Digital technology promises immense opportunities for government, but adoption and scaling must accelerate dramatically.
In November 2022, the GovTech Summit celebrated its fifth anniversary. Held in the Hague, the Netherlands, the summit gathered policymakers, innovators, and researchers from around the world to discuss how digital technologies can transform public services.
The summit’s opening panel already proved revealing to the tone of the entire event. When asked whether the GovTech boom was still booming, all panellists responded with a firm “yes”, emphasising the ability of technology to enable better decision-making, more citizen-centric service provision and more efficient processes. While all participants did share this conviction for the potential of GovTech, there was disagreement on how we are going to get there. The remainder of this blog post explores these debates by presenting three building blocks for scaling digital technologies in government.
Institutionalise digitisation. During their panel, Stefan Schnorr, German State Secretary for Digital & Transport, and Alexandra van Huffelen, Dutch Minister for Digitalisation, discussed the necessity of a digital ministry. Both agreed that during early stages of government digitisation, a dedicated ministry was crucial to set the overall strategic direction, to foster collaboration across ministries and to drive flagship digitisation projects. When the discussion moved to the long-term need for a digital ministry, the audience saw Mr. Schnorr and Ms. van Huffelen disagree. While Mr. Schnorr hoped that in ten years’ time a dedicated digital ministry would become obsolete, as digital would be the default, Ms. van Huffelen believed there would be a continued role for such a ministry. Even when all other ministries were organising themselves digitally, there would always be a need for overarching rules and standards, she argued.
Enable cooperation with the private sector. Various panels acknowledged the important role of private companies in digitising government. While this should not exempt government from building internal capacities, the private sector can often move faster and has more freedom to experiment. However, it became clear that public procurement remains a major roadblock. “Just participating in a public tender can kill a nascent start-up”, said Amandine Le Pape, COO and Co-Founder of the GovTech start-up Element. When debating possible solutions, Arūnė Urtė Matelytė pointed to the potential of structured innovation programmes, often referred to as GovTech Labs. Running such a Lab in Lithuania, Ms. Matelytė highlighted the need to establish a standardised framework for working with start-ups. This typically involves streamlined procurement and relaxed regulatory requirements.
Involve citizens. An example from Estonia, the poster child of government digitisation, points to an often-overlooked problem: The Estonian government had launched an innovative, well-designed digital platform for citizen participation, but barely anyone was using it. Debates in GovTech are often exclusively focused on the supply side. However, as Ms. Van Huffelen pointed out, 20% of the Dutch population lack basic digital skills. Importantly, those citizens who cannot use digital services are most likely always outnumbered by those who do not want to, for instance, due to concerns over a technology’s trustworthiness. Paula Forteza, former member of the French Parliament, formulated an interesting angle for tackling this issue. She proposed the establishment of citizen assemblies to better anticipate the concerns of citizens and involve them in the governance of emerging technologies.
Overall, the 2022 GovTech Summit exemplified why digitisation remains one of the most exciting fields within government. While it became clear that there still is lot of work ahead, the ideas presented at the summit leave one optimistic that we were on the right track for a more digital future.
Photo copyright: PUBLIC / Rein Rijke
