The 2021 State of Digital Transformation Report
Contents, Executive Summary and Introduction
What is the Report?
The Report summarises some of the ideas and topics that were discussed at the fourth annual Digital Services Convening jointly hosted by Harvard and Public Digital.
You can find a pdf version of the report here. Please refer to the pdf version for referencing purposes.
Contents
Part 1
1. From Platforms to Protocols: India’s Story of Leapfrogging Financial Inclusion
2. Open Source Will Play a Larger Role in the Digital Government of the Future
Part 2
3. Beginning of the New Wave of Digital Service Teams
5. Leveraging Existing Tools Effectively: Colorado’s Modern Software Delivery Maturity Matrix
Part 3
6. A Public Servant’s Perspective: Applying Digital in a Nondigital Landscape
7. Confronting a Pandemic: The Case of NHS Test and Trace
Part 4
8. The Application of Levers for Digital Service Groups
10. Re-shaping the Vendor Eco-System
Executive Summary
In June 2021, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the digital transformation consultancy Public Digital hosted the fourth annual Digital Services Convening. The goal of this convening was to accelerate the digital transformation of governments across the world by creating a space where practitioners could learn lessons from each other, share their experiences, and discuss best practices. Like last year, this year’s convening was held virtually. The three-day event was attended by over 100 participants based in around 47 governments around the world and represented 30 different countries — our most diverse set of attendees to date.
Day one kicked off with a reflection on the past year and both the successes teams realized and the challenges teams faced in light of COVID-19. The day’s main theme was exploring models for scaling the adoption of digital services in ways that transcend the resources of a single nation state. Pramod Verma — the architect of the Aadhaar and much of the India stack — gave a fascinating keynote on the need to revisit creating new internet protocols to standardize and commoditize key services. This was followed by a panel discussion on the potential to use and share open source in government.
Day two focused on new digital service teams that had emerged since the first wave of digital service teams nearly a decade ago. We were joined by colleagues from Japan, Morocco, West Java, and Madagascar to discuss how they had set up their digital service teams, the levers they employed, and the lessons they may have learned from the first wave. We ended the day by asking a panel of digital service teams what their most successful levers had been.
Day three started with the first ever panel involving public servants not based in digital service teams and exploring their experience of interacting with these groups, their ways of working, and standards. The convening ended with three important digital leaders discussing their experiences of leadership and how digital transformation can be sustained. The community’s growth, the progress that had been made to date, and the experiences of navigating a pandemic meant that this year, like other years, led to several great lessons and ideas being shared and discussed. It also provided an opportunity to truly reflect on the progress that had been made since the first wave of digital service teams and how the landscape has changed, bringing both benefits and familiar and different challenges. This report is an effort to share some of the learning and insights from this year’s convening.
Introduction: The 2021 Digital Services Convening
Authors: David Eaves and Sechi Kailasa
This year’s convening marked the fourth Digital Services Convening jointly organized by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Public Digital, a disruptive digital transformation consultancy. The event has been described by a Cambridge University study as one of six seminal digital government conferences across the globe. The importance of having a space where digital government practitioners can learn, share, and discuss their experiences is only growing, as more and more governments are grappling with transformation efforts and the subsequent issues that such efforts give rise to.
Many digital service teams had made significant gains during the pandemic and were awarded more authority, remit, and funding. COVID-19 had also affected governments’ risk appetites across the world, leading to more experimentation and iteration. This has not always led to successful outcomes; in some cases, it might not be appropriate to bypass processes or use a magic wand as a lever. However, this general shift has meant that the entrenched ways of working and the prevailing speed of bureaucracy were challenged. It remains an open question as to whether all the gains made during the pandemic can or should be retained.
Digital teams had to respond to the pandemic with the capabilities they had as opposed to the ones they would have liked to have had. The pandemic reinforced the idea that governments and organizations more broadly can no longer afford to sideline developing digital capability — many that had previously done so were pushed to create and implement a digital strategy.
The fourth convening demonstrated the progress that had been made since the first wave of digital service teams in the early 2010s, with the attendance and participation of many new digital teams around the world. This new wave of digital teams had based many of their strategies on the first wave — they had used and adapted their tools and shadowed teams to understand their culture and ways of working. Importantly, they had also avoided some of the earlier teams’ pitfalls and adapted their strategies to the local context they faced, for example, by adopting a hybrid method of delivery due to the lack of local talent. Interestingly, the North Star (the overarching goal) for digital service teams of building common infrastructure and building cross-government platforms that enabled deep institutional change hadn’t changed (at least not yet) for the new wave. However, there was divergence in the strategies and methods that teams were using to approach it. At a broad level, lower income nations seem to be finding approaching the North Star much easier (perhaps because they can start from a context more similar to a blank state), but as countries build these systems of common infrastructures and platforms, considerations such as privacy, security, trust, and the relationship between citizens will become increasingly important. As a result, the governance burden inherent in digital transformation will need to be addressed sooner rather than later.
At last year’s convening, the idea of levers for digital service teams was introduced. Since many organizations still aren’t digitally native, levers are necessary as they enable teams with strategies to be effective and allow them to expand their sphere of influence and have meaningful impact. This year’s convening allowed us to apply the concept of levers to different contexts and learn how different teams across the world had adopted various levers and how they had fared. It also highlighted the importance of levers because it’s clear that teams are not yet free from the threat of defunding and deprioritization.
The convening ended with a panel reflecting on leadership within digital government, including Minister Cina Lawson of Togo; Tom Read, the CEO of the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS); and Matt Cutts, the former head of the United States Digital Service (USDS). They noted practitioners face many challenges in this space and reinforced the need for resiliency. They asked practitioners to remember that we’re operating in a different environment than in the early days, and there are now a lot of people routing for practitioners’ work, fighting for their funding, and using their strategies accessed via their comms and putting them into practice. There is a super power in demonstrating progress quickly, bringing users into the fold, and using the tried and tested ways of working that this community has developed. We’ve come a significant way on this journey, and as we continue, we should remember to work in the open, share and draw lessons from each other, and continue to contribute to and strengthen this community.
