The role of digitization in government policy implementation

The governments across the world have evolved over the last couple of years, with the advancement of technology, to rise to the expectations of the citizens and businesses even with tight budgets and increasingly complex challenges. To facilitate this mammoth task, governments form policies and implement them to pass on the benefits to the grass root level citizens. Taking a cue from the private sector’s adoption of technology, the citizens have now the heightened expectations from the government for having a personalized and relevant experience. That calls for the inclusion of digitization in government policy implementation.

The policies are written a statement of ideas, goals, plan of action proposed or adopted by any department or agency or people themselves. While the policy-making in one task, the implementation is actually a great challenge. The implementation of the policies means the administration of the process in which various resources, organizations, procedures, and techniques work together to put the drafted policies into effect. When the rubber meets the road, the policy implementation process faces some unforeseen challenges. They are bound to occur. However, if those are not resolved in time then they can lead to a huge loss of public resources. It is said that a policy embraced by the government, advocated by the authorities and announced overtly but inadequately delivered, is worse than no policy at all.

To things together and bring the desired outcome of the policy implementation, digitization plays a crucial role. From the start of the implementation process, it brings in transparency in tracking how and when the proposal would be implemented including all of its key milestones. The built-in workflows keep track of who is responsible for delivering the policies, who is accountable and who are the decision makers. The digitization project generally takes in to account the key risk factors with mitigation management strategies. This makes the whole policy implementation process resilient enough. The digitization helps governments to automate following important stages and process of the policy implementation:

  1. Planning
  2. Governance
  3. Risk management
  4. Monitoring review and evaluation with digital dashboards and stats
  5. Resource management
  6. Preventive action strategies
  7. Workflow management

Having digitization included in the policy implementation ensures cost-effective solutions, savings in human work, automation of the processes, and efficient results. The digitization helps governments save cost, enhance public services and improve citizen’s quality of life.