Digital Transformation: How does programing with “digital by design” look like?

By Tshering Wangmo, Alex Oprunenco, Mellyana Frederika

It has become a common place that Covid pandemics has accelerated digital transformation and many organizations excel at “doing digital”, with proliferation of apps, platforms and tools being an important measure of that. However, the “thinking digital” or doing digital by default programming (or policy-making) has remained an objective difficult to attain with “digital” too often playing a role of a hammer looking for a nail.

At the same time, to respond to escalating challenges of the present we have been exploring adoption of the portfolio approach and while this is an ongoing journey, we often face questions what is the role that digital can play beyond isolated “solutions” or tools? That essentially creates a two-fold opportunity for us:

a) How we can support our CO digital offers to be more ambitious and systemic by leveraging our system transformation approach.

b) How we can use system approach to leverage digital across programming for a more sustained transformation?

Our working assumption is: what is not transformative will not last, what is not digital will not scale.

Testing initial hypotheses bottom up

With this in mind, we decided to take a different approach towards looking at the role digital can play to support system transformation. This approach would start not with digital tools or “solutions”, but with understanding better the problem space: what is the “north star” that organization wants to drive towards, what systemic drivers are in place and people’s expectations, and what needs to change in underlying conditions before we start looking at the role of digital and tech.

To sum up our hypothesis that starting with understanding the system in analogue and solution pathways before looking for tech, will help us:

· Better understanding the expectations and issues, our main stakeholders are grappling with and what role “digital” already plays or can play;

· Identify and develop more relevant entry points for digital programming in overall portfolios as opposed to some last-minute tech palliatives, i.e. how programs can be digital by design in terms of stakeholder engagement;

· Support sustainability via wider adoption and use by people since those solutions will respond to the issues on the ground and would be designed together with the ecosystem, i.e. focusing not on digital products but on (human) systems and experiences enhanced by digital;

· Have more robust scaling pathways by spearheading cultural adoption of digital as representing intrinsic value across the portfolio or policy ecosystems and testing emerging “solutions” through the programs.

Emerging insights

With this in mind, we have kicked off our Digital Stewardship with Bhutan CO team. While the digital angle required some tweaking, overall, we followed our system exploration process used elsewhere, focusing on the strategic intent, direction and system context of desired transformation shifts. This was followed by the sense-making of the CO program as well as external engagements with various partners across the national ecosystem. While we are just at the beginning of this work a few important lessons that we would like to share:

Lesson 1: The intent matters

While it is seductive to think about technology as a silver bullet, its impact and value should be very much purpose-driven. For us, the framing provided by the country’s strategic direction and CO’s strategic intent has contextualized around retaining “carbon negativity”, need for new growth engines, inclusive livelihoods, and trust-based governance. This intent creates a “nesting” system for our digital work and requires us to be mindful not just of individual imperatives but also linkages amongst them. For instance, thinking about how digital transformation can support economic growth we need to be mindful of the unique “carbon negative” status of Bhutan and how digital should help preserve rather than undermine it. And as we have seen elsewhere, digital policy is not necessarily carbon neutral.

Lesson 2: Digital as an afterthought

Too often programs are being caught in-between “focused on digital”, in other words looking to test/implement a particular digital solution, or being standard program where digital comes as an afterthought, where digital needs to satisfy organizational reporting requirements or simply add some “digital shine”. In both cases, we risk missing the mark by foregoing potential of developing programs that are relevant not because they have developed a digital product but because they can respond to exponential demands of the era of climate emergency, energy transition, and others.

Lesson 3: LNOB(ut)…

This one doesn’t come as entirely new and as we know that we need better understanding of our stakeholders, their motivations and factors driving their exclusion. Our exploration highlighted several important dimensions to keep in mind and work around:

· Being mindful about analog barriers and what impact (often magnifying) digital can have;

· Digital is not only about access, and venues and ways of use vary across various groups, hence importance of “digital ethnography” around people we are working with. For example, in Bhutan we came across a story of remote communities that was using a Bhutanese emigree telegram channel as an only way to get information about external developments. How often governments and other organizations explore and leverage tech solutions thar are already in existence and preferred by users ;

· Supply-driven proliferation of digital apps that is not putting emphasis on the quality of relationship between policy-makers and the public, e.g. in service delivery, can act as a tax on more vulnerable groups of people;

· Very often there is no opportunity for continuous engagement, feedback provision and helping the space for those marginalized to take the lead.

Lesson 4: People again

Ultimately, digital transformation is the culture issue. Through our work we are coming to a collective understanding of how digital can help across the programs for stakeholder engagement, implementation, learning about impact and M&E. Fundamentally, we start with the question: “What issue are you trying to address and if digital can help?”, rather than: “Here is a cool digital tool — let’s see how we can use it?”. This, however, requires adoption of the mindset shift well beyond innovation or digital teams.

Lesson 5: this is not just about UNDP

Ultimately, through our engagement with ecosystem partners across the region — we hear overtones of this conversation over and over again. From very different ways to incubate digital into policy development to understanding implications of digital transformation for various development spaces. As one of our Central digital agency Government counterpart put it: “Various departments are coming with requests for specific tech solutions to us, but the issue is the understanding of the problem and how we ensure coherence across the government…this is where the impact potential is!”

Taken together, we believe that translating these emerging learnings into new approaches to program design and delivery puts us in a very different position to other players in the field. It brings strengthened coherence across policy areas, relevance due to strong interaction with the country culture and context as well as exposure to local communities, and synchs this with the organizational culture– and this what our partners on the ground need most.

Bhutan is where we started our journey and these are just emerging lessons. We will be happy to hear from others how they are leveraging digital for systemic effects and how this framing can help us reach scale with digital in mind and practice.