Building tomorrow’s digital nations

Deepak Pelluru

Does a ‘Nation’ need a strategy? Do the principles of competitive advantage that apply to business firms equally apply to ‘nations’ as well? In this increasing interdependent world where nations compete among themselves on various fronts, the answer is an unequivocal “YES”.

The top down strategy of a nation will encompass aspects such as improving macro-economic indicators, effective governance, embracing a holistic foreign policy and enhancing foreign trade, improving standard of living of its citizens, reducing unemployment, accelerating the GDP growth, better education and healthcare and so on. A well-defined strategy along with effective measurement of progress will ensure the success of the nations in this world where competition is rife. This competition is much more accentuated in the emerging markets where the nations try to outsmart each other to win in the global market place.

What role does ‘DIGITAL’ have to play in this era of hyper-competition amongst nations to give them a competitive advantage? In the backdrop of today’s nation, ‘DIGITAL’ and ‘PROGRESS’ are intertwined and the nation’s strategy is incomplete and ineffective unless the quintessential digital elements are deeply embedded in the soul of a nation’s strategy. The recently announced “Digital India” strategy is a case in point. The Digital India program’s vision is to ‘transform India into digital empowered society and knowledge economy’. Nations such as Singapore and South Korea have made significant progress in the areas of e-Governance. While many of the developed countries have adopted e-Governance a long time ago the issue is that this is a result of bottom up strategy emanating from the individual departments compared to a top down approach that a ‘Digital Strategy’ is all about.

Digital technologies permeate all aspects of the economy and governance and effectively execute citizen to government or corporate to government or government to government transactions as well as ensure that all the activities related to generating the GDP are handled effectively and efficiently.

This is the era of a next-gen ‘Algorithm driven economy’ where all the outputs in the economy (both goods and services) as well as all the demand for the inputs (both goods and services) would be forecasted in advance using digital technologies such as Social, Mobility, Cloud, Internet of Things, Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, and we are able to optimally map the demand to the supply. This will result in a digitally driven version of a planned economy, driven in conjunction with the capitalistic world. This is not to even hint that capitalism is not going to work and that we need a planned economy. We will in-fact see market imperfections reduce by the adoption of digital technologies and thereby re-gain the trust of people in capitalism and prevent a repeat of movements like “Occupy Wall Street”.

The information such as demand vs. supply gaps and forecasts for the future are known in real time which can lead to proper alignment of pricing based on real time visibility into supply and demand. This will help handle national issues like inflation much better. It is a known fact that modernization of the supply chain in a nation leveraging digital technologies will have a huge impact on controlling food prices.

Digital technologies can play a crucial role in a multitude of areas such as leveraging sensors for monitoring the condition of crops, analytics for forecasting the supply of food, remote health diagnostics with the help of wearables and tele-medicine, rural banking with the help of mobile device based payment services, leveraging social media for crowdsourcing of ideas and formulation of policies, having a seamless network across government departments for smooth handling of transactions from a single window, etc. The land records can be digitized using Map APIs such as Google Maps and this will help resolve many disputes quicker.

The entire Government Financial system should be made fully digital with both revenues and expenditure handled via direct bank transfers which in turn will avoid revenue leakages and rampant corruption. The discretionary powers of the bureaucrats can be curtailed by usage of rule based BPM systems and workflow based mechanisms which minimize the need for human interventions.

The Unique Identification (Aadhaar) scheme implemented by the Government of India is a brilliant example of ‘Digital in action’ which could be leveraged akin to the SSN in the USA for authentication, identity verification and authorization as well as for transferring subsides to the eligible people. An App eco system around Aadhaar-like applications can be built by private parties by using the Web Services and APIs exposed by the Government which can leverage the trusted authentication mechanism provided.

The concept of a ‘single window’ approach for faster clearances that many governments in the emerging markets talk about can be realized by the use of digital technologies via ‘dynamic case management’ for tracking the status of an application or request across the multitude of departments that are typically needed to act on the request and display a consistent view not only to the customer but also to the nodal agency that tracks the progress of the applications and measures the time taken for closing an application or request successfully. A case in point could be a proposal for Foreign Direct Investment made in one of the emerging market nations which would need the clearance from various ministries such as finance, commerce, corporate law, external affairs, and environment. Appropriate metrics and analytics based dashboards can be then presented to the top executives such as Presidents/Prime Ministers which then acts as a barometer of the investor friendliness of their nation.

The Government can leverage Digital Systems for providing ‘systems of engagement’ to its stake-holders vis. a vis. ‘systems of record’. They will help in providing truly best-in-class customer service experiences to their stakeholders and also adhere to SLAs in clearing pending issues by means of advanced automation. An interesting technology that can be leveraged by nations is BIG DATA. A nation by its very nature has access to reams and reams of data about its citizens on a variety of areas. All this data can be fed to a BIG DATA system and meaningful analysis can be churned from these systems. Patterns such as migration from a city to another, health and insurance related spending patterns, probability of a citizen committing an offense and so on can be predicted in advance. This will lead to better preparedness and enable long term planning of the national economy.

‘Smart Cities’ in both developed and developing countries is one of the latest trends which will really change the face of cities as we know them and will alleviate many of the pain points associated with today’s cities. The ‘Smart Cities’ concept will leverage many digital technologies and in particular, the ‘Internet of Things’. Companies such as CISCO who are pioneers in this area provide solutions encompassing intelligent networks, sensors and other digital technologies to provide a holistic view of the events occurring in cities on various fronts such as medical emergencies, traffic jams and car parking, water and power supply, law and order. They also enable the provision of high quality public services to the citizens close to their door steps. The integration of advanced analytics with the events from the sensors and other data sources enable detection of things such as epidemics/medical emergencies, traffic congestion and providing alternate routes via navigation systems, track law violations to aid enforcement officers, manage the equilibrium between supply and demand of utilities like water, power using Smart Grids, etc.

In a nutshell, Digital can help realize things such as disseminating information and seeking public opinion and ideas via social channels, education and healthcare functions over digital modes, registration of houses and land online, real time access to emergency services such as ambulances, police and justice, timely transfer of money from government to people and from vice versa, administration of smart cities, fostering innovations in agriculture and many more functions. Thus, the entire gamut of government services as well as the entire economic activity in a nation can be truly integrated one day, providing a holistic picture of the economic and governance related activities in the country and making the nation vibrant, corruption free and progressive.

The author is the associate vice president, Digital Integration Services, Infosys