Last month, the servers of the National Stock Exchange were down for a few hours during business hours, adversely impacting critical trading activity. Since 2017, NSE has had nine such server glitches. On March 8, the critical OTP (one time password) and other important SMS messages for the banking, e-commerce, payments and other industries were adversely impacted as TRAI’s regulations on ‘Bulk SMS service provider registration on DLT platform’ were implemented without adequate planning or backups.
These are just two of the many examples of various government agencies’ suboptimal planning and adoption of digital technology platforms and their operations. The basic digital tools of different government departments, such as websites and mobile apps, have a significant headroom for improvement, and most often fail to deliver on the fundamental functionality or experience.
Why is this happening? What does it take for government agencies to improve on their digitisation and digital technologies adoption goals, and delivering on the experience?
High On Intent, Low On Execution
Digital India, a campaign launched in 2015 by the central government to ensure various government services are made available to citizens digitally, is a great initiative. However, on the execution front it has been marred by issues, from completion of online transactions to inadequate and/or slow Internet speeds.
The superior quality of any digital platform depends on three key elements — robust backend network and infrastructure, ample features and functionality, and intuitive user interface. Most government digital platforms and tools fail to deliver on at least one of these three requirements. This significantly under-delivers on the end-user experience.
When it comes to ideas, policy drafting and legislation, India’s initiatives are among the most advanced and progressive in the world. Be it the Data Protection Bill, the National Strategy for AI, the Digital Currency Bill, etc. have been some of the earliest and comprehensive frameworks in the world.
However, the execution of some of these policies has been abysmal. The government also has multiple agencies, such as the NITI Aayog and the National Informatics Centre, which apart from providing the infrastructure for government IT services and Digital India initiatives, has also opened centres of excellence for various emerging technologies, including data analytics, artificial intelligence and blockchain.
Despite these and other similar agencies, there seems to be some level of incoherence in the government’s implementing and operating digital technology initiatives and programmes.
Comprehensive Engagement
A significant part of delivering a great end-to-end user experience on any digital platform is ‘Design Thinking’. Design Thinking is essentially an approach used for designing products, solutions, services and platforms with a human-centred core. Ever since Apple popularised this approach through its smartphone revolution more than a decade ago, most private technology industry players have adopted it to build products and solutions.
Since then, a good Design Thinking approach has been the key differentiator between a good and a bad digital product. From the looks of it, government agencies drastically lack Design Thinking for their digital tools and portals.
Government agencies need to collaborate more with private technology companies targeting a comprehensive and long-term ecosystem development, which goes beyond the current client-vendor mode where communication is at a transactional level, and ideation and collaboration is bare minimal.
Talent Spotting
It’s not that India has a dearth of talent when it comes to technology and science. Rather than the government identifying and employing the best talents in these fields, often it is private tech companies, including the FAANG, who end up with them.
Most global technology companies have appointed India heads and have found success in the Indian market. However, government agencies have failed to maximise from these partnerships. The government could collaborate with such companies to have access to technologies at early development stages, train and update government workforce, and develop an ecosystem where government IT tools, websites, apps, etc, are constantly improving.
Fast Generational Cycle
At MIT’s India Emerging Technologies Innovation Awards Conference in 2018, a speaker asked the audience for show of hands, if in agreement, for the statement he made: “We are witnessing the fastest pace of innovation, of our lives, in emerging deep technologies (AI/ML, Blockchain, IoT, AR/VR, Robotics, etc)”. Almost every hand in the conference hall went up. The speaker interjected saying, “That was just half of my question, here’s the other half: How many of you realise that this is also the slowest pace of emerging technologies innovation that you shall witness for the rest of your lives?” This second half hit everybody in the audience strongly.
We’ve been closely tracking the developments in innovation in emerging technologies for over seven years now. As per our estimates, the generational cycle for AI/ML is six-to-nine months, for blockchain it’s 12-15 months, and for IoT, it’s about 18 months. This means that a new technique or a platform in AI/ML will be surpassed by its next generation version within six-to-nine months.
Most of these emerging technologies are evolving as ‘deep technologies’, meaning they run in the background and power a number of platforms, solutions and applications across industries.
Need Of The Hour
With the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 shining the spotlight on people’s lives and livelihoods, emerging technologies have lost their sheen and buzzword status. However, the pandemic has only accelerated the adoption of digital transformation across industries; and these technologies are playing a critical role in that while their pace of innovation continues unabated. All these technologies play a vital role in delivering the experience of various digital platforms and tools.
Government agencies have to be cognisant of this evolution and dynamic, and need to act swiftly in order to keep up with the innovation pace not only to formulate policies and regulations, but to also integrate these technologies into their own programmes and tools.
That government agencies need a new attitude when it comes to adopting digital technologies is not new. That government agencies need to be a lean and efficient work forces is also not new. The need of the hour is that government agencies work with a sense of urgency. This needs to come from a place of vision, and ably supported by patience and diligence.
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