How can Chile move towards a digital government that offers better services to citizens?

Adapted from photo by Ximena Nahmias on Unsplash

It’s been a great pleasure to work with the Government of Chile over the last few years and for that effort to culminate in the launch earlier this year of reports covering Chile’s digital government strategy, digital identity and public service design and delivery.

Tackling the COVID-19 crisis shows the importance of strengthening co-operation across borders and underlines the role of the OECD in bringing countries together. Working together can help us collectively find the most effective solutions to the challenges facing our planet.

Even before this health crisis, the role of the state was under ever greater scrutiny in responding to the challenges of the 21st century such as:

• addressing structural inequality
• transitioning to low-carbon economies
• restoring trust in public institutions, and
• meeting the raised expectations of increasingly digitalised economies and societies.

The pandemic has added a further layer of complexity to designing and delivering policies and services that work for all.

For government, the crisis removed any luxury of choice in digital being the default. The shuttering of face-to-face service locations for citizens and the overnight shift to remote working for public servants was enforced rather than the fulfilment of planned digital government ambitions.

But that’s not the full story. In the early 90s science-fiction writer William Gibson said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. Almost 30 years later it’s easy to think that the internet is ubiquitous. But this year has highlighted not only the ‘digital divide’ but in general, the disparity in access to ‘the future’:

• for countries where health systems don’t benefit from the latest in technology, data sharing or medicine
• for households that rely on jobs that deny them the ability to work from home or avoid crowded public transport
• for children without access to the internet or devices to keep pace with their education.

For example, in Chile, the most recent data from the OECD’s PISA database shows that 25% of 15 year olds from socio-economically disadvantaged schools lack access to a computer for schooling at home compared to 10% amongst the most advantaged.

This points to the core role of the state in acting to improve people’s lives, across the whole of society.

As Latin America tackles this dreadful disease the focus is rightfully on the immediate response to secure social and economic resilience, but it is the role of the state to take a far-sighted view. To explore how our societies can ‘build back better’ to create a post-COVID world that is more equitable, sustainable and better equipped to respond to future crises.

Government’s use of digital technologies, digital practices and data are critical in helping countries achieve this ambition.

Digital government is not about just moving offline services and processes onto the internet with technological solutions but:

• re-engineering and re-designing services and processes so that they are digital in their design
• moving away from top-down assumptions about citizen or business needs by making government user-driven in determining needs and encouraging collaboration to address them
• viewing technology and data as enablers in support of those needs

Around the world we’re seeing evidence that the maturity of digital government efforts shaped the capacity of countries to respond to the crisis. That maturity reflects some important truths:

• it’s the product of hard work: it doesn’t happen overnight
• it involves changing the culture of government
• technology and data are enabling assets, not the solution
• recognising the importance of learning and iterating is crucial
• there is a virtuous circle between governance, strategy, data and tools like identity

Which brings us to the work we’ve done with Chile in response to their desire to keep learning, iterating and improving their digital government model over these last few years.

1. Governance for digital government

The story of our digital government work with Chile begins in 2016 with Digital Government in Chile — Strengthening the Institutional and Governance Framework. It recommended establishing an institutional environment with a clearly identified organisation acting as the figurehead for the digital government agenda. The result was the creation of the Digital Government Division in the Ministry General Secretariat of the Presidency.

In our work around the world, we’ve seen that a critical factor in digital government maturity is maintaining the mandate and funding for a dedicated organisation such as the Digital Government Division to set standards, provide central resources and break down government siloes.

2. Digital Government Strategy

The first of the reports we launched earlier this year, Digital Government in Chile: A Strategy to Enable Digital Transformation, made several recommendations including

• Engagement and coordination within and between government institutions to ensure shared ownership of, and responsibility for, the digital government agenda
• Building technical leadership and digital skills
• Developing service design and delivery approaches that prioritise user research, recognise the value of data and foster digital inclusion.

Drawing on those recommendations, Chile published a Digital Government Strategy and Digital Transformation Law in 2019. They are designed to embed digital approaches into the everyday of government. Those documents lay down a challenge for public servants across the entire public administration to play their part in Chile becoming a digital by design state that is proactive, people-centred, data-driven, and open and collaborative by default.

3. Digital Identity

The second of the reports launched in 2020, Digital Government in Chile: Digital identity focuses on the role of ClaveÚnica as a secure and resilient digital identity to support a digital by design state.

Digital identity helps protect governments against fraud and makes it possible to secure continuous delivery of core public services. Most importantly it empowers individuals — it lets you prove you are who you claim to be. And can give you greater control and visibility over how your data is being used.

But it’s critical to think in terms of identity as a service.

In Chile a physical card, the Cédula de Identidad must be carried and is used by citizens travelling inside the country, proving identity at public/private institutions, and for voting. Alongside that is a suite of tools, including ClaveÚnica (for authentication) and FirmaGob (as a digital signature), for which the ambition is to offer an equivalent level of assurance online.

COVID-19 has highlighted the opportunities and challenges for digital identity around the world. In Chile, ClaveÚnica saw a huge initial leap to 8m registered users as well as a sustained increase in daily traffic, 10 times what it was in the summer of 2019.

The recommendations of this report discuss how Chile can build foundations for digital identity, develop the technical solution, implement policy levers to shape adoption (both within society and government), and handle data (both for transparency and monitoring but also in equipping citizens with control of their data).

4. Service design and delivery

The right technical underpinnings are crucial but the final report, Digital Government in Chile: Improving public service design and delivery, zeroes in on the human aspect of digital government.

That means the internal culture of government and the needs of public servants to thrive in a digitally enabled state, improving how we serve our societies. But more crucially it focuses on the needs of citizens.

The purpose of digital government is to improve people’s lives, across the whole of society.

In the past, governments moved things online, automated internal processes and satisfied themselves that they’d achieved greater administrative efficiency. Only to discover that these technology-led interventions had inadvertently created digital-by-default siloes that excluded those without internet access or needing in-person support.

Digital government cares about technology but only as an enabler to caring about the needs of service users to answering this question:

How can services be designed and delivered to ensure that digital progress benefits everyone, including those who rely on face-to-face interactions?

The services report looks at the experience of ChileAtiende, the web, telephone and in person network for accessing government services throughout Chile. It has been successful in building a trusted, reliable and inclusive service delivery brand.

There must be renewed commitment to achieving an omni-channel approach to services so citizens can enjoy a joined up and coherent experience of government services across all policy areas and the whole country regardless of the channel they choose to use. The standards set by ChileAtiende can be the foundation for addressing the broader, more complicated landscape of service provision with its multiple organisation specific channels.

What’s next?

Successful digital government reflects the successful combination of several policy ideas. These 4 reports point to a methodical approach that gradually builds and develops the conditions to lead, implement and embed digital government practices:

1. First, a focus on governance to create momentum through an organisation with the mandate and resources to lead.
2. That paves the way to set out a clear strategy with concrete actions and measurable delivery. And, importantly for the Chilean context, backed by legislation.
3. No strategy will deliver without setting up teams for success and giving them, and citizens, the tools (like digital identity) to meet their needs.
4. The result, over time and with ongoing investment is a service design and delivery culture that breaks down organisational siloes, places users’ needs at the core and solves whole problems for citizens and public servants.

With these reports, the digital strategy, the Digital Transformation Law, and the need for the recovery from COVID-19 to be ambitious in terms of the future health and welfare of the public and economies there is an opportunity for the digital government experience in Chile to advance to the next level.

Doing so will require a commitment to revisit and iterate governance models in line with the maturity of digital government efforts. We look forward with anticipation to see how Chile delivers over the coming years to achieve that.