• The problem: Thinking about paperwork focuses our gaze on the bureaucracy, on the steps to get to the end. Instead, digital services are focused on needs.
  • Why it matters: Changing this approach is important to design digital public services that are functional to the needs of the people — and not the bureaucracy.
  • The solution: Understanding this perspective break helps start to rethink how to better design services.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed everything. Our relationship with the government has suffered deep adjustments as well. The speed at which governments have adopted technologies in their internal and external procedures has also changed. Governments have adjusted their digital policy strategies to answer the pandemic context’s digital needs that those citizens were demanding. 

Digital Public Services (DPS)

Naturally, if you listen to someone talking about digital services, you try to associate them with technology. If you add the adjective ‘public’, your mind will say that this technology appears in a government context. But what should we think of when we refer to digital services, and specifically, digital public services? 

The concept of ‘services’ has been defined by Louise Downe as ‘simply something that helps someone to do something’. The addition of ‘digital’ is given by the channel through which it is being provided, and those have been changed throughout the history of civilisation. Therefore, public digital services refer to the way of satisfying a need through a digital procedure by a public entity. 

Good public services strengthen the trust in institutions and ultimately in democracy.

State services touch all parts of our lives. Perhaps a significant number of these have been performed through a public digital platform, thus adding the ‘digital’ feature. 

Downe discusses good services as a desirable place where companies and governments must go. So, good services are important for citizens — as consumers of them — for organisations that provide them as the main player and in the long run for society. Good public services strengthen the trust in institutions and ultimately in democracy. 

What is important to design and implement good digital public services?

Creating public services is not a mechanical operation. Firstly, no procedure will be operational if the government does not identify a need in advance. So, needs must always precede services and this premise also applies to digital services. Secondly, services must simplify and reduce the efforts of citizens, incorporating the minimum necessary steps which must be clearly explained. 

Thirdly, services must empathise with the context and feelings of citizens. It is necessary to identify the advantages and disadvantages of each situation, to constantly adapt and improve.

But what happens when these public services are put in a digital context? These ideas are applicable but nevertheless, the context seems to demand something more. 

The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) has developed important researchon this topic in the Latin American region. This published work shows the experiences in digital public services in four countries: Estonia, Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay.

The authors point out five elements that countries should pay attention to develop a national strategy for digital public services. Their recommendations are to know the citizen’s experience with the public services, eliminate procedures where possible, redesign public services with the citizen’s experience in mind, supply digital public services and invest in quality face–to–face services. For digital public services, the article recommends some aspects that policymakers must consider. These are digital identity, digital signal, interoperability, data mining, single portal, citizen folder, and finally, cybersecurity

Uruguay’s digitisation experience

Uruguay’s experience — which integrates the work mentioned — is strongly linked to a digitisation process. The Gartner glossary describes digitisation as the process of ‘tak[ing] an analog[ue] process and chang[ing] it to a digital form without any different–in–kind changes to the process itself’. 

The project to reduce red tape started in 2015. The first step was for citizens to be able to initiate 100% of the Central Administration procedures completely online. The second goal was that by 2020, all central administration procedures could be completed online. 

This project progressed and the digitization process was changed by a digital business transformation. In this case, Gartner glossary describes it as ‘the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model’. This approach allows governments to create and redefine digital public services with a focus on user needs. Technological tools are functional to the achievement of those objectives and the assumptions on which paper procedures rest are drastically modified.

Public value digital services chain

Uruguay’s Digital Public Services Strategy focuses its efforts on adding value at every step. This is obtained through the chain of digital services of public value, a new approach to face the real challenges in digital public services and that incorporates the different tools described above. 

Digital public services are analysed as an element that integrates a broader universe. Each procedure is made up of requirements, and those that at the same time may perhaps be the result of another procedure. In this way, a large map of procedures is displayed where all are connected to each other by those that they have in common. 

This approach will make it possible to advance in the identification of chains that add value to citizens, with a strong consideration of their needs. It is not a question of thinking about the procedures as a unit since people do not need to carry out the procedure itself, but they do it to the extent that it meets their needs. These, in turn, can be completed only when the person completes an important set of procedures. Consider, for example, the steps that must be followed to open a business. Individually, each procedure does not have a value per se, but what matters is that the sum of them satisfies that citizen’s needs. The next steps may be to generate public digital services in anticipation of citizen needs, or a digital repository of documents presented in the procedures — as a kind of citizen digital folder.

The digital transformation of government is a process that requires moving away from a focus on procedures to a focus on needs. This is very easy to say, but to make it happen it is necessary to break with the idea that procedures are a tool of bureaucracy. Digital public services must always be designed for the citizen, and the processes within the state organisation must be indifferent to them.

This piece originally appeared on Apolitical, the global network for public servants. You can find the original here. For more like this, see Apolitical’s government innovation newsfeed.