discontinue digital systems designed by other government entities and requisition data from other entities. The section presents Clark’s opinion that the powers that ADIP has, while admittedly broad, should not be revoked. However, he believes in making changes to the agency’s operations to reduce the potential of abuse of power. For example, he believes that there should be a formal process for government entities to follow when developing a digital tool to ensure the tool works with Mexico City Key and fits into the wider ADIP technology ecosystem. ADIP would have no reason to discontinue a new digital system if the government entity followed the formal process. As another example, Clark believes that there should be a formal process of requisitioning data systems and information, and that there should be a method of determining who approved the requisition, whether the data was duplicated, and if the data got destroyed at the end of its use cycle.
The Future of ADIP
When Claudia Sheinbaum was elected mayor in 2018, she promised to harness the momentum of her historic election as the city’s first female mayor to build a more innovative Mexican capital. In her inauguration speech, she declared her administration would focus on innovation and rights. Sheinbaum stepped down from her role as mayor during the summer of 2023 to start a campaign for the presidency. If she wins her party’s primary, more likely than not Eduardo Clark will join her campaign, and if she wins the general election, she will likely appoint him to a role in the federal government.
I attended Sheinbaum’s final rally as mayor, which was held in Mexico City’s Monumento a la Revolución public square on June 15, 2023, the day before she formally resigned to pursue her party’s nomination. I had not yet conducted a single interview for my case study, having arrived in Mexico less than a week before. The previous day, the first day that I stepped foot in ADIP’s office in the historic center of Mexico City, the conversations with staff gravitated more towards the heat wave passing through the city than the woman who was at the top of ADIP’s hierarchy.
The heat was oppressive. Still, the mayor succeeded in packing the public square. I look back at that day and wonder if I witnessed the first step towards another historic election — the beginning of a journey not only for Claudia Sheinbaum and Eduardo Clark but the innovation landscape of Mexico as a nation. And while developing a digital government tool for the nation would not be without its own unique challenges, the story of Mexico City Key would serve as an indispensable guide.
