ICT and Social Services - presentation to GCC countries Social Security Leadership

Last week I had the pleasure to address a group of senior staff from Social Security Organisations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), hosted by GOSI. I was invited to give a presentation on ICT trends and directions for Social Service and to outline recommendations for the GCC countries.

To my surprise it was actually raining in Riyadh when I arrived - but not for long. The next day (April 10th) the weather was back to normal - clear blue sky, bright sun and pretty hot - coming from Scandinavia's 5dg day temperature.

Whilst not know this beforehand Scandinavia and the Digitization of Denmark would be a topic that would be of interest - as well as recommendations on what the GCC countries could learn from other countries on the path forward to greater digitalization.

I had 20 minutes and 5 minutes for Q&A for my presentation. On the Panel was also Accenture and IBM to present their view on the future of Social Services from an ICT point of view.

I will not go through all my slides, as some of them was identical to the presentation I gave at the Minimum Income Support seminar on April 3rd in Brussels. Slides and comments to be found here.

I did spend a bit of time on going through a few of the different kind of trends that I see happening in the coming years - especially between the ones driven by paradigm-shifts and those driven by technology-shifts.

It is clear that a number of changes are heavily impacting what Governments need to do over the next years - to realize the Digitized Service Society - which in Accenture terminology is labeled: "The Digital Business". Governments need to prepare themselves for the demographic changes - this will also happen in the Arab world - some 30 years shifted compared to the Western world, but they need to prepare for a different mixture of citizens in the future - which will put much more pressure on Health Care and Social Care. From a technology point of view, Straight Through Processing (STP), Performance Management and Cloud-enablement will be significant areas to consider.

As the presentation focused on ICT-enablement and trends and directions, I contextualized to the audience what they need to consider to have success with ICT innovations and what kind of prerequisites they need to have before enabling advanced eGovernment Services to the Citizens.

Selecting the right amount of technology which is matching the right level of digitalizations and which are matching the maturity of both Government and Citizens is difficult. But first things first. One needs to secure the foundations.

And I believe that there are 3 elements that needs to be in place before realizing eGovernment Services to the Citizens:

1) Good Master Data - one needs to know the best possible sub-set of information regarding the Citizens, in order to be able to make eligibility determinations.

2) Good Authentication / PKI - one needs to be sure that the citizens asking for services is the right citizen, with the right credentials. Governments need to find ways to authenticate citizens in order to provide them with services and benefits.

3) Good communication infrastructure. Citizens and Government Employees want to have mobile access to information and services.

When the prerequisites are in place, Governments can start developing complex self-service and capabilities for the citizens. But - there are other issues that Governments need to address along the "right path" to the digitized Service Society.

 There are challenges around:

* Complex rules
* Citizens Digital Illiteracy
* Objective vs. Subjective rules
* Digital Payment

All of these have been dealt with in a number of countries. And there are some good learning's that can be shared.

As one of the previous slides showed there seems to be a correlation between the complexity of Social Benefit programs and the scale of digitalization - one explanation could be that the more complex the social welfare benefit system the more resources will correct determinations require - and hence the savings earned by increased digitalization will be greater. One of the best examples on how to enable Straight Through Processing is the Swedish Social Security Agency - they digitized more than 12.000 lines of rules and have now a "case processing time" of 1-2 seconds compared to days or weeks by experienced case workers. At the same time they have achieved 99.98% automation. Furthermore they don't need special IT-people or programmers to maintain the rules, as the maintenance can be done easily - and in natural language, by the legal people owning the legal responsibility.

Citizens want to do services when it fits them - not when it fits Governments. This is a change in culture. The mantra of today is: "Do not ask what the Citizen can do for you, but what you can do for the Citizen". The way Accenture puts this is that Citizens are no longer asked to "claim" benefit, but are "offered" benefits. But it is a challenge that a growing number of citizens are digital illiterates.

Digital illiteracy is a growing concern, as it creates division of citizens (A and B-teams) as well as it is the opposite of the inclusive society, as it exclude a number of citizens. While discussing my claim that more than 25% of the population of Denmark were digital illiterates, a peer within the Canadian Government stated that among users of Social Services in Canada, the estimate was that more than 80% were digital illiterates. Shocking indeed. But there is hope - evaluations among smartphone users show that most are able to use apps to navigate services and games. Hence one of the ways to ensure better inclusion will be gamification. And Governments need to start experimentation and develop strategies for how to embed elements of games (ie. gamification) into their strategic thinking - especially to communicate with the most vulnerable citizens.

On objective vs. subjective rules as well as digital payment, read here.

Jumping fast forward I also did spend some time on the recommendations - these are the same advise that I gave in 2013 on the ISSA conference on Compliance and Collection Evasion (see my white paper here). Basically because they are still perfectly valid and will remain so for long time.




I will not for now go through all the recommendations - later I will comment on each of them individually on the blog, but I just want to highlight one recommendation that was a bit unclear to many in the conference.

You are NOT unique.

Why is that I - for many years now - have claimed that Public Sector authorities are not unique, when many organisations and agencies certainly believes that they are?

Besides being a provocative statement, it is also one which is both true and false. It is false, because organizations are unique, there exist only one GOSI in Saudi Arabia, but it is also true, because what GOSI does in terms of PROCESSES (the way the work as a public sector entity) is NOT unique. It is basically generic and identical to most other public sector agencies around the world. The differences in Public Sector Processes are - in ICT-enablement terms - small. There might be variations in the way they do segregation of duties, who can do what, when, why; who approves; who informs who etc. But basically it is the same meta-processes that all Government organizations are formed after.

What really makes organizations UNIQUE is the POLICIES. Policies are vastly different. Just examine the EU and the debate on so-called "Welfare Tourism". This is because the definitions and benefit rights - the POLICIES of Welfare - are completely different and defined using a multiplicity of different concepts - why they seems to be quite incommensurable.

So - in the more ICT-mature countries there is a clear tendency to separate policies from processes. This is a challenge, if one have an integrated, hand-coded legacy system (in Cobolt), but there are technology options that allows one to extract Cobolt-rules and migrate them to a Policy Automation tools - like OPA.

 From the audience there was a number of questions to the panel. I will only reflect my answers in the following:

Q: How can the collaboration between Business and ICT be improved ?

A: It is one of the most frequently asked questions. Some years back I trained ICT people as well as Business People under understanding each others "language" - and it is a difficult task. Recently more and more companies (WSJ mentions how American Express sends senior executives to programming and computational design classes) has begun educating non-technical staff in programming in an effort to make them understand what the world of ICT is all about. No one is really doing the same for the ICT people. And here is a challenge - it is probably easier to learn ICT about the Business (Pains and Challenges) that it is to learn the Business about the ICT (Pains and Challenges).

But nevertheless both sides must collaborate - they must understand how Business and ICT is like Yin & Yang - two sides of the same coin. There are a number of strategies that can be deployed to make sure that there is created buy-in on all levels. Build a business case. Make sure that is is collaborative developed between the ICT and Business people, so that it reflects all the costs and all the values created. A huge issue with Public Sector Business Cases are that they tend to examine only the cost side and not value the value-side.  Ensure a sound Governance Structure: Make sure that there is frequent and direct involvement of Business in ICT and that ICT are involved with Business. Make the CIO part of Business discussions - and vice verse. Be transparent about how Business and ICT is a coin - "an item": Always include ICT in agency-wide internal communication - let everybody understand why ICT is important and how it will be part of the senior management teams transformation strategy.

Q: What can the GCC countries learn from other countries with respect to digitalization of Social Security / Social Welfare ?

A: There are quite some challenges in "knowledge transfer" from one experience to another - but there are some learning's that can be transferred - like the requirements / prerequisites mentioned above. Furthermore I think that it depends on the willingness of a country - something I often have encountered in Public Sector is a stickiness of minds to change - mostly in form of "NIH" - Not Invented Here syndrome. "We didn't invent it, then it can't be good". Governments must learn how to embrace best / good practices from other places in the world. Why re-invent the wheel, when others already have done it for you?

Among the learning that GCC countries can reuse is: 1) Make roadmaps and do not deviate from them. I will be more than happy to host inspirational workshops on how to construct an ICT roadmap for the next 5-10 years based on current technologies and industry solutions. 2) Collaborate with both the Implementer and the ICT-Vendor throughout the project. Instigate a collaborative forum between you, the Implementer and the ICT-vendor - could be in the form of an Innovation Advisory Board - where you are able to information and discuss current challenges and future innovations of the implementation of the roadmap. I would be happy to explain more in-depth on my experience with such boards, and what values it have provided. 

Denmark was mentioned several times by all speakers - and why? Because Denmark is seen as one of the front-runners on the edge of digitalization. And as a Dane I can confirm that it is absolutely awesome services that we get access to - from the information aggregated citizen portal to the "one-click" tax return for most citizens to "property information" with more than 400 individual data points per property - available for anyone to examine and reuse. And did I mention that the Government has enforced by law "digital-by-default" for companies and citizens within the next 2 years? And that all Government accumulated data (non-privacy intrusive and state-secrecy disclosing) is made freely available?

But this is the "It's always sunny in Philadelphia" part of the story - not that there is a "dark" side of the Danish experience - there are clearly issues that needs to be addressed, but we are working on that. No, it is more the time and the constraints that the digitalization has brought with it.

Digital Denmark is build on 3 key master data registries - these were defined in mid-60's and they were met with some concerns - but quickly everybody was behind the registers: The CPR (Citizen ID and Masterdata), BBR (Building and Property Registration) and SE/CVR (Company Registration - later than the two others).

Over time all services has been provided utilizing these central registers - and the reason why it has worked in Denmark is because Danes TRUST the Government. Danes are the single most Government trusting society. We basically believes that the Government will act in our interest rather than its own interest. This fundamental concept of trust has meant that we happily provide the Government with all our "master data" - Denmark has one of the best mortality databases in the world, because we are able to interconnect vast amount of data with the individuals - and hence "trace" cause and effect. As mentioned the OIS (Public Information Server) provide access to every single property - including public valuation, latest sales prices, ownership, roof-type, number of toilets etc etc - more than 400 data points per property.

There are two challenges going forward: 1) Harvest / Saw, 2) Governance-models and 3) Lack of Centralism. These two are tightly connected. It is always a challenge, if another agency needs to saw (ie. collect information and bear the cost) that others will harvest the benefit from (ie. use the data). This has often made required transformations take years where other countries who have different models have been able to react more swiftly. 2) Governance models - not only is agency-wide governance required to succeed with digitalization - but cross-agency governance is needed. And Denmark has been quite fragmented on this. There has been several entities, who have tried to commandeer the "right path" but without being successful. 3) The model of autonomy for Municipalities and Regions, as stated in the Constitution, is challenging, as it basically allows every single of the 98 municipalities to develop their own IT for exactly the same business problem. One could wish for a bit more centralism.



As always comments and ideas are more than welcome.