From Government Solutions to Societal Capabilities
As the DPI debate has evolved over the past couple of years, there continues to be a lack of clarity on what DPI is. There have been several attempts at coming up with a “definition” by various stakeholders, but there is no consensus. The framing of ‘shared means to many ends’ that David Eaves and Jordan Sandman articulated about a year ago seems to capture the essence of what infrastructure generally is – digital or physical.
There is a ‘whole of government’ framing, that has tried to evolve beyond the silo, point, full stack digital solutions approach that has been typical in government for the past few decades. Some have called this evolution ‘digital government’, where the efforts have been to build re-usable capabilities across government. But this framing is still restricted to the thinking of government as a solution provider, albeit taking a more government-wide view of reusable artefacts.
Taking a whole of government view would be like developing roads for all government functions, but not make it available as a societal asset. To give a digital example, it would be like building out the GPS and keeping it only for government use. Digital government takes a “solutions perspective”, and its only purpose is to improve the delivery of government services to citizens.
Contrast this with a ‘whole of society’ view of DPI. When we take a whole of society view, we index more on developing capabilities that societal actors – government and private – can leverage and innovate on top. The whole of society approach takes a view that we don’t know what problems society will need to address in future, but today we can create a series of capabilities that may be combined to find appropriate solutions. This shift in mindset from a solutions perspective to a capabilities perspective is an important one, but also a difficult one.
The capabilities approach often takes the form of digital infrastructure artefacts such as, digital ID, payments, data exchange, verifiable credentials, etc. But the ability of each country/ society to leverage these capabilities and build solutions on top is very mixed – both in the government and in the private sector. The DPI map developed by @David Eaves and colleagues lists many countries as having such capabilities; but most countries have not been able to leverage the collective power of these capabilities to address societal issues innovatively.
Lessons from some ‘successful’ digital infrastructure artefacts perhaps points to the effectiveness of a mix of these approaches. The Department of Defense in the US built GPS for a specific purpose, but then opened it up to the public. Having a specific use case often provides the justification for the building that capability, but the genius in any such effort is to think of the layer as infrastructure – minimalist and specific in its capabilities, but which others can combine with other capabilities and use for many other purposes. This dual approach – developing targeted capabilities while considering their broader utility as public infrastructure – can unlock immense societal value.
Two things to hope for:
1. The dominant ‘digital government’ view will evolve into thinking about building capabilities for the whole of society. That is, we will see a shift from thinking about digital infrastructure for government to digital public infrastructure for society.
2. Both governments and the private sector will learn how to leverage the full potential of whole of society digital capabilities (DPI) to drive massive innovation, drive down prices and make technology work for everyone.
These shifts will take deliberate and consistent efforts. How might relevant stakeholders navigate this important shift?