It’s ten years since Tim O’Reilly first brought the concept of government as a platform to a global audience with his landmark paper on the topic. The paper highlighted the potential for web 2.0 technologies, that were at the time growing apace via platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, could transform governments and better enable them to address the many challenges facing the world.
Since then, great strides have been made in digitizing various aspects of public services, with the European Commission providing an eGovernment Benchmark to help governments measure their progress.
The potential for such projects was illustrated by the UK government, whose Government Digital Service (GDS) suggests that around £1.7 billion per year can be saved through smarter use of digital technologies.
Digitizing government
When it comes to developing government as a platform, nations have generally taken slightly unique approaches. For instance, in the UK, GDS has focused its efforts on improving access to services, bolstering the efficiency of government itself, and the creation of common building blocks to help government departments more effectively develop new services.
In the Netherlands, a number of key portals have been developed by central government agencies, such as Overheid.nl and Ondernemersplein.nl, with these portals designed to help signpost citizens to the correct resources. The country has focused on providing secure online authentication as a fundamental building block that they can build upon, with over 80% of the country having the DigiD that was developed.
Germany’s Portalverbund portal mirrors the federal nature of the German government and aims to link the various portals at federal, state, and local levels into one central network that helps citizens access nearly 600 government services.
None of these nations has made as much progress as Malta, Portugal, or Estonia, however, who have managed to make around 98% of government services available online. In Estonia, for instance, the X-Road platform aims to connect the information systems of every government department so that citizens only have to tell the state once about any particular life event rather than dealing separately with each relevant department.
Bedding in innovation
The latest example of digital governance in the country is the Digital Testbed Framework, which allows innovators from around the world to test out their ideas from within the digital government setting. The testbed not only aims to give innovators access to the technological framework but also to the expertise that has helped to create it.
The trade-off is that the government mandates any technologies that emerge from the partnership are open source and therefore free to use. The hope is that the testbed will remove much of the red tape that might otherwise encumber partnering with the government.
“The problem many start-ups face today is that the environment for cooperation the public sector is built on is old, outdated and inflexible and this makes integration and collaboration difficult,” Siim Sikkut, CIO of Estonia, says. “As the saying goes, ‘there’s no need to reinvent the wheel,’ and that’s why we’re inviting anyone and everyone to use the same tech stack we use to run and build our own digital government, for free.”
Encouraging change
Of course, they’re not the only country engaged in the creation of a more attractive and welcoming environment for innovators. Baltic neighbor Lithuania has also recently launched a GovTech sandbox, which will allow public authorities to invest in and pilot new technologies in the public sector.
The idea is that rather than investing in ready-made solutions, agencies will instead be investing in more untested technologies to try and solve up to 30 challenges across the state. The project is the brainchild of GovTech Lab Lithuania, which was launched in 2019 to identify key challenges faced by the public sector that could be tackled by introducing the latest technologies.
“The end goal of the program is to transform citizens‘ daily encounters with public services globally,” says Birute Bukauskaite, Head of the Agency for Science, Innovation and Technology (MITA), which is overseeing the project. “By introducing new financial incentives, the program will enable start-ups and innovative companies to use their creative minds in order to solve public sector challenges in an innovative and future-oriented way.”
Growing interest
Research published earlier this year found that, just as in other areas of the economy, interest in GovTech is growing. If this interest in GovTech is to be realized, then greater appreciation and removal of the barriers associated with sharing data between departments will be needed. This is something that both the Estonian and Lithuanian projects could do more on, and it is only really when the huge datasets held by governments are liberalized in a secure and transparent way that GovTech will truly take off.
Estonia has the secure identity management to provide such an infrastructure, with the digital ID established in 2001 (and a mobile version in 2007) powering one of the most sophisticated national ID systems in the world. This digital ID is used to do everything from checking medical records to voting online, while also acting as proof of identification for things like online banking and travel within the EU.
Despite the country using blockchain to allow a permanent record of access to data, however, there remains more that can be done to truly create the kind of open data marketplaces that would truly transform both innovation and governance. To date, the Estonian team believes that startups can benefit as much from using dummy data as they can with real data, which may be true for the creation and testing of prototypes, but is perhaps less so for ongoing government business.
History tells us that it’s much easier for governments to add red tape than to remove it, and we’re living in an era in which Covid-19 has prompted a swathe of bureaucratic restrictions on our way of life. While it’s by no means certain that these restrictions will go once Covid eases, it is at least pleasing to see governments using technology to try and make our lives that little bit easier.
