Digital initiatives in the public and private sector — Governments, NGO’s and Businesses — often consume massive amounts of funds, yet the results they return can be quite modest, if not nonexistent.
Some of it is because these organisations are fundamentally doing more of the same and expecting different results.
How best to design for digital?
Let’s stop right there, or at least pause and review what we are doing in our efforts toward becoming a digital company, a digital nation, a digital economy.
The pause and review is essential because there is a critical challenge, an all-important consideration, before we get to designing for digital.
And the purpose is to reach consensus across the entire organisation, whole-of-government on what digital really means to us all and what it is to have a digital vision and so we can execute to that vision.
What does digital really mean?
We need to agree what digital means across the board, how do we settle on a vision and how we go forward from where we are today.
First, we need to acknowledge that we’re being bombarded with technologies from every angle — social, mobile, analytics, AI, 5G, cloud and on and on.
We need to calm down about the hype of all these technologies, because to get value from these technologies it is important that we must first be a well-run organisation or at the very least have a coherent plan to becoming a well-run organisation regardless of these technologies.
Take for example AI and analytics, we can collect data we can analyse that data and we can get insights but if we don’t have good business processes or are not working on becoming a well-run organisation then we will not be able to take advantage of the massive amounts of funding these technologies, systems and applications will consume.
Run a small test for yourselves and answer a few questions like how much of the taxpayers’ money has a project consumed, what is the value they have gained from that project, how long are we going to continue spending down the same path, when will it stop?
Are we just getting knocked around, lurching from technology to technology, promise after promise without being able to take advantage of these efforts?
Foundational investment Foremost in our digital transformation plans must be a commitment to becoming an organisation that is well run with sound business processes to enable the technologies to reach their potential.
The confluence of abundant bandwidth and storage, abundant networking via the adoption of 5G and improvements in telecommunication infrastructure, adoption of AI and blockchain and all the rest of it will see our intentions of becoming a digital economy transition into a data economy.
The convergence of data, digital, and business processes together, as one, is and should evolve as a foundational investment in the economy to achieve greater differentiation, better results than standalone digital and data strategies to support economic growth.
A cohesive vision UNCTAD digital report 2023, the World Bank Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Fiscal Review Committee report, the national budget, the Voluntary National Review, the five and 20-year National Development Plan.
Fiji’s income and expenditure and census must be leveraged to reach consensus toward a cohesive vision for the nation.
It would seem all these great resources can be considered as a combined, integrated resource to further inform a national vision and strategy.
Data, digital, and business process transformation presents us with the opportunity to change our value proposition to our citizens, our customers.
If we don’t get our heads around that then we are going to operate as we always did, regardless of what technologies and applications we implement.
It will be a situation where we keep doing what we’ve always done.
And we know what that gets us. But we can learn a lot from the past.
The past can help us immensely in shaping our strategy going forward in the next three, 10, 20 years.
And this is where data plays a major role in shaping our digital plans.
Analysis and insights from historical and current data can guide our plans.
There is nothing else you can point to that has evidence-based information, true data facts of the past.
And that is the difference between data for analysis and day-to-day transactions.
Transactions generate data that must be held for future analysis.
Data in combination with more recent and real-time data can provide insights to shape our digital programs.
And the good news is that we have lots of data in storage ranging from immigration, health, education, employment, social welfare and so on.
Inspire new value proposition
We’re now in a position to inspire new value propositions to our people, new services, better services, and opportunities.
If we’re not there then we’re not digital.
So it is critically important that we know what we are transforming to.
It cannot be left at digitisation, which is enabling existing processes to be digitised, paper to electronic means of submitting applications over the internet, and storage and retrieval.
It’s not enough to say we’re doing digital transformation.
That is akin to saying you are baking, but not saying what it is that you’re baking.
Only digital transformation can be an expensive exercise that can take an inordinate amount of time.
We need to clearly state what we are transforming to, and why.
Meeting citizen expectations
By the time our digital transformations reach some satisfactory level of acceptance and readiness our target market will have changed.
The core of the people we’ll be serving will migrate through the generations, Gen X, Y, Z, A and may’ve seen a change in employment status, marital status, or socio-economic status and hence the demands on what we started out transforming for will have shifted.
Regardless people will expect seamless, end-to-end experiences, and data analysis will need to play an increasingly important role to help digitalisation provide the right level of personalised services to the right people.
Data helps us understand who our people actually are, what their needs and wants are, what the needed services are, when, and how often, as well as how they prefer to engage with ministries and their departments.
A digital transformation that focuses on data and analytics can enable technology and processes that will help gather and analyse that data so that we can meet citizen expectations as they evolve.
Data and digital transformation strategies
To deliver successful economic transformations organising around citizen outcomes will require data informed policies, operational decisions, and actions with three inter-dependent strategies.
Digital government focused on the delivery aspects of public services, digital economy to enable online transactional engagement across digital users including government, businesses, NGOs, and citizens with a focus on economic growth, and data strategy which is critical to both digital government and the digital economy.
It is best practice in both government and business transformations.
Data is collected from various sources across the economy and government.
Offline and online data is combined for analysis and enriches decision making and improving citizen experiences which is then analysed to identify trends, inform policy and digital programs, and monitor the impact of digital programs.
• NALEEN NAGESHWAR is a regular contributor. The views are his and not of this newspaper.
