I’m still experimenting with the format of these now the Platformland book is done. Please let me know if there are specific things you’d like to hear more about.
All the best,
Richard
When Bangladesh treated physical service centres as a platform
Under the motto “Service at Doorsteps,” Bangladesh’s 9000+ Digital Centres provide a common access point to digital services. They claim to have saved time and money for the public and government.
Estonia has a government team focused on the real-time economy
The group is creating data standards for companies who need to report information to government. They are also aiming to replace PDF invoices sent by email between companies with digital invoicing, 10% of companies are already doing it.
Does automation change how public servants make decisions about the public?
A study of Dutch food and product safety inspectors using a digital system called INSPECT, which supported their inspections and automated some manual process, found that automation changes the enforcement style of inspectors.
Inspectors became more rules based and more likely to take into account the opinions of others, such as their peers. However, those changes were not explained by the perception of less discretion by inspectors.
Further, automation did not change the how inspectors explained the law to the public: their “facilitation style”. So, what’s going on?
The authors note that, although automation in the public sector can take different forms, it is primarily a decision support technology for public servants. As such, they suggest looking for answers in the characteristics of the digital systems:
“In a way, automation – at least to some extent – alters the choice architecture of street-level bureaucrats because they have to fill in their observations in that system”
and characteristics of the tasks that public servants are set:
“low-level complex tasks are more suitable to be automated because there is less need for human intervention to begin with”
whereas facilitation with the public:
“is a more complex and uncertain task….. as facilitation involves the task of taking into account the sometimes unpredictable circumstances of clients”
The case for Digital Public Infrastructure
Dave Levy from Amazon AWS makes the case for why government’s should care about Digital Public Infrastructure:
The savings an established collection of DPI can bring to a country are substantial, with India estimating that it saves more than $31.8 billion a year through its DPI initiatives, the equivalent of nearly 1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).
At a more granular level, individual DPI capabilities also unlock impressive savings. Estonia’s X-Road data exchange platform saves its citizens an estimated 2,066 years of working time annually and savings of approximately 2 percent of GDP.
In addition to the significant savings in time and money, the adoption of DPI brings benefits for governments including acceleration of digital modernization, more consistent public service delivery, increased digital inclusion and participation, reductions in leakage and fraud, and increased agility and responsiveness in the face of change and crises.