GovTech: From Great Challenges to Great Opportunities
While I started to interview people around the world who work in the field of GovTech, I discovered that there tend to be very similar patterns in terms of their answers, approaches and perspectives. It turns out, GovTech challenges and approaches are shared by various experts all around the world!
In this article, I would like to share my impressions on GovTech around the world. Obviously, this perspective is based on my personal exchange with GovTech experts rather than scientific results.
1. Everywhere around the world, people mention that the institutional environment and governmental culture is a huge challenge.
Inflexibility of processes, bureaucracy, complicated and abundant regulation as well as slow adoption of new solutions or technology are common themes around the GovTech world. These circumstances are often the reason for long sales cycles in the field of GovTech, which demonstrates another challenge especially for startups who want to work together with the public sector or are depended on it. Also, the procurement process is a big obstacle for all these stakeholders.
Leticia Piccolotto, the Founder of the BraziLab, shared with me the following:
„There are three main barriers: normative, cultural and infrastructural. We have a national legislation on public procurement that makes it difficult to purchase technological solutions, especially those offered by startups. In addition, it is necessary to advance in a culture of innovation: it is fundamental that public managers are open to the benefits brought by the digital transformation and that entrepreneurs of startups perceive this openness and start to invest more and more in specific solutions for governments. Finally, we need to move forward in ensuring the infrastructure necessary to support digital transformation: there is no point in having frontier technological solutions — for example, blockchain, internet of things, artificial intelligence — if we do not also have the necessary conditions for their implementation within the government.”
Due to all the challenges in working with the government, more and more GovTech innovation programs have been developing worldwide in order to allow more innovation adoption and startup-government partnerships. If you are more interested in open GovTech innovation programs, make sure you click HERE.
2. Motivations are different but the core is the same: making lives of citizens better.
During my conversations with GovTech experts, I got the feeling that their personal motivation differs in terms of their jobs and the areas of impact. Some want to make the government and its processes more efficient. Others would like to transform cities into becoming more sustainable. Yet others want to promote the efficiency and transparency of governmental processes and decisions. GovTech can not only support citizens in participating more actively, but it can also promote more equality and fairness.
While I spoke with Bitange Ndemo, Professor at the University of Nairobi, he shared the following:
„I feel strongly that technology will tackle many of Africa’s challenges, including poverty. Without doubt, it is the responsibility of those who understand the impact of technology to promote it in the continent.”
In the answer of many GovTech leaders, the motivation behind the work in the field of GovTech is always related to promoting new technology as a tool for changing cities and governments for the better, for the sake of the residents. The main motivation for their work is making the lives of the people better and bringing together governments and citizens through technology.
3. Experts all around the world agree: COVID-19 is reinforcing the importance of GovTech and will make this industry to become even more prevalent, quicker.
The crisis caused by the spread of COVID-19 revealed that a lot of public institutions have missed their opportunity to conduct digital transformation and are now struggling to serve their citizens properly.
Due to the difficult economic situation worldwide, a lot of citizens are in need now to receive effective support of their governments. Jonnie Haddon, the Program Director of the Lightning Lab in New Zealand, shared:
„For two reasons the next 12–18 months the role of the government and how it embraces technology and innovation, in general, is going to be more important than ever. Firstly, so many people are going to be looking to government for assistance and for financial and social support and it will not be able to meet the need using traditional or existing models and infrastructure. Secondly, how they shape the public sector to deal with the crisis will have a lasting impact and it represents a massive opportunity to dramatically change the system.”
The crisis is showing that the government can move fast, take unusual levels of risks and use emerging technologies. It has demonstrated how fundamental technology is. Due to this fact, experts expect that governments will accelerate their digital transformation and that GovTech will become an even more fast-growing industry.
It is clear that the sector still has a lot of potential for development, so it is all the more pleasing to see that there are more and more developments and projects all over the world that promote GovTech and support the private-public sector.
If you are now curious what the opinions of the experts are in detail, check out the interviews HERE.
N.B. We are going to publish the GovTech Leaders 2020 list in September 2020. If you’d like to get this material, make sure you sign up for CREATORS newsletter HERE to get updates about reports that may be relevant for you.
