GovCrate is an internet startup company that is set to take the Pacific by storm if the team assembled to build it have their way. GovCrate is the brainchild of of Jonah Tisam. We caught up recently with Jonah to ask him what GovCrate was and why it was is so revolutionary.
“GovCrate is essentially an e-government platform. It lets governments in the Pacific digitise their day to day operations. The reason it so revolutionary is that for the first time, the price point for having an e-Government platform will now be within reach for most Pacific Island governments thanks to GovCrate” says Tisam.
To understand why this is so groundbreaking, you need to understand the economics surrounding an e-Government platform. Typically designing and building an e-Government system meant that you had to employ hundreds of highly skilled people and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build such a system. This typically took years and in some cases decades to accomplish. Due to that cost, only the most developed countries attempted e-Government initiatives. However the scope and complexity of transitioning a large bureaucracy from paper to digital, very few initiatives were successful. High rates of failure in e-Government projects was the norm. The Cook Islands even attempted this in the early 2000’s with funding from UNDP but with largely the same outcome. The notable exceptions to this were the initiatives carried out in New Zealand, the UK and Estonia who have successful government wide implementation of e-Government.
So what does GovCrate do that is so different?
Well for the last 10 years Tisam has been working on a technology called Viviki. Viviki is a tool that allows anyone to rapidly design and build applications faster and cheaper than anything else out there today. Last year Tisam applied to and was accepted into Massey University’s e-Centre startup foundation programme. He took the Viviki technology to the e-Centre’s incubator programme to see how he could apply it to problems in the Pacific.
Note: An incubator programme is a programme that brings in new companies (usually internet based companies) that have the potential to grow quickly and provides them with the support and funding to get them ready.
“I applied for their startup foundation programme last year and went in to chat about what I was working on. Initially I was enrolled to only do the foundation programme, however after discussing what I was thinking of working on, the staff at the e-Centre decided to fast track me into their startup accelerator programme.” says Tisam. “It was here that our Viviki system was used to create GovCrate. We did it by combining my expertise in technology with my dads expertise in governance. We were initially focused on the state of productivity of government departments in the Cook Islands. The public service had been growing steadily since the mid 1990’s without any significant increase in productivity due to paper and manual processes. So we came up with GovCrate as a solution to that manual paper process and then built the initial prototype using Viviki”.
“I’d also been working with governments in the Pacific for the last 10 years and they all had the same problem, all their systems were based on paper. So the problem isn’t just limited to the Cook Islands, its a much bigger problem across the Pacific. Imagine the inefficiency in day to day operations multiplied across every department across every country in the Pacific. Your looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity to these economies, and that’s the conservative estimate. That’s when we realised we were onto something big.” says Tisam. “Looking back it’s kind of understandable why people didn’t tackle the problem. The technology and technical capacity needed to address it was out of reach for most Pacific governments. Well that’s not the case anymore thank to GovCrate.” says Tisam.
While at the e-Centre work begun on building building a fully digital e-Registry and e-Permit system. The goal was to offer the software as a service to governments to help them streamline any Registry or Permit process in the country. “We are now looking to establish MOU’s with several governments in the Pacific this year to begin rolling out the system.” says Tisam.
During trials he’ll be hard at work fine tuning business models. Tisam says having a solid business model ensures the system is sustainable for government departments in the long term. A lot of government technology projects fail because business model development isn’t thought through at all. “Since we’re the first ones to attempt to design business models for governments in the region, we really don’t have anything we can refer to since the economics are different in the Pacific. So we’ve designed, built and are validated our own models to understand what will and will not work.”
According to Tisam if governments in the Pacific decide to adopt the GovCrate platform in their country, they can significantly streamline the way things are done and leapfrog most other countries in the world in terms of productivity. This is especially critical now that most Pacific Island countries are being graduated to developing country status and will lose special treatment for donor funding, market access etc. “It becomes crucial for our governments to start thinking about how to improve their level of productivity in an increasingly competitive and globalised environment. Otherwise they risk being left behind.” says Tisam.
He may be right about this as governments make up a large part of Pacific economies. If their levels of productivity aren’t modernised that puts them at a significant disadvantage on the global stage. “It’s something that I think leaders in the region are slowly starting to realise as things begin to change as the privileges they once had begin to go away. All I can say is we have a piece of technology that could dramatically tip the balance back in their favour” says Tisam.
If the GovCrate team are able to pull this off, it would be a revolution for governments in the Pacific and could be one of the first Pacific based internet startup companies we see going global.
If you are a government department in the Pacific and are interested in GovCrate, they have their e-Registry and e-Permit system ready. You can get in touch with the GovCrate team here to enquire about participating: https://govcrate.com/#contact
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Jonah Tisam has a PHD in Governance and Public Policy and his thesis was on the restructuring of government during the economic crisis of the mid 1990’s where the majority of the Public Service was cut due to budgetary constraints.
