Did COVID-19 find digital governments prepared?
A call to accelerate the digital transformation
- Did the COVID-19 find digital governments prepared?
- Were governments more digitally mature better equipped to leverage digital data and technologies to secure resilience, responsiveness and agility?
- In the COVID19 context should we talk about accelerating the digital transformation of governments or rather focus on “doing it right”?
As people, governments and economies enter a new phase of the management of the crisis the world is facing since early 2020, we all wonder how we should adjust to what appears being a new normal. We all know we won’t go back to what normal used to be, but we certainly know that digital tools will be a vital part of our personal and professional lives. Digital platforms happened to be essential to maintain a sense of normality and to implement solutions to the pandemic, but they also enabled governments to avoid significant disruptions in their capacity to protect and serve us. As we define the new normal, we can’t help but wonder: Did the COVID-19 find digital governments prepared?
We still do not know enough about the virus to feel confident we have found the way to feel absolutely safe. But there is something we know: we all have felt the role of our governments was more essential than ever. The overall impression is that those governments that could count on more digitally mature public sectors, were more ready to leverage digital, data and technologies to react promptly and secure continuity in the delivery of public services. Denmark has been able to leverage long-standing strategic commitment to the universal adoption of digital identity to simplify the overnight shift to digital by default for public services; the solid legal and regulatory environment governing data access in Korea made possible to develop a suite of tools to help contain the outbreak while preserving citizen trust; and in the UK, the GOV.UK Service Toolkit helped to maintain quality standards in launching over 100 new COVID related services. Many of which responded to the needs of the most vulnerable in society.
As we retrospectively observe these trends there is a fundamental question we shall ask: Have we really felt the absolute need to accelerate the digitalization of governments or did we simply realize that most authorities had finally found the incentives and drivers to implement decisions that had been taken a while before?
As OECD Digital Government and Data Unit, we have a long-standing commitment to help governments advance the digitalization of their public sectors in meaningful ways, i.e. taking the most strategic and adequate actions given the specific context for the digital transformation of governments to thrive. As part of this endeavor, we’ve engaged with digital leaders in OECD member and partner countries to understand if the COVID19 pandemic had found them ready to make the most of digital technologies to maintain the resilience, agility and responsiveness of their governments as they were navigating through the response and recovery phases. We think that the COVID19 pandemic certainly provides the opportunity to assess the level of preparedness of our digital governments, but we believe it primarily points to the need of acknowledging the importance of “doing it well” rather than focusing on accelerating the digital transformation. Any decision governments take today will have an impact on long-term strategies and policies for years to come, then balancing fast response and solutions while maintaining a strategic vision for the future remains a critical challenge.
We observe how digital government policies and tools have the potential not only to address the COVID-19 but also to radically transform governments. It appears that agility and alignment within public sectors was a key requirement to secure resilience, but have you fundamentally changed the way your civil servants work in a digital environment? Has the uptake of eID across government institutions and users grown? Have you taken this opportunity to assess what digital initiatives you could have done differently? Going back to “normal” vs coming back to a “new normal” is radically different, what does this mean for a digital government? As we all focus on using tools and data to find new ways to collaborate with people, among countries, with CSOs and the private sector, are we also capable to think about what citizens really need and worry about and shift towards a more proactive way to serve them? Have we been able to properly identify and use data to come up with solutions and understand the consequences of the social dimension of the crisis and its impact on economic activities?
There are many unanswered questions with an important cross-border dimension that will require joint reflections in the coming months. Partnerships, international collaborations and cooperation will be more important than ever to share experiences and learn together.
COVID19 has a wide and expanding scope and risks multiply as nations begin to reopen social life and economies. In the search of sound responses and recovery strategies, where a trial and error approach is imposed by the absence of complete knowledge, we know that we are asked to play safe and reasonable. As Dr. Tedros from the WHO urges us as individuals to continue to maintain measures of self-protection and social distancing he calls “on all countries to exercise extreme vigilance”. It is important that governments remain prepared for the coming stages of the pandemic and have the right digital enablers and tools to react fast and safe.
We’ll be on this for quite some time and the exit strategy will be complex and long, which is why we strongly believe that the best answers can only be found if we work together at the national, local and global level. Securing an equitable recovery and making efforts sustainable as part of long-term reforms, will demand understanding the kind of digital tools and actions we’ll need, a huge amount of data and evidence in addition to the capacity to use data within the adequate frameworks and the right measures to preserve privacy, security and maintain public trust.
Trust will be influenced profoundly by the absolute priority for governments to prove accountable in the use of precious time, data and financial resources. For instance, given the heated public debate on the relevance of the apps to enable effective and rapid tracing, it will be important for public authorities to demonstrate and communicate how decisions on an app fit into a broader strategic approach meant to protect lives by tracking the spread of the virus and keep people safe, rather than being the consequence of a “centralized data-hungry approach” or the desire to increase surveillance.
What can we do together and what will have to remain national? What is the role of digital leaders in all this? As we’ll engage with the OECD E-leaders community to address these questions we’ll share via this channel the main reflections on whether and how the digital maturity of governments matters to secure their resilience, agility and responsiveness. We will be looking forward to hearing from you and discuss globally.
