Part 8: Argentina: Building a Civic Tech Startup Within Government (2019)
By Daniel Abadie, Former Undersecretary of Digital Government, Argentina, with Luis Valles, Harvard Business School
When President Mauricio Macri took office on December 10, 2015, Argentina’s national digital-government strategy was fragmented, with more than 1,000 websites, all built in different technologies from different vendors, and most of its content was institutional information that was not relevant for citizens. We had three websites, each with its own how-to guide to explain the same government service — and all three explanations were wrong. We are one of many countries fighting to transition from an e-gov strategy to a digital one. President Macri created the Ministry of Modernization and appointed me the undersecretary of digital government to define Argentina’s digital strategy and how it would interact with citizens. Our one central ambition was to build a personalized government experience for Argentinians. But as the ensuing years would show us, progress wasn’t easy.
Building a civic tech startup within government is hard, messy, and lean. We faced the struggles all startups have: budget limitations (2019 budget: 1.4 million USD), recruiting, egos, learning the way, gaining support, scaling up, growing through the crisis of success. Below are some of the challenges we faced and what we did to navigate them.
Design Services Centered on User Needs to Repair Trust in Government
When governments don’t have a digital strategy centered on citizens, their search engines are not relevant, information is not useful, and services are hard to understand. When this happens citizens create their own content to explain how hard it is to navigate government services. Citizens begin to lose hope in services and they stop expecting a good experience from the government. This can start a public narrative where people believe doing things with the government is bureaucratic and always will be. To avoid this we created a UX team to collaborate with government departments to design content that is user-focused, easy to understand, and useful. Since then our 600 content editors have created more than 50,000 content pages for our citizens. Designing government services with a deep understanding of user needs is essential to building trust in government.
Find the Hidden Talent within Your Organization to Build Your Team
In our first month we discovered that attracting talent from the private sector was nearly impossible because of the significant salary gap between the private and public sector, a lack of structured incentives, and an old-fashioned human-resources culture. With no other alternatives we turned our attention inside the administration. We found that despite little progress in Argentina’s digital government strategy from 2011 to 2015, there were still many public servants with enthusiasm, talent, and the desire to join our digital team. In the end we recruited the bulk of our team internally, including designers, content editors, and developers. External hires included leadership roles and our UX team. We uncovered the hidden talent within our organization by promoting our mission to do things that simplify the lives of our citizens and make interactions with government easy.
Focus on Product Delivery to Mitigate Internal Political Competition
The Ministry of Modernization also included secretaries in charge of transforming other parts of the core operations of government. As happens in large organizations with siloed structures, it didn’t take long for internal rivals to rise up from the administration’s existing IT/tech offices. We found ourselves caught in a competition of platforms, services, and power. One thing I’ve learned during my journey through the public sector is that the “space race,” or the friction around someone else building the same thing you are, is unavoidable for any digital service team. The only way to overcome this is by building trust through useful products; this works not only with citizens but also with political leaders who are the ones that enable you to take more risk. The ultimate source of our political power is product delivery.
Scope Projects Down to Essentials to Avoid Being Spread Too Thin
In my first year and a half as undersecretary I learned that the inertia of my eight years of government experience for the City of Buenos Aires had clouded my judgment. Moving from a local to a national government is like jumping from the NCAA to the NBA, and at some point this adjustment hits you in the face. We took more projects than we should have, and this cost us time, energy, and effort. Our team was being worn down while we were still looking for our identity. We had to adapt to the new national context and focus our projects with the sole objective of discovering our path while staying true to our strategy of gaining political power through product delivery.
Kickstart Momentum with Top-Down Support
To focus on product delivery, we realized we needed some room for experimentation. We achieved this in our second year by playing our highest card: a presidential decree. How did we get this card? By leveraging the political support built over years of putting in the work in public office. I worked with the president during his two terms as mayor of Buenos Aires. Our shared history gave me the credibility to seek support. The president, chief of staff, and secretary of modernization were the first believers in our team’s mission. So instead of starting bottom-up, we went top-down. Sometimes we feel like the exception in the way digital government initiatives are born.
On February 2, 2017, Macri created the Public Sector Digital Platform through Executive Order №87/17. It formally established a single domain strategy (argentina.gob.ar), created the citizen digital profile My Argentina, and ordered the integration of existing citizen profiles and platforms within it. The Ministry of Modernization received formal authority over the newly created digital platform. After various resolutions, the undersecretariat of digital government was entrusted with organizing, developing, executing, and following up on the public-sector digital platform. In the following months, our control was expanded to cover virtual assistants and AI services. This official top-down support gave us the power we needed to shut down sites and initiatives to avoid fragmentation of our digital strategy.
How Do You Build a 21st-Century Government? By Making Things Work Simpler
In three and a half years we built a government platform from scratch. We integrated more than 1,000 websites into a single domain (Argentina.gob.ar) and have served more than 128 million users since launching in 2016. The goal was crystal clear: creating services that are useful for our citizens. Although the path to get there was not as obvious, we ultimately focused on three initiatives we needed to accomplish: gain credibility, develop new capabilities, and scale up through a blockbuster service project.
Gain Credibility
Building My Argentina, a citizen dashboard that would become the single starting point of any interaction with our government, wasn’t easy. We discovered the features of our platform during the journey, often changing directions and shifting from one priority to another. My Argentina was built from scratch because we didn’t have a preexisting one-stop-shop service-delivery platform. From a technical perspective, the process of designing, developing, and implementing the platform was a major challenge for a team with little resources. While we had experience building the digital platform for Buenos Aires City Government, operating at the federal level wasn’t so simple. Other agencies and ministries did not initially support or trust our products. We found that “if you build it, they won’t come” unless you put in the work to gain your reputation. That is a battle on two fronts. The first front is with other agencies and ministries, to encourage them to add their services onto the new centralized platform. The second front is with citizens: Government apps are the first to be uninstalled by users when they lack space on their phones, and the only way to avoid it is to be useful. We started to increase the number of My Argentina user accounts by building small services that met specific user needs no one else was tackling. A great example of those quick delivered services was the development of a basic notification system. Our user research team realized that users were searching across various websites for important government information that was not always easy to find. The notification system became a new service to remind citizens by email or push notifications about important dates like national holidays and when their tax was due or benefits could be collected.
We leveraged our success with the notification system to improve internal collaboration. Agencies and ministries were more interested in working with us when they could see our ability to deliver on new services quickly and reliably.
Go Slow to Develop Capabilities
Our slow buildup of services in our initial stage began a profound transformation in the government services we provided and how citizens experienced them. We developed the capabilities to integrate services with My Argentina, created administrative procedures to support this work, and nurtured the cultural transformation needed to absorb this new way of operating. In addition, after four years of working at the national level, we developed the capacity to be deeply empathetic to the needs of citizens. We categorized our services as either “services that hurt” or “services that help” the citizens. One example of a service that hurt was the disabilities journey in our country. It is a painful moment when any citizen needs to obtain a disability certificate for himself or a child. At the time, our government service failed to easily inform people what documentation was necessary to request a certificate. This forced them to visit the offices at least four times to verify their documentation before starting the administrative process of obtaining the certificate. In an already painful moment in people’s lives, our government did nothing to reduce the complexity of process. With this empathetic lens, we focused on creating a feature on the My Argentina platform to help citizens understand the overall process to obtain this certificate, including an interactive form that walked through each requirement based on the specific conditions of a citizen. It also allowed citizens to complete the documentation required for their evaluation online. Since we launched the service, more than 190,000 people avoided going into an office to check their documentation requirements.
While this was significant progress for our team, these improvements did not gain the attention of the government departments that looked at us as competition. Government transformation is made harder by having to fight the egos that are afraid to give up any control or responsibility, even if it would improve operations. My Argentina needed a blockbuster service to get ahead of the curve.
Scale Up to a Blockbuster Service
On October 29, 2018, we made the decision to digitize our national driving license and host it on My Argentina. We needed to move fast. The transport agency had 65 days to build a new mobile app for traffic agents and a web service for integration with My Argentina, and inform all traffic agents in the country of the new tool. We saved the legal discussions for last.
Adding the driving license to My Argentina was strategic for two reasons. First, it is a mainstream service that 11 million citizens use every day. This made it easy to explain that the license would be available on your phone and would still have legal status. Second, adding the license was the stepping stone to adding larger services to My Argentina. We strongly believe that the source of our power is doing the things that are most useful for citizens. Incorporating a service used by 11 million people would give us the reputation and leverage needed to negotiate with government departments that resisted the migration of their services to My Argentina.
We knew our citizens had low expectations for digital service solutions provided by the government. We saw this as an opportunity to launch a massive service knowing that we were not ready yet. It was chaotic. We receive more than 200,000 requests per second and we hit a wall. Everything we had prepared for wasn’t even remotely close to the incredible demand we got in the first 48 hours. The service was jammed with so many users trying to get their driving license on their phones that it often crashed during the day. But when the president showed his own license on his phone we realized we had become too big to fail. The image of the Macri using our platform gave us the political capital necessary to move forward, but while our increased credibility made the government agencies more open to collaboration, they were also cautious because of the instability of the platform.
We started questioning everything we’d done and decided to rebuild 90 percent of the My Argentina platform in the next two months. Sometimes launching a product to learn is more important than being 100 percent ready. The decision to rebuild was ambitious, bold, and painful, but it was the right decision for the sustainability of our project. If we wanted to grow, the only way was to go back and correct the loose ends we left open for the sake of launching early to learn how best to move forward. The lean methodology has an associated risk and it was time to confront that risk by building a stronger architecture, so our next goal became platform stability. If My Argentina remained reliably up and accessible for 99.98 percent of the day, users would continue using us and we would avoid app uninstalls.
Impact of Work
All this struggle for success is linked to the single thing no one in government has: time. We had many internal discussions about “the good, the bad, and the perfect.” We debated how a product, platform, or service should be built with the limitations of our team and time frame. Often there is a closing window of opportunity to deliver a product. Cultivating a sense of urgency helped push our team to deliver things simpler and sometimes “more alpha than beta.” Successful products and fast delivery times built our reputation the point where the government departments that used to play hard-to-get started coming to us to join My Argentina.
In February 2019 the digital driving license was launched, becoming the first digital citizen ID integrated with My Argentina. It can be used independently and is as valid as its physical version. Since March 2019 we have added new services including car insurance (20 million users), car documentation (23 million users), labor insurance card, organ donor credential, organ transplant credential, vaccines certificate, and a tool to walk citizens through obtaining a disability certificate. By September 2019, we had launched our first legal digital national ID card in My Argentina for our entire population of 44 million citizens, along with the nautical and aeronautical licenses, cargo transport inspection records, and more. Today, 3.2 million citizens use My Argentina on a daily basis and the numbers grow every day.
Conclusion
Government as a platform means understanding that the real platform is not government but the citizen. Government must learn like the rest of the internet industry that what users want is what users need. Citizens want to have a unique experience with government. Their needs can’t be parameterized; we must build a platform that gives access to the personal information and services that are relevant to each individual. This is government entering the last age of the internet: “internet of me.”
The central struggle for public leaders trying to walk the path of digital transformation is the mental transition from being the authority over citizens to becoming a commodity service provider for citizens. This is why governments should invest in digital-services teams that help navigate this transition. We understood this from the beginning. The undersecretary of digital government is a civic-tech startup founded in the heart of government that built products for citizens with the mantra that delivering beats everything.
