Session 6: Digital transformation and Whole-of-Government

Whole-of-government approach is fast emerging as a best practice as the world embraces digital transformation at an accelerated pace driven by the pandemic. Countries are now increasingly looking to integrated digital government strategies and technologies to “transform" themselves and the way they do business, to improve how to operate, how to deliver public services, how to engage stakeholders and how to provide impactful citizen centric solutions leaving no one behind.

Reuse of digital infrastructure, developing a digital ecosystem and developing synergies across the sectors (moving away from siloed approach) that increasingly deploy digital solutions are high priorities today. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Estonia (MFA Estonia), The Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development of the Federal Republic of Germany (BMZ), and the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) have launched the Govstack initiative with an aim to enable countries to kickstart their digital transformation journey by adopting, deploying, and scaling digital government services utilizing the digital building blocks approach. The approach to develop a government stack has been adopted by a number of countries in the Asia-Pacific region (e.g. Australia, India, Singapore). The session will provide a practical insight on how building blocks can be developed and integrated at national level to realize whole-of-government approach.

Cross-sectoral digital skills developmet form one of the core necessities to manifest this approach and it is important for countries to undertake their assessment and develop national programs to make it available in a timely fashion. Countries (e.g. Cambodia) have undertaken national level skills assessment in an effort to build capacities that can facilitate digital transformation policies and strategies.