Digital interventions in Government

Introduction

Digitization in the Government sector in India started to show some impact in 1990s, before that it was all experiments at small scale. Digitization was never promoted in the Government due to the common taboo existing during that time that digitization will lead to job losses. And Government always wanted to maintain the image of the job creator in the country. The allied departments of the government such as railways, airlines, etc were the largest benefactor with limited digitization at that time. This kind of digitization was just to keep accounting of the transactions which were very large in number. These systems were prominent for more that two decades.

Owing to the success of these systems, governments across India started to digitize other transaction processing systems especially involving the financial transactions primarily to keep record and accounting. Over years, governments across India tried to digitize the government services delivery also, but those projects could only see partial implementation in India. Many of these projects followed the big-bang approach which was borrowed from the large Enterprise IT implementations in the private sector. However, due to very large scale associated with Government services delivery, these projects failed to provide full benefits, and had only limited impact. Also, due to the nature of these projects as an enterprise-wide implementation, these systems did not provide for much integration with other systems. The failure of these projects to provide large impact led to the popular taboo that IT implementations are not for the government.

A silver lining amid the crisis

The National Informatics Center (NIC) was the organization which was created in the 80s provided a less-risky approach of IT implementation which could be spread across many years. They were able to allay the apprehensions of the government towards having the strategic control of the systems in the governments across India. NIC followed the hub and spoke model with the hub being the central NIC team in Delhi, and spokes being the various state NIC teams. They used to do pilot of any implementation in any of the state government first, realize the benefits, before rolling it out in other states in India. Most of these systems were primarily to support the services provided by the government, but never a full-fledged product and service.

Advent of the digital age

During the same time, the private sector had experimented with Large enterprise IT system which provided for vertical integration of the value chain of companies to support operational efficiency, and impact the profits. But, as the impact of operational efficiency in the companies profits faded away. The need for innovation was felt again. Innovation by the very meaning of it, does not provide for operational efficiency. The innovation means experimentation with the selected ideas which may or may not succeed. Many companies who have embraced innovation succeeded and became very large, many others failed. The common factor among the companies who have succeeded in this model of growth were companies having low-cost structures, and companies who have been ambidextrous (who have been able to balance innovation and growth). One of the popular strategies among those companies have been not to kill the cash cow, but try to build other products in parallel as experiments. Design thinking, one of the popular method of innovation of 21st century, has large implications in the way, and the new interventions can be ideated. But, there should be a fine balance between exploration and exploitation. One of the other important factor to keep in mind was the successful experiments should have the ability for fast scale up. With the fifth differentiator of the 21st century being Information Technology, and also the advent of Internet to create connected societies, digital products/services were the most popular among the ideas which were suppose to succeed. Besides, with large cost structure a no-no for achieving profitability, most of the companies shifted focus from vertical integration across the value chains; leading to stacked value chains with independent and autonomous entities within the stack. Hence, digital products/services in a vertically stack organizations became the mantra in private industry.

Mantra for the government

With industry shifting to vertically stacked value chains which are loosely coupled with each other through an ecosystem, the government could be the next place where such models of service delivery could gain trust of the political class, bureaucracy and also the electorate. With autonomy of each of the entity in the government is enshrined in the constitution, the stack value chains with government entities as platform for the various entities to meet and provide the service to the citizen could be the way forward.

Creating successful product/services with such ecosystem

A vertically stacked organization which could be any government department willing to provide better services to the electorate, should embrace this change and build this on a modular and open-architecture which should be developed in an Agile way. In the government context, this means that such services should be piloted in the lowest feasible unit of the government such as at the district or GP level, and should be built for scale with open-source technologies on a Cloud. The success of these interventions should be measured through use-case specific metrics derived before they are piloted. Such as model allows for scale-up of these successful interventions, if successful. Besides, owing to the modular design such interventions can be quickly upgraded to a better one, in case of change in vision of the government.

Way forward

These interventions which are open, modular, and allow integration with the other autonomous bodies of the government is the way forward. Hence, the government should re-think on very large projects which are too risky with many unknowns. Government as a platform for the entities of the ecosystem coming together to provide better services to the citizens is a novel idea, but could be the sustainable innovation which could lead the growth of our economy and go a long way towards making our districts self-reliant. Also, the dream of Swaraj at the local level by the father of the nation might also become true.