How governments go digital

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MARK LYNDERSAY

ON TUESDAY morning, executives from Deloitte's Center for Government Insights and a panel of regional professionals discussed digital transformation for governments at AmCham TT's Now and Beyond online summit.

William Eggers, who has written extensively on digital transformation, noted that during the e-government era, governments became wired, but not transformed. He described the result as: "Hollywood storefronts put in front of traditional processes."

Governments, Eggers noted, will be found at one of four stages of digital transformation development – beginning digital, doing digital, becoming digital and being digital.

The global covid19 pandemic has pushed many governments forward and Eggers notes that most are at the third stage of evolution, where process changes to align with digital capacity.

Deloitte found that 74 per cent of governments report rapid advances, that were projected to take three to five years, during the pandemic.

Beyond taking action, 67 per cent of governments have increased their financial commitment to digital despite budget pressures due to the pandemic, and the financial consultancy is seeing bigger financial investments in ICT.

Eggers's colleague at Deloitte, Joe Mariani, pointed to examples of what frictionless government means, noting early examples like airport biometrics for identification and the EZPass licence plate scanning that automated payments on toll roads.

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In the panel discussion that followed the Deloitte presentations, regional players considered what's needed to make digital transformation real.

"We haven't identified the Estonia for the Caribbean or Latin America yet," said Carina Cockburn, country representative for the IDB.

"We are still very much paper-based across much of the Caribbean. TT is one of the few nation states in the Caribbean with an e-government policy.

"It's clear that there is an infrastructure gap, there is a need to build out more fixed broadband in rural areas.”

"We think, how can we become an invisible bank?" said Driss Temsamani, head of digital for the bank Citi. "The challenge is to become an invisible government, the less friction you have, the more invisible you are."

That's going to be a challenge for a government based on friction, a regime of sandpaper and sand for progress that's resulted in ongoing low placings for TT in global ease-of-doing-business ratings.

Randall Karim, chief technical operations adviser, Ministry of Trade and Industry, has worked in government for more than a decade, and worked on the single electronic window project, TTBizLink.

"We have always had the support of the decision-makers at the highest levels of government," Karim said. "But you have to have the capacity for execution. If you don't have that capacity, you will spend an inordinate amount of time on execution.

"Covid has given us the opportunity to accelerate the change management aspects of the transformation. We now had people who were working from home, dealing with a screen and saying, 'Hey, I can make this digital thing work.'

"Once you are running a dual-track system (digital and in-person), you will still have people coming into a government office believing that they will get better service by making personal contact.

"One of the critical factors is money. Digital transformation is an expensive thing."

So how does digital transformation happen in government?

"The more transformational a change is, the more difficult is," Mariani said, "because everything in an organisation is designed to default to how things were done previously. Every government has a resistance to that kind of change."

"You need to focus on frontline workers," added Eggers. "There is always going to be resistance to that kind of fundamental change."

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there