Beginning of the New Wave of Digital Service Teams
Author: Surabhi Hodigere, Master of Public Policy, 2022
This article delves into how a new wave of digital service teams converge and diverge from the previous ones, examines what characterizes their approach, and sets up challenges that must be addressed in the coming years.
In 2018, the postconvening report declared that digital service teams in governments from across the world are at the end of the beginning in a long, and perhaps endless, journey of digital transformation. In describing digital services teams that we will refer to as part of the “first wave” throughout this article, David Eaves and Ben McGuire wrote in 2018 that “the novelty and newness of these teams has worn off; on the other hand, there is growing acceptance by many governments that these teams are a useful tool for driving new practices, particularly agile development processes and user centric design.” Four years hence, the time is ripe to conclude that a wave of digital service teams growing through the pandemic years has heralded the beginning of a new era. Governments are waking up to the immense impact technology has in facilitating better public service delivery, and core digital government platforms such as identity, single sign-on, and payment platforms are becoming part of governments’ lexicon world over. At the same time, the world, both in general and specific to digital in government, has been changing at a rapid pace and has been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
How does this new wave of digital service teams approach what has been described as the North Star for digital service teams? Are they following the same strategies as the first wave? What challenges do they face? A panel at this year’s Digital Services Convening brought together representatives from this new wave of teams, including from West Java, Morocco, Japan, and Madagascar, to discuss these questions.
New teams are more strongly oriented toward the North Star
As with the first wave, there is consensus across key stakeholders that the new teams continue to ascertain that “creating or acquiring a core government platform” is the North Star. The first wave was more focused on creating buy-in, testing, and building, whereas the new wave can afford to be a lot less intervention focused. Instead, the new teams are investing in key infrastructure development, which is visible in the prioritization of projects taken up by the new digital teams. For example, West Java is building a platform that helps multiple government agencies within the province to share and reuse data. Similarly, Madagascar is creating an identity management system that allows for data authentication across government services. While new wave teams converge on the North Star, they follow a multitude of approaches. Unlike the provincial West Java team or the federal Madagascar team, the newly formed Japan team found its origins catering to industry. The Japanese Ministry of Electronics and Information created a digital service team focused on providing unique solutions to better facilitate business in the country. One of their products was a unique digital ID for companies.(formatting note: internal link to Japan article below). [AP1]
New wave teams are more reliant on collaboration
New wave teams, particularly in emerging economies, were building off of the work done in the first wave. All the new wave teams represented on the panel spent considerable time researching existing digital government efforts and collaborating with the first wave teams and the larger community of digital government actors before arriving at their approach to achieving the North Star. They benefited from the lessons learned from first movers in countries like Estonia, India, the UK, and Singapore. In fact, before setting up the digital service unit, the Japanese office at this year’s panel visited, shadowed, and learned from these early movers. In addition, panelists from Morocco mentioned they had benchmarked solutions from relatively newer digital agencies in Australia and Denmark.
New wave teams are prioritizing political capital building
The first wave of digital service teams demonstrated the importance of securing strong political capital to establish and sustain digital initiatives. For example, the GDS was able to cash in their earned political capital to attain domain control, a factor that greatly facilitated their eventual scale. New wave teams had the benefit of learning from the previous teams in this matter; they were aware of, and intentionally prioritized the building of, political capital. In West Java, the new wave digital team is working with multiple provincial agencies on data sharing and standardization. The team’s proximity to the governor allows it to work cohesively with multiple agencies, a task that might have proven to be harder otherwise. However, one aspect remained similar across both the new and previous wave teams — political actors have overarching authority over the projects they sponsor. This was apparent in conversations in the conveying where panelists agreed that proximity to power often comes with curbs on autonomy. Additionally, the question of what happens when your political sponsor leaves office remains just as pertinent for new wave teams as it did for the previous ones.
New wave teams continue to face the talent crunch, struggle with IT management
That there is a new wave of digital services teams is testimony to the growing importance of digital in government. New wave teams must create, hire, and adapt expertise to sustain this growth, bringing up a plethora of questions on the nature of digital government expertise. How much technological expertise is required to build and handle the digital government of the future? Who trains the existing and next generation of public servants to incorporate digital? What role must consultants, communities, and experts play? New wave teams seem to be more sensitive to the need to manage incentives of other departments, particularly IT. However, there are no clear-cut strategies that are equivocally endorsed by them. Instead, the strategies to work among competing incentives are circumstantial and context based.
New wave teams learned from the past, but challenges continue and are growing
As the size of the digital government grows, there is an increasing cost to getting things wrong.
Questions continue to exist and grow on the governance, funding, and sustainability of digital service teams. In addition, emerging technologies are expanding the boundaries of law and regulation, particularly on the aspects of security and privacy. While the first wave was aware of these challenges, its ability to tackle them was restricted by the newness of their mandate. While new wave teams had the benefit of understanding the depth of these challenges thanks to the previous wave of teams, how they will be tackled going forward is yet to be seen.
