Most governments across the world have had to adapt their processes and regulations during the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. And as many countries are heading back towards some sort of normalcy, governments are now shifting their efforts towards driving recovery as well as mitigation.
So how can governments leverage the painful experiences during the pandemic to best equip for the short and longer-term in re-starting our economy and ‘normal’ life while avoiding or preparing for any reoccurrence of another pandemic?
Pandemics are a forcing factor for change
Pandemics have been a catalyst for profound change throughout history. In 541 AD, the Justinian Plague changed the course of the empire; In 1350, the Black Death caused England and France to call a truce to their war. In the more recent 1855, the Plague caused a change in policies in India, sparking revolts against the British empire.
Government efforts to manage the current emergency has also naturally disrupted the normal ‘modus operandi’. We have seen digitalization decisions – including changes to regulation – being taken and implemented in days that had been under discussion for months.
The effective remote working of public servants to online court hearings or parliamentary sessions to citizens leveraging e-services like social or unemployment benefits requests has led governments to support the resulting huge spikes in demand.
The good, the not-so-good and the greater good
The willingness for citizens to be served by their public sector agencies with the same experience as when dealing with their favourite online banking has been discussed at length as a characteristic element of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
What this pandemic has also shed a huge light upon is the importance for governments themselves to have appropriate agility to take decisions and act (supported by adequate regulation), appropriate tools (including digital ones) and appropriate means (including material resources, funds or people ability/capacity).
A balancing act
The key is to balance the desired agility which we have experienced repeatedly during the crisis (the good) with public sector bureaucracy which we can define as a specific form of organization characterizing public sector agencies in many countries (perceived as the not-so-good) and the ability to impactfully serve the greater good.
This is an incredibly complex balance to achieve, often requiring an adaptive loop model as well as the ability to integrate additional skills and create agile focus/execution groups with the right skills.
Agility to act: how do we deal with unnecessary bureaucracy?
Bureaucracy is nowadays often portrayed as sub-optimally responsive and competent, even incapable of staying at pace with societal changes.
Reviewing regulations on core processes to enable more agility could help daunt the complexity which currently slows down governments’ progress in many countries: this should include the ability to adapt regulations swiftly to external changes, to take decisions in a timely fashion, to have flexible procurement tools as well as to enable the involvement of ecosystems which can support competency in line with ongoing progress… all while maintaining transparency, fairness, constitutional values and the individual as well as the country’s best interest at heart.
The experience we have just been through is crucial in providing pragmatic learnings, vivid best practices to repeat and insights on how to deal with the ‘hard rocks’ such as balancing the privacy of individuals with the need to have the right information, in real-time to save lives and diminish economic impact and recession.
Making the right decisions with the right data
Making optimized decisions that serve individuals and the country is heavily dependent upon the data governments have. At the beginning of the crisis, governments had to make decisions with partial information under huge time pressure, enormous citizen anxiety and no allowed margin for failure.
The importance of data for governments has been a centre topic of many conferences for decades around data interoperability, open data, secure data exchange and more.
Today’s technology tools can provide great ability to analyse and visualize data, draw intelligent insights, simulate cases, provide predictive scenarios and preventive measures; it is now also easier to add external data sets to governments’ existing information as well as anonymized data in order to respect privacy rules and optimize outputs.
Governments are becoming increasingly data-savvy, but there is still a complex, unresolved issue compounded by government structures and systems.
Organizing that data, processing it and giving it a context will provide the information that governments need in critical decision making. Incremental projects as well as leveraging relevant data science skills can help facilitate and accelerate such progress in government.
Security and privacy
We have all seen the increase in cyber-attacks, the spread of disinformation, and the rise of concerns about attacks on individual privacy and human rights related to contact tracing projects.
Fighting off cyber attacks necessitates a collective effort between governments. As new data challenges arise, privacy technologies must become the standard for enterprises and governments alike to ensure a wide-scale privacy-enabled data collaboration before the next crisis can unfold.
As countries grow more and more dependent on digital systems to continue their operations, it became important to have robust cyber security while maintaining the privacy and digital trust in order to safeguard the ongoing implementation of innovative projects.
Unless both security and privacy technology, skills and ecosystems are firmly in place, there will never be enough transparency or trust to enable the adoption and agility required moving forward.
Can governments balance agility, bureaucracy and drive for a better good?
The painful experience which we are going through around the world can facilitate a positive, disruptive jump forward for our governments to benefit individuals and societies. Governments have reminded everybody that while they are key actors in securing online safety, they cannot do it alone.
During the pandemic, individuals, companies and organisations have all come together in beautiful ways to support and facilitate governments’ actions for a common good. This valuable civic engagement has created, and will continue to create, an invaluable contribution to our present and our future alike.
This article originally appeared on the author’s LinkedIn page.
Senior Director, Government Industry EMEA | Leveraging technology to impact governments & the citizen they serve.
