The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> For example, architecture, design, software development. Programme management and stakeholder. And speaking of best practises, Dr. Alex is with us today to discuss and explain what is behind compliance for government entities. And how can we take them from compliance to excellence. Floor yours.
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Thank you very much. Maybe a quick small addition to my background. I'm before working with governments around the world in Germany, which is where I'm coming from. But also in the rest of Europe. Very much in the Middle East. And then basically all other continents. For about the last 12 years. To support the transformation. And the type of client that I actually enjoy working the most with. Are central digital government agentses. So similar to DGA in Saudi Arabia. And I've worked with a couple of those around the world. So such entities. Central digital government agencies. They often phase the expectation to fix digital government. To finally get it done.
You can set policies. You can say look, you have to comply with these policies. Number 1. Number 2 is, capability building. So you can teach people in the ministries and the agencies how to implement best practises, how do the right thing. And Number 3, and this is what I want to talk about today. Is to put forward an instrument to assess the digital performance, the digital maturity of the ecosystem of individual entities and to basically point out constructive ways of improving. So that is the instrument I want to focus on today. And what I want to argue and two further elements. Number 1 is excellence. To have a more detailed view on what actually constitutes the best practise and managing digital in a government entity. And help entities to achieve this best practise. I will also argue as a third element, you will require an impact approach as well. And track impacts. These are the three elements you should have. Compliance, excellence and impact.
So let's start with compliance, right? And I think Saudi Arabia is actually a great example of having a very mature approach to tracking and managing the compliance with digital government standards and policies. It is called the QIYAS statistic.. 87% compliance all entities with digital government standards. So its gone up significantly since 2021. Let's get the context here. Fact Number 1. Digital government ecosystems are actually very complex.
So typically you have like anywhere between 150 and 200 individual entities and the government. Which is a whole lot more complex than when running a private sector organisation. My friends in the private sector and digital McKenzie, they are always kind of astonished at how it is. Digital transformation and the government. Even how complex it is. So you typically have a little ten sectors and 100 plus government agencies.
So that is why lot of governments have now implemented a central digitallal government agency. Like DGA in Saudi Arabia. So that is fact number 1.
Fact Number 2. As we're kind of getting, 10 years ago when I started in the field, digital was kind of new. To government and like most. There were lot of people (?) no longer the case. So digital government has reached a certain degree of maturity now. So that it is not enough to kind of like focus on the basics. So more than 50% of countries in the world fully operationalised digital public infrastructure frameworks. The majority of countries actually already significantly leveraging AI.
So if you really want to go on the basics, then you need.
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To best practise require. So you need to support them. Detailed migration plan. Monitoring in place. You basically define a few things here that go beyond the basic thing of having a cloud unit in place. And you can add many more things here. So you need financial cloud, financial management or (?) capability. Which is able to actually deliver the financial savings that you typically hope to realise when you start a cloud programme.
So that is what excellence looks like on this particular example. But then again it is not just it is not just okay or enough to look at how you are doing things. Right? Like if you are doing it with the right style and, you know, you are looking good so to speak. Best practise like well you do it. You really want to make sure you actually track if you also deliver the goods. So in this particular example, right, like if you stick with the cloud example. You would want to track how you are actually delivering cost savings. How you're reducing time to market, right, for innovations, digital innovations that you are pushing.
End of the day.
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Central digital government agency. Best practise behaviours for the entity. And then you also track the actual outcomes of investing in digital. So are you getting return on investment.
So in order to, you know, like also involve the audience here a bit, and, you know, I hope this is going to be a dialogue when we get to the Q&A. But let me ask you this question. In your country, and I see there are a variety of countries represented here. In your country, what do you think what is the public administration emphasising? In terms of fostering the overall digital government ecosystem? Is it more compliance? Is it more excellent? Is it more impact?
Please go to the survey. And then we're going to see in a moment.
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>> ALEX DOMEYER: All right. This is interesting. Confirms the hypothesis thinks I had when writing this talk. In most places, compliance is kind of where you start, right? It is the most basic of the three ingredients. I mean, you should have it. But it is also, let's say, kind of like the I mean, it gets you so far. Gets you to a certain point. But at the end of the day it is not like the most sophisticated element.
But it is kind of like where most countries are today. Right?
Let's take a moment to decompact digital government excellence a bit. In your country with your central digital government agency head to develop. Are they performing well on digital government excellence? What would be the dimensions that you could include?
In my view there are essentially four dimensions here. Strategy. Most foundational component. And here you can ask questions such as is the strategy bold enough? So are you actually setting ambitious targets. Does it link in a meaningful. To the business strategy of the entity. Or kind of like cookie cutter digital strategy that could as well be true for a chocolate factory. But does it like to the business strategy of your entity.
Is there a clear business case contained in the strategy for the investments that you are making? Right? So are you really putting forward that is the ROI we expect from implementing the strategy?
And also, does it look beyond the ecosystem. Right? So beyond the into the ecosystem I mean. So beyond the entity into the ecosystem towards partners, so that could be other government entities and also suppliers. Right? And the private sector.
Second element is operations. Covering questions about, you know, do you have the right governance framework in place? Right? So do you have the right roles? The right processes defined? Do you usagal ways of working? (?) cycle, actually support agile ways of working. And that is one of the challenges I often see in government entities, yes we want to do agile. But the way we actually govern ourselves, in particular how we govern funding doesn't actually support agile ways of working.
So if your assessment rubric, that could be a question you could ask.
Third category is technology. Right?
So that would include questions about your architecture. Do you have modern kind of platform architecture that clearly distinguishes between things that everybody should use in the same way. And products. Right? That you build on top of the architecture. So are you following what an architecture paradigms here. Are you using cloud in the right way? Do you follow cybersecurity standards? So that would be the technology component.
And lastly, we have organisational resources. So the most important question in that category is do you have the right capabilities in house? And do you work with outside vendors in an effective way? So that in sum, between your in house capabilities and your external capables, you have all the right capabilities in place for you to deliver on your strategy.
This is just kind of like it is one cut. Or one way of categorizing this. There is many other ways. And other governments have done, or different governments have done this in different ways. Could be a few kind of basic overview of what you could potentially include here.
Your assessment framework in place.
The next question becomes "how do you actually use it?" So is it a scoring framework? Right? Where you go out to each entity and score each entity each year. Everybody gets a score. The score on the website. And then becomes a little like going to school and taking an exam. And let's say there is a certain risk that is kind of overstate. So the digital performance, right, because they don't want to look bad. So my point of view, some of the governments I've worked with that has often is assessment framework in place, they would rather use it not as kind of like a schooling device. But as a coaching device.
Where you have an assessment framework in place that entities can use to self evaluate. Right? To see how they are doing against kind of concrete things. How they could be doing better.
And then the central digital government agency would kind of coach them on consult them so to speak on how to improve on these dimensions. But you don't necessarily get published. You know, like this year and, you know.
My experience, not particularly constructive, right, if you are a digital government agency and you want kind of a good working relationship with the entities. It is much better to use that as a coaching device.
Impact on the other hand, that is a different story. So impact, I'm like firmly convinced that you should have a set of KPIs that you are measuring. And then you publish it. So if you say I want to save 500 million U.S. dollars or whatever currency you are in through using digital. Then you should measure if you actually get there.
And this is something that you should kind of inform the public about in order to make this kind of a firm commitment. That is then much more likely to be followed through with.
All right. Next audience question. I talked a little about KPIs for digital government impact. So let's see what you guys have, KPIs that you think are constructive to measure and publish nationally in order to track the progress of digital transformation and government.
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I like this concept. Satisfaction, in my view that is the element of KPI. What is digital government all about? It is about making life easier for citizens. And making it easier to run a business. So the economy can grow. And how do you see if you achieve these targets?
You ask people. You ask people and businesses how they are doing. And I think this is for me like the major KPI that everybody should track.
Interestingly it is actually one of the there are some governments that actually do this. But overall, let's say the enthusiasm to publish kind of like this national KPI on how are you actually doing on service delivery is somewhat limited in most places.
So I think the places that do best, right, so Saudi, for instance, made a huge jump in the digital services index on the EDGI. And I think one of the reasons why they have made this big jump is because they actually publish, right, the outcomes of their digital government investments. And they hold kind of the ecosystem accountable to actually deliver.
So in my view that is really key. So satisfaction is great, experience is related to this. Usage, right, like another kind of very important KPI.
In Germany where I come from, we have a lot of digital government solutions online. I would say the digital adoption, the user trade, is not particularly high. And if this was actually published on a regular basis for every service that is online, my sense is we would probably be doing a little better. So this is also a great one to publish.
But yeah. Thank you so much for your contributions. I see you guys are kind of like thinking about this very much along the same lines that I was thinking. And thanks for the engagement. A theory I want to propose. But this is something that is actually happening.
If we look at excellence, I want to say one of the countries or case examples I like the best is the United Kingdom. Which in 2020 for the.
A coaching and teaching device. Basically sets forth a number of best practises government entities can follow in the space of digital and data.
It is actually part of a wide web of functional standards in the government. So there is one for HR. There is one for finance, one for project delivery. There is one for property management. So the UK government basically had such a standard for basically all the functions that are common across the government.
So things that are not unique to particular agency. But that are common across entities.
And what they cover in this (?)
And they very clearly prescribe. So these are the roles you should have in your entity. You should have a chief digital officer. You should have a chief data officer. You should have some person that is accountable all of digital. Within the wider government ecosystem. Right? So one neck to choke so to speak for a digital performance.
So that is the governance section. There is also something about process, you know, how do you, for instance, do what I find interesting in the UK is that they are very focussed on assuring the value of projects and of investments they make. So they have in the government section of the standard some very clear guidelines and how you should do this.
Some parts are mandatory by the way. Right? So they would have language in there where it says you must do this. Right? It is not optional. And then there is a lot of language in there where it says depending on the agency (?). So in that sense, it is very much.
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Other things included in there are service management, which is very much about like how should you deliver the services in the government. So how you make user friendly. Like what is the settleup in place to manage a service. There is technology management which covers architecture and operations management. Substandards included in there. Specific technical topics. The digital and data standard, would reference some more detailed standards.
In this way, you know, if you are IT or digital officer in an entity. Really know exactly what to do. Right? So this way I think the central digital (?) in the UK. The digital and data profession in the UK government. In a standardized way. So that everybody rises kind of to the same level.
For people to like interact with each other. So.
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That we should have. To digital officer. We know what each other's responsibility is. And in that way, it becomes much easier to collaborate across the government in professional way. So that is how they think about this.
Probably the most (?) and drive digital government excellence that I'm aware of, which is currently in place. I haven't studied all 180 countries so there might be (?) other countries that are relevant here. But I think the UK is in my view one that is kind of like most mature in terms of driving an excellence perspective.
Second example I wanted to highlight is Singapore. I think sing spore a great example for (?) very systematic way. Their digital government strategy which is called the digital government print. I think the cycle just finished. They came out with it in 2018. It was finished to be implemented until 2023 and I suppose they are working on the next cycle now. But in that, they put forward 15 KPIs. And then they got very serious about making sure they deliver on these KPIs.
So (?) satisfaction with resident and business services, right. (?) percent online payment. Every civil servant at least basic digital literacy. Checked. So people actually go through the training and certification to make sure that this is the case. And some more technical things, which would be equally important.
Example of this, 90 100% of data fields, which are included in government IT systems. Machine readable and accessible by ape. If I think about the governments I know. Incredibly ambitious goal. I would say the European governments I work with would probably be much lower than this. But Singapore kind of set this target and by and large they got there. So they didn't hit every KPI. In 2023. But by and large they got there. And over the five years they saw some very significant improvements on many of these dimensions. And they published this. And held themselves accountable to it. And, you know, stay honest so to speak on the strategy they want to you deliver.
And then let me close with Saudi Arabia, our host today. Thank you very much for having all of us. So we've talked about Qiyas and your systematic approach to compliance, which I think is very inspiring. And mature.
I also think, so in terms of KPIs, I actually know I have no other clients in my line of work where the people I work with are more enthusiastic about KPIs.
So Saudi Arabia for me is the land of KPIs. And as I said, I think this is the reason why you guys have like made these amazing strides over the past few years. And you are now number 4. So world class in the digital services index on the EDGI.
So on impact you are also doing very well. And I understand working on figuring out how to address this in the future. So in my perspective, we can probably, you know, with all of these ingredients in place, we can probably see more progress in digital government. So we're excited about what Saudi Arabia is going to do in the next couple of years in digital government. Keep inspiring us. And thanks very much for having me, having us today at IGF.
Thank you.
>> What questions? But allow me to ask first. You have covered several dimensions across the government entities. So what do you think would be the main key areas, critical areas that entities need to focus on? And what would be the challenges from here?
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Yeah. So I think the four areas I talked about probably a good starting point. Right? So a strategy, organisational resources, technology management, and operations. Services and operations.
I think on these, what you have to think I mean, the main challenge here is like how granular do you get? So when you set up an assessment framework for individual entities? There are a lot of things that people can be doing in the right way or in the wrong way.
But you can't, the UK digital and data centre, it has 40 pages. And when you read it, it actually still feels a little sometimes high level. And then they refer to like individual substandards. Such as the cloud standard and the cyber standard.
So I think the main challenge here is to kind of hit the right level of abstraction. So that it is still digestible for the entities that you are working with.
If you hit them with a 500 page manual and try to regulate kind of every single thing they are supposed to be doing? People not going to enjoy this. The independent professionals. They know how to run IT and digital function.
So you need to kind of like find a level of abstraction that is kind of informative enough so that people actually learn something out of it. But you are not kind of like, let's say, overdoing it. Yeah?
So that is that I would say is the main challenge when you are address this.
>> Should we say that compliance should be always related to the regulatory framework? That is if we judge compliance, somehow we should find ideas and (?) in legal aspects and so that regulatory framework really are the framework that we measure.
>> ALEX DOMEYER: I think that is a nice way of thinking about it. There are some things where you don't want to coach people to do it. You want to make people do it. Right? And if they don't, then you have a problem. Right?
But I mean this again shouldn't be a catalogue of like 500 play pages where you say to like the last detail this is what it requires.
You want to give people some freedom to run their digital function in a way suitable to their organisations. But there are some things you want to put down in a regulation.
So, for instance, I mean cybersecurity, I think is one of those areas where you want to be very prescriptive. Right? About how people should approach it. And you don't want to give too much space for interpretation. Right? What exactly should be done.
Can then in my view it should be a regulation. And everybody I mean you don't you should have 100% compliance. You are not going for 80 or 90%. You are going for 100% on those.
Everything else, right, where it is more of a you know, like this would be good. This would be professional. It would be nice if you had this. I would put this into the "excellence" category.
>> Okay.
I have the mic so.
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Yeah.
>> Okay.
Thank you. My name is ZORAN, from the (?) online services approximately more than 20 years. And my first key question is we have online services by the private sector and public sector. And the public sector services are not in general even 50 60% of the quality of the private sector services.
So my first question is, what is the piece that missing in the public sector services? And I won't accept the argument that the government lack money or maybe modernization in public administration. Because we know that even some of the high income countries, I will take the example of Germany, can afford the latest technology, can afford to modernize the public. And yet in Berlin to register a new will take two weeks just to register into the basic registry. What is the piece missing for public services same quality as private sector services?
And what do you think the role of the soft regulation, like you mention the standards. If you read one of the rules of UK service standard is, understand your users needs. Do you think that the governments understand what user wants and what user needs?
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Great. So kind of the 30 billion dollar question in Germany. Right? So 30 billion euros is how much we spend on public sector I.T. Huge amount of money. And I think very very legitimate question to ask what are we actually buying. And you gave a good example about why we'd want to be skeptical with these $30 billion around about.
So the answer to that question is of course not simple. Given there is many reasons like why this isn't working as well as we would hope to. And by the way this is not like an uncommon phenomenon. Right? So we studied a few years back we studied I want to say around 10 countries around the world and all world regions. There was not a single country where the public sector did better than the private sector in terms of service quality. So this was the common finding everywhere.
I think there might be so I recently read something about a digital government ranking here in the Middle East, where it was actually quite closely related. So private sector and public sector were doing about equally well.
So I think in general it is possible, right, to reach that state. How do you get there?
I mean if you ask me with regard to Germany? The main challenge I would say we have is on the technological platform side. Because we don't have one. So we have very complex digital government ecosystem with hundreds of agencies. States like Berlin. Municipalities. Everyone is working kind of on their own technology.
So with 30 billion euros that we're spending. Like for each individual service and each individual entity, actually isn't that much money. Right? When you add all of it, it becomes a lot.
Kind of the subcritical spend and Lew maturity at the level of individual entity, the outcomes are kind of like what they are. So I think that is kind of like one of the main reasons I would highlight. So you need some form of technology platform governance at the national level. Once you have that, I think the next important thing is to think about how everyone in the ecosystem. And work according to best practises, develop the services, manage the services. Maintain the data and so on and so forth. And kind of like a best practise way.
And I think that is where a digital government maturity assessment, or excellence framework, comes in quite handy. But it is kind of like the second most important thing. Right? Important but second most important, in my view.
Do we know the needs of the users in government? I would say on average probably less so than the private sector. Because the private sector doesn't do it, you know, they go out of business. And slightly stronger incentive to look after the user. But I don't think there is kind of a structural obstacle to doing this. And there are many government services around the world which are fantastic. And they really like speak to the needs of the users. So I don't think it is like structurally impossible. Right?
But I think empirically speaking you are right. That it is not the case as much as we would like it to be.
>> Ask about the future of KPI, governments. The fast pace of technology. And I think a little stagnant. So the digital maturity pegged against 100% services end to end. Digitiseed. UX/UI. Platformisation. What is your sense? What are the next batch of say, KPIs for digital government? Given that AI is there. It is a big buzz word. But what are we really talking about? Digital government.
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Question. I think in some sense things stay stable over time. They don't change that much. I would expect the ones that we have right now continue to be important. So user satisfaction. Cost of investing in digital and what do you get out of it. So I think these will remain important KPIs. I think there is a certain temptation for governments to kind of measure the adoption of specific technologies. So like a while ago, say how many block chain projects do we have in government? Right?
This is not like a so you were important KPI. I wouldn't go for measuring the adoption of kind of individual technologies. What I would always try do is to measure kind of like some actual outcome. Like the ultimate recipients. Right?
So people, businesses, government entities themselves like actually care about. So one thing that I've seen becoming kind of more prominent is kind of the question of like how many services have we moved to kind of like a completely proactive mode of delivery? Right where you have zero touch delivery. You just get the service when you are entitled to it. I think that is a great KPI. And then of course if you want to kind of like make sure that you stay innovative. You can measure things like how many projects are we doing in AI. How many people have been kind of skilled in AI?
I think these are kind of temporary things that for a certain period of time might be useful to measure. But then for the real KPI that you put at the heart of your strategy, I would say kind of like the evergreens are a good start and maybe every 5 10 years you get kind of like a new one.
>> I think one of the most important things effected by digital advancements in government entities and organisations are business processes. So what is the role of business processes management in access.
>> ALEX DOMEYER: I think it is actually huge. Business process management is kind of like, it is not the most exciting kind of like innovative term. And it has been around for a long time. I don't think so the public sectors entities I have worked with, this is an area where typically they can improve. And how can they improve. They often have a process map. But it is not really focussed on what outcomes are these processes delivering for the constituents, for residents, for businesses. For other government entities.
So I think the best entities that I've seen, what they have is a business strategy, where they say this is what we actually want and need to deliver. And it goes beyond we need to implement the laws that apply us to. Right? I mean, that is not a strategy. Like, you should be doing it yes. But beyond this you should have a view. Like what are you actually delivering for the community.
And then you link your processes to these outcomes. And you say, you know, this process, so I work a lot with labour agencies. So the process of matching job seekers with job opportunities. So this is a process or a product. And you can break down how it works.
And you should be doing this, right?
And then you should measure how well this process actually delivering on these KPIs. And you should kind of codify how the process looks like today. Because lot of the entities I have seen, kind of know how they do it. But then, you know, like in this location, they do it like this way. And other way they do it another way. Right?
So the next level is to like really standards how you are doing it. And then you kind of like continually improve it. To have kind of like what I would call a product management mind set. Like in private sector you would say product management, not process magnet.
But service delivery in public entities is usually process driven. So you start somewhere. You know the transaction initiated by the citizen, for instance. Then it goes somewhere in the agency. And goes back to the citizen. A little bit of back and forth. Some chequing against rules that apply. Often rules apply to a service or process.
And you should be very well aware. You should model what you are actually doing and always be on the lookout for ways to improve this.
So a systematic business process management, understood in the right way. A strategic exercise, not as kind of like, you know, like a way to employ a very large number of (?).Em little self critically about our industry. Business process management as a strategic exercise I think is key. And should be part of any digital government excellence standard.
>> Okay.
Thank you for your sharing. Very valuable and helpful for us. I saw from examples, kingdom of UK, you said ranking of EDGI is very good result.
My question here is, so for other countries who want to improve the ranking here, what is main area they should do it?
Second one is for I saw there some data for the experience and satisfaction. Very difficult to measure for KPI. Do I have some good example of practise how the governance can measure these?
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Sure. So Saudi is amazing. And I don't know if you can replicate kind of going up 67 rings in one, two year cycle on the digitting service index? So this might be kind of like historical singularity in a way, right?
So what did they do? And what can other countries do to kind of get to a similar level? Depend a little on where you are as an individual country. Some countries. Germany, for instance, is really lacking I think on the technology platform side. Which is what I mentioned in response to an earlier question.
Other countries might have different issues. But I think what the Saudis did really well over the last couple of years was kind of like this performance improvement mind set. So they set themselveses a target. They start of vision 2030, we want to be in a certain place by 2030. And I think in digital government they overachieved.
And they didn't just set themselveses the target. They measured it in many, many different dimensions. Including kind of like the tough ones. Including user satisfaction. Including the effectiveness of the money that is actually being spent. Including digital adoption. Right?
Where a lot of the clients I have worked with, little bit similar to what you just said. Like oh isn't that hard to measure it? And isn't like in this agency it is different from that agency. And how can we have a single national KPI? And how do we get agencies to report the KPI in the first place? And, you know, like let's not overdo it with the performance mind set. I think Saudi is a good I mean, Saudi is not a small country. Right? It is almost 40 million people. You know, like very complex and large government.
And they kind of like didn't follow these precepts, of oh it is hard and let's not do it. It is like the ministries won't go along and so on. Right?
So I think once you have a strong central digit government governance mechanism in place, then you can follow through on this. Right? And you can say you know, look, measuring satisfaction, it is not that hard. Right? Every company does it. Most companies. Almost every company does it. And many government entities do it. And there is established methods of doing it. And some use NPS. Some CECCD and. Then you need to make the entities do it.
That is kind of the hard part. The tricky things in the clients or context I have worked with is yes, you have somebody who is centrally responsible for driving digital government maturity. By they don't actually have the competence and the powers to, you know, make those decisions. And make kind of all of the entities to contribute in a certain way. Right?
So I would say, I mean in line, so last year there is an amazing report. I think it was called the digital leaders report. And I think one of the key findings of that report was all the countries that actually do reasonably well on digital government have a central digital agency in place. And they give the central digital agency enough power to move the ecosystem. Instead of just running around. And, you know, like telling people kind of obvious things. Right?
So I think the things I've been talk about. I mean they are not particularly complicated or sophisticated. The challenge to implement it in a complex government ecosystem.
>> Hello?
>> Thank you, can you hear me?
So in your presentation you mentioned capability as on important proctor to support. What are some digital or technical capabilities that we should focus on to propel excellence and building it in house?
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Right. So I think the approach that Singapore has with kind of like everybody should have basic literacy. I think that is very important. Everybody should have it.
In particular, people in leadership positions. Right?
So having a solid curriculum of, you know, understanding the basics. You know, how do you do an I.T. project? Why is it useful to do certain things in the cloud and like others not?
So certain level of digital literacy I think everybody should have.
I think the more tricky question is about how much, kind of, technicallal, real technical capability do you build in house? Versus how much do you rely on outside vendors?
And there are people who say, you know, governments are too dependant on system integrators and outside venders. And that is probably true. But you also like shouldn't go overboard in terms of trying to do everything in house. Because nobody does that. Even the most successful ones don't. They work with vendors. Typical share of, average is 50/50. And some like 60/40 and others 40/60. But there is also like very, big share of outside capabilities you are accessing. And that is logical. Right?
I mean, you are not government entities and also most businesses are not in the business of, you know, like having the most up to date digital capabilities on everything. They are in the business of their business. Right? So they should access kind of external vendors to a certain degree.
But I also think that, I mean like everyone company or every organisation as a digital organisation today. So there is a certain degree of in house capability that is helpful to have. And I think again, I mean Singapore is for me, they are the KPI champions. And they are the capability champions. Right?
So what I really like another thing I really like about Singapore is their I.T. delivery arm in the government. And GAFTIK Singapore is actually being set up. I think they call it a statutory board. Which means it is not a public sector agency. Is they are not bound by the same restrictions as a typical public sector entity. Can you can essentially operate like a private company. And they operate like a digital company.
So like Google. Or accenture or what have you.
So they would hire kind of like the same level of talent. They pay them the same amount of money. But also manage them in the same way. Like how a Google would manage kind of like their star architect. So if you deliver your projects, great. You can continue your job. If you don't, maybe it is time for to you look for a position somewhere else.
So GAFTEC Singapore is an in house capability organisation but run like a private sector organisation. It performs much much better than all the other I.T. delivery organisations I know of. So having that level of capability is really crucial. But getting there? The traditional way. Let me put it that way.
All right. I'm getting some signs that I need to kind of like wrap up from the back. I don't know. Maybe can do one more question. Yeah.
>> Okay.
Thank you for sharing. And we got to have some idea of the economy. You know, I am from China and we know economy is just two category. One is market economy. And another one is command economy. If. You also mentioned digital governance. We also know there was a balance. But technology development and also economy. And if the government involved too much, maybe the technical development would be slow.
So my question is, what do you think about what kind of the best KPI of the digital combined? And why?
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Sorry. Can you repeat the question. I'm not sure I quite caught this.
>> Yeah. My question is, what do you think about the KPI of the digital governance to site to management. Because as we think there was two kind of market economy, commodity economy.
>> ALEX DOMEYER: So what is kind of the right balance between the government and the private sector?
>> Yes.
>> ALEX DOMEYER: Yeah.
It is kind of a complicated question, right? I mean, my sense is what most government entities do, like in their core mission, is actually I mean they are running a fairly simple business. And getting some highly structured and regulated services to the end user. And I don't think you need to... it is not like you are building spaceships. Right?
So my sense is, as long as you have kind of like a reasonable level of architecture capability. You have some software engineers. You can kind of like build this and direct the private sector contractors that you work with. Then you are in good shape.
So you don't need to go like 100% in house capability. But you also shouldn't go kind of like 5% in house capability and 95% outsource capability, this is which is actually something sounds drastic right? But something I've seen in many places. So kind of a very lopsided balance between government and private sector, in terms of delivering I.T. for public sector entities.
But, you know, like in terms of you know, if you really want to get a number? I think 50/50 is actually quite good. Right? That is kind of like the industry average. If you look at Gartner I.T. spend data. That is where you typically end up with. Across kind of all industries. 50% is your own people. And investments that you make directly. And the rest is kind of like working with whatever is your preferred private sector I.T. provider.
So I think government is not kind of like structurally different from this. Right? They are not kind of they don't need to be kind of super innovative, like Google. And they are also not like in a place where you could say oh you actually don't need anyone in house. Right? So I would say just go for the industry average, which would be around 50/50.
Thank you very much. Great discussion. And thanks for having me.