UX, Interoperability and Federated Data

The digital transformation of the Public Administration is a need shared by all countries, and all are working hard to achieve it. The question is whether progress is being made in the right direction or whether it is easy to stray along the way.

The importance and urgency of this transformation are more than evident in the case of Spain, as evidenced by the creation of the new Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service. It has been excellent news for all of us who are dedicated to this exciting subject (and also for the rest of the citizenry, even if they don't know it yet).

And what are the trends in public digital transformation?

In my humble opinion, trends are only about the technologies that are used. In digital transformation, there are no trends, but a continuous process with a very clear objective: to achieve a government where internal efficiency is optimal and where government services are provided to citizens and businesses in accordance with their expectations of obtaining quality services. At the conceptual level, there are many issues to take into account, two of which stand out:

User Experience, abbreviated as UX:

The focus should be on the demand of citizens and society, not the supply of the administration. Although it may seem very obvious, when this is confused, services cease to be of quality.

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Interoperability:

The second is that problems are not solved in silos. This translates into the need for interoperability, based on what we know as "Government as a Platform". Interoperability is required between different organizations and information systems. This is already a reality in many countries, with Estonia being the pioneer. While the Estonian example is not directly comparable due to its history and unique characteristics, it is a model to which other countries aspire. And their entire model is based on their well-known X-Road, an open source software and ecosystem solution that provides a unified and secure data exchange between public and private sector organizations. There are already more than 20 countries with the X-Road model in place, including countries such as Colombia, Japan and India, and others with similar federated data models.

At the sector level, we have the European GAIA-X model, with its verticalized data spaces, which represents a significant change in the data economy. We would need a federated data space, such as for tourism, but with a vertical covering the country's public administration.

In most countries, every area offers online services, and there are few public services that are not available for processing from home. However, the problem sometimes lies in the fact that, in order to provide these services, in each government area, department or even within a department, customized or even custom-built systems and databases have been developed. This is neither efficient nor scalable, but has been done because of the need for digitization and to offer services, not with a common, but with a departmental approach (the famous silos). Once this is done, the cost of interoperability, of reusing systems, tools and databases, of exchanging data for an optimal user experience, as well as the creation of corresponding standards, is very high.

Interoperability is the basis for a good user experience.

Decentralization increases the cost of interoperability. While the focus and proximity to the citizenry improves, it is necessary to have coordination mechanisms to achieve a "network of highways and digital roads" that allow the addition of digital services with ease and quality.

It is easy to deviate from this path. Who continues to build roads that do not connect to any destination, will move further and further away from the desired digital transformation.

In turn, user experience, interoperability and federated data will enable the creation of new public services, faster, more scalable and with greater impact. And again, the data economy that is created will foster the development of emerging companies that develop services based on technological innovation, such as all the startups in the govtech ecosystem.