A GovTech Playbook: Lessons Learned from Cross-Country Experiences | New Economy Forum

Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining us. Good afternoon to everybody here in Washington DC and of course to everyone connected virtually around the world. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the second session of the New Economy Forum, a GovTech playbook, lessons learned from cross-country experiences. So GovTech, a quick recap, it's all about public sector modernization. We're talking about using technology to improve government services and operations to ultimately benefit the citizens. It's a key component of the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department activities and today we'll be discussing what we've learned on the GovTech journey so far, both broadly and specifically from different countries' own unique experiences. And we'll also explore what lies ahead and how to create momentum to keep developing and pushing forward. The panel will delve into their personal and practical experiences and give their insights on how to make GovTech a success. It is my pleasure to be moderating this panel with our four distinguished guests. Let me introduce each of them briefly to you. So all the way down at the end there we have in the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department. Next to him we have David Eves, who is Associate Professor of Digital Government and Co-Deputy Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London. And then next to him we have Mr. Hisham Alsheikh, who is the Vice Governor of Shared Services in the Saudi Arabia Digital Government Authority. And next to is the Deputy Secretary of the Digital Economy and Business Committee of Cambodia. So let's kick off with you, Ruud, if I may. So, so far in terms of your work, what you've experienced that's got us to this point, how do you create success in GovTech? Thank you, Amanda, and good afternoon everyone. So first of all, I think it's very good that you started with the definition of what GovTech is, because people always talk about this term, but they sometimes mean different things. And we have been struggling with that. We have been sort of thinking, what for us does GovTech mean? And as you say, for us it means it's about the digitalization of government operations, but also of government policies. Because once you can enhance your operations, this may also open opportunities to modify the design of your policy. So we deliberately also included policies sort of into what we see as GovTech. GovTech is basically in everything we do, everything governments do. GovTech digitalization plays a very important role these days. And we discovered that many governments, GovTech is a siloed approach. Different government agencies have their own GovTech projects. Also with us, we work a lot in revenue administration, we work a lot in public financial management, in ministries of finance. There's a lot in common. So we created this group that basically recognizes the commonalities in addressing GovTech. We also, for us, GovTech is so revolutionary because it changes everything that has to do with information. So information, government services are very information intensive, and digitalization means that we have better data, we have more data, we have quicker data, we can store the data and share the data easier, and we can analyze data and information much better. This basically means that there's huge benefits for governments in terms of serving people. But it is not taken for granted. We've also learned that there are major challenges, and one of the major challenges that we see is the digital divide in the world. Three billion people around the world are not connected to the internet. In advanced economies, more than 90% of the people use the internet. In emerging markets, economies, it's more than 70%. But in low-income countries, it is just one third. Two out of three people do not have access to internet. That, if the government wants to provide service to the citizens, is a big issue. Solving this is not easy. So we've done an analysis of what it would take for the world to connect also the low-income countries, people in low-income countries, to the internet. This would require a massive investment of, we estimate, it is more than 400 billion US dollars that would be required. It's very concentrated also in the low-income countries. For sub-Saharan African countries, it is four and a half percent of their GDP. So these are massive investments that are required. But it's not just the infrastructure, it's also the affordability of access to internet. If you look at what it costs to be connected in an advanced economy, it's about $25 per month on average. In a low-income country, it's less. It's only $5. But as a share of their income, it is actually nine times larger than for a person in an advanced economy. So affordability is also a big issue. So this digital divide is, I think, very critical in reaping the benefits of digitalization, particularly for developing countries. If you allow me, I want to make one more sort of lesson that we have learned, and that is digitalization is not just about an IT project. We've seen many failures of GovTech projects, and that was because they were focused too narrowly. GovTech is really a comprehensive reform of the ways of doing things, the way of thinking about things. It changes organizations, it changes people, it changes skills. So it's a much more, sort of requires a holistic approach rather than sort of a narrowly focused project. Hisham, you've been at the forefront of Saudi Arabia's digital government transformation for 20 years now. What is at the top of your mind in terms of what you want to share with our audience from what you've learned during that time? Because you've had some pretty impressive results. Thank you, Amanda. If I look at it going back when all of this started, we had a very passionate view of where we want to be. At that time, we had a lot of challenges, we had a lot of areas that requires development in terms of core infrastructure, in terms of skills and capabilities, and in terms of having direction. And just a few years back, when the Vision 2030 was set, we had a clear target of having a pioneering government for an enabled and a vibrant society. And that gave us a clear direction to focus on the society, and the society is all about our people, our citizens. And that had us put the approach of a citizen-centric government, government services. From there, we started moving into, you know, leveraging the power of data, leveraging the power of the advanced technology that we have. We've done a lot of work over the years, but our focus and primary attention was towards the citizen. The government is focusing on serving the citizen. We actually moved away from, you know, predicting or trying to think of what the citizen wants. No, we actually go to the citizens, we ask them, what are the services that you're looking for? We engage them. So basically, we engage them in the services that we want to do. And with that, we created a collaborative community between the government and the beneficiaries. Therefore, we managed to come up with really what is needed by them. We adopted a concept that has been growing over the world over the past years, which is called life journeys. Every day, each and every individual has a certain life journey that they do. In total, life journeys are about 20 to 30. That's actually what you do in your entire life. You know, like, for example, starting a family, owning a house, getting a job, obtaining education, seeking health, or something like that. So we pick up the most common and important life journeys, and those life journeys concern several agencies down the road. We bring all the agencies together, we sit them together with some of the beneficiaries who are working on our research, and they work with us on streamlining the service process so that the user can, you know, find everything streamlined and very simple and easy. After that, we created something called the National Digital Government Strategy that had a primary pillar, which was government to citizen. And that is a primary focus for each and every digital service that is being introduced into the market or into the landscape of digital government. If you don't have the citizen part of your attention, then we will block it, and we will not support it. You have to go back, understand what are they looking for, and make sure that you provide them with the best service. Also, a very important element that we focused on is making sure that we have clear objectives with sustainability, because the digital government transformation is a journey that starts and never stops. It started in 2005 for us, other countries started before or after, but it's not a project that starts for a year or two and then starts. No, it's a change of the way the government is working. It's part of their lifestyle, if I can call it, the government lifestyle. So it needs to continue. You need to make sure as a government that this is a sustainable approach that you move on to. And last but not least, we make sure that the entire government ecosystem has a common goal. We cannot have government agencies within a country working in silos. Then that will go into a bit of a disarray and services will fail. Effectively, the ultimate beneficiary, be it an individual or a business or a government-to-government, they will have that conflict and things will crack down and fail. You have to have a clear target, a common target, and we work towards achieving that target. So engaging with people, finding out what people actually want and need. Lee, is that something you can relate to? Because Cambodia has moved very fast with GovTech, hasn't it? And done a lot of leapfrogging in some ways. What has allowed you to do that? Yes, I mean, well, actually, we are not moving that fast, actually. We started the digital transformation journey back then in 2002, and we learned a lot from the past experience, especially from our own experience and also the other countries' experience to tailor-made what we have at the moment. So I can tell you something like this. We can break into three phases. The first phase is from 2002 to 2010. I would call it an e-government where at the time, only one institution that managed the key application in terms of technology and then provide that application to the other line ministry to be used. And because why we do something like this? Because at that time, more than 20 years ago, I mean, not all the government agencies have the capability to develop, to implement, and even to operate the system by themselves. So that is why we chose only one and then do the system for the others. And this can be a success in the sense that it can roll out the system quite fast, but it faces one main challenge problem. That is the ownership of the system as well as the ownership of the data. Because the respective line ministry that is supposed to own the system does not actually own the system, because it is operated by the other line ministry. And from that, we move to the second phase from 2010 to 2019, something like that, where the line ministry tries to claim their responsibility, claim their ownership. So the system that has been developed over the past eight years being demolished, being re-engineered, and being rebuilt once again. But at the time, not by one institution, but by their own institution. So that is why in the second phase, there are a lot of services coming out from the government. But although we can solve the ownership issue, but we present another issue, which is the interoperability. Because the system from line ministry cannot talk to each other, because there is no common ground that design all systems to talk with each other in advance. So this is the major problem that maybe the investment, especially from the ministry of finance itself, cannot block, because we do not know how to prevent this from happening. So moving to the third phase from 2020 onwards, we realized that, because at that time we took a visit in Estonia, and we learned about the data exchange in order to solve the interoperability issue within the government. So that is why we developed a common platform, four things, as of now. The first one is the data exchange, where we adopt fully from the ISO in Estonia to connect the system of the ministry together, as well as from the architecture as well. And the second thing, because of course we really need a sign-on, a digital identity, to allow the citizen not to create a huge pair, a hundred pair of username and password to access one portal to another portal of the government, but just only one identity in a mobile form so that you can log in to every service of the government. So this is the second thing that we developed as a common system. The third thing is about the payment, the local payment. Local payment here, meaning that in the past we used to have a problem where one bank that had dominance in the market had more accounts. They tried to close the loop, meaning that if I want to transfer from mine to Amanda, I need to have the account in the same bank, because transfer across the bank is not possible at the time. So that's why we create an intra-layer that allows the bank MFI, PSI to join together, so that the fund can be moved from one account to another, although you are from a different bank based on the QR code. So this is also, we call it the third dimension to tackle this kind of problem. Recently we introduced another one, we call it the Verify.gov.kh, meaning it is a platform to verify your document electronically, to verify the authenticity of the document. Because we are not having enough all the data set already from the line ministry to be verified online immediately, so that's why we chose the hybrid approach, where for those who cannot afford the system immediately, their certificate, let's say business certificate, education certificate, things like that, can be put into one place and it transform into an electronic format that can be verified and understood by the other. So this is how the four things can be complemented and we learn a lot from the other countries as well. By doing something like that, it stands as a pillar that for all the government services that sit on top, you can name it, let's say from education, healthcare, including the public finance as well, they rely on that kind of service. I mean you can't escape, although you've developed any kind of system from these four fundamental pillars. So based on this, we hope that in the coming year there will be some sort of more flourish in terms of providing better public services to the citizens, so the citizens cannot or maybe do not try to enter the data again and again, the same data one again and again, because all the data can be verified from one another between the ministry, between the line ministry and the government. So that is how that we learn, so I hope that you may get from the experience and try to avoid the unnecessary part that you can live from, moving to the ecosystem where the system can be interconnected and can be interoperable with one another. So making things simple, making things work, which we all know the frustration of when that doesn't happen. David, you've had your brain across this for several years. What is, in a more general term, we've heard from specific countries here, but I think you used an analogy earlier today just to kind of bring everyone back in on GovTech and how it should work in an ideal world. I want to first take a step back and just maybe make two observations. One is I was really impressed with the presentation this morning and the work that's happening in Saudi Arabia and Cambodia. I was really quite floored and one of the things that really strikes me, and I always try to let everybody know, is actually I hate the term digital government. I really just dislike it, because when I say the words digital government, you think I'm talking about the future, and I teach, like I've spent the last 10 years teaching public administration students, and particularly the mid-careers who come to my classroom, they know I'm not talking about the future, I'm talking about the present. That there is no digital government, there's just government. And the reality is almost anything that happens in your government now touches a technology in some form or another. Even if a citizen's using a piece of paper to fill out a form, someone is then transcribing that generally into some, like you know, in the worst case scenario into an Excel spreadsheet, and then it's being saved somewhere. But there is a digital element that's now happening across all governments. So I think the first thing I really try to convey to people is we've got to stop talking about this as though it's some separate and distinct thing. And that's why I also, I love that you're kind of, you're talking about like the various phases that you felt Cambodia went through. It's actually important to remember this is both a really old and quite new phenomenon. We've actually been doing technology and using computers in government since the 1950s. But what really shifted in 2000, and this is the kind of thing I have to remind my students, is like nobody used a service online with their government before 2000. And probably most people didn't before 2010, even in the most advanced countries. And so what really has shifted is now all of a sudden we have this ability where we'd like to interact with our governments in virtual ways, but we've built a whole bunch of systems that are really actually designed for public administrators to intermediate between citizens and those systems. And so maybe some lucky places are getting to leapfrog because they had less built, but there's actually far fewer of those than you think. So the real conversation that's happening is we're finally beginning to wrestle with this notion of what does it mean to be in a digital era as a government, and what does a kind of, if you will, an enterprise strategy for government actually look like, as opposed to having every ministry run off and do their own thing. That is the core question. And if you're not thinking in those terms, if you're not thinking about what is our government-wide strategy, and increasingly, more excitingly, our society-wide strategy for thinking about how we're going to run a government and a society and an economy in a digital era, you are having the wrong conversation and you don't even know it. So the metaphor that I try to always get to is to think about highways. For me, what I'm really keen to see is governments making investments in infrastructure in a digital perspective, a digital infrastructure. Because right now, we're effectively asking every ministry to go build their own highway network and run their own truck system or run their own cars on it, and they're all building highways with different standards and different schemas, and they've got their own custom-built automobile companies running on them. And I'm like, no, how do we figure out how to get a common highway system that creates all sorts of competition where you have competition for building cars, but public investment into creating standards that both the public and the private sector can leverage so we can really make benefits from being in a digital era? And if that's the way we've got to be starting to think, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about the kind of conversation on digital public infrastructure. So you say at the beginning there that this is about now. How would you characterize for the audience the kind of ideal GovTech situation? What would it look like? How would it behave for the people using it? Well, it's actually not far off from what our colleague from Cambodia described. What he's effectively describing is, what are the core rails or highways that you need to run a society? Well, you've got to have some way of identifying who your citizens are and letting them assert who they are. There needs to be some mechanism for the exchange of value. So how do I pay you, or how do you pay me? How do I pay my taxes to government? How do I make that as easy as I possibly can? And then how am I able to move data across, at least at a very minimum, across the government silos so that you can offer me moment of life services without having me to fill out 10 pages of forms to tell you, actually, this is my age, and this is my unique identifier, and this is my address all over again. I don't have to repeat all of that. So what are these common rails that we're starting to build that allows you to do all of that? So I'm really interested in kind of what are those common things. And the really tricky part is, in some places, actually, I think these older legacy systems can be pivoted to turn into kind of elements of those rails, but they require a different way of thinking. And other places where you are lucky, you get to build them from scratch, or we're going to have to go rebuild them. And the real tension, though, is you just can't go willy-nilly and build this. You've got to build something that is generalized and abstract and infrastructure-like that the citizens don't really connect with. But you've got to connect it with services that citizens find meaningful and worthy of their time and energy to create a new social contract where they want to engage and become formally part of the government, or they want to become part of the formal economy and engage with the government. And so the places that I've seen that have been most successful are the places where you've built out infrastructure, and you've built a killer app at the same time. So you have a benefit system, or you have a way of establishing a business that's so easy and so delightful to use that people want to make use of that. And then the infrastructure then demonstrates its successfulness, and other ministries want to come and take part of it. As I shared this morning, nobody wants to buy a PlayStation without a great video game. And right now, I feel like ministries of finance, and I worry the World Bank's all about pushing PlayStations onto governments, build a PlayStation. But you've got to have a great game, or nobody wants to come and use it. Lee, you can put your modesty to one side. Do you think Cambodia is where David describes, and you're achieving that level now? And if so, what conditions have allowed you to have that level of success? Well, I mean, the term success is quite overwhelming, I would say. But I would prefer to say that maybe a substantial progress compared to what we have done in the past 20 years. So in that sense, I think maybe there are some factors as well, maybe three factors I would like to raise. The first one, we need a policy, a strategy, or maybe a roadmap. So at least to advocate that the government, as a government, we have these kinds of things, and then all the stakeholders that participate need to be aware and to be ready that whenever you want to propose a system in your sector, you need to follow a certain rule, a certain thing, in order to achieve the interoperability as much as possible. Otherwise, we're going to waste the money as we have in the past 10 years, 20 years. So this is the key thing, and it needs to be communicated properly to all the stakeholders, the government, and also the private sector, as well as the partners as well. The second thing is about choosing the right model. I mean, the right model here, whether you want to be very independent, very siloed. I think some countries, they prefer that kind of thing, because to give the full autonomy to the law ministry, to full control on the system. But to us, in Cambodia's case, we proved that this model doesn't work at all, and then that's why we chose the ecosystem model, where we believe that as a whole government, although from a very far point of view, it's just only one, but internally the thing to be separated but interconnected within a very well-defined framework that we call interoperability. Without this, again, you cannot provide an efficient and easy public services to the citizens and also to the business. I raise one example that we successfully adopted in this case. Before 2021, before we adopted this model, in order to get a business license, being in Cambodia, you need maybe around 50 to 60 working days just only to get a piece of business license, because you need to go to the Ministry of Commerce again, then you need to file the information again to the tech department, you need to go to this kind of ministry to ask for the license again and again. That's why it takes a lot of time. In calculation, it's about 50 to 60 working days. Based on the model that I just described, meaning that we developed only one portal that allowed the businessman to fill all the information and then pay online within the local payment network, and then the data will be distributed to the respective line ministry so that their line ministry can just check it, approve the application if it is correct, and then they can get the certificate online that also being verifiable. This is how it works and it can transform from 50 or 60 working days up to only five days only. This is how we can reduce based on applying this model. Whether or not this model is convincing for the other country, it depends on the situation, but at least it works for Cambodia at the moment. I think the last factor is about, I call it, the readiness of the variability, because being an ecosystem, meaning that you have multiple systems, so that it depends on the readiness of several things. If you have only one thing, then you cannot call it an ecosystem because it will depend on one another. Just for example, you need to verify the personal information based on your ID database. You need to verify your property based on, let's say, land management things or maybe a vehicle thing in order to streamline all the information that you want, and then can provide better services to the citizens as well as to the business. These are the main three factors that I think are quite contributing. I just would like to echo David that without this framework, I don't think that the Gautek is going to be moved, especially in the case of Cambodia. Hisham, when it comes to Saudi Arabia, what would you say has allowed you to get where you are now? I'm sure you would say you feel like you're in a pretty good position when it comes to Gautek. What has allowed that? Definitely, we're not where we want to be, just to be clear. We're passionate about the future and moving forward, but yes, we are in a fairly good position compared to the rest of the world and when we started. Definitely, people and skills, that's a primary key player. Having a clear unified strategy that aligns all of the different organizations in one place. Having all of the enablers of the ecosystem, as mentioned, identity payments, secure government networks, also identifying who does what. That was a primary challenge at one stage of identifying a possible data dictionary for the government. For example, my name is Hisham. Who knows that? Which agency of the government has that record? That agency should provide its services to everyone else. Whenever a query happens on this ID, then they need to respond with that exact name. If they want to ask about my education, then it's the Ministry of Education who should respond back. No one else should come and say, oh, he has a PhD or he doesn't have one. No, the identification, my medical records, my justice records, these have to be identified. We've done a homework, I think it was in late 2019, identifying the most common and required data dictionary of the government and identifying the responsible entities. That enabled a lot of the success. Going into the next phase of the predictive government, and this is something that we've been working on for a few years, and we're starting to see the results come up. The government now is interconnected. Solutions and agencies are all interconnected. We have a government service bus and a secure network that links the entire government together. So every piece of data is there. So now the government needs to know what is it that you want or need in the near future. I'll give you a simple example. If a family is blessed with a child, a newborn, then immediately the Ministry of Health knows that there's a human that got introduced into the society. Then they need to start sending reminders to their parents for vaccination on their periodic intervals required. As soon as they reach the year four or five, then Ministry of Education will send the reminder to the family telling them that your son or daughter needs to go to preschool, if you wish. And they know probably your location based on your address, national address. This is a recommendation proximity of schools next to you. And then you're reaching the age of 18, then it's time to, well, technically you should have completed high school and ready to go to university. Then they send recommendations and support and so on. The government has all of these data and capabilities. We're working on creating that predictive government analysis. And it goes beyond to health and so on. The other thing is we've gone beyond technology. So it's not about a technological advancement or a few pieces here and there. No, we've gone to actual results and numbers going far beyond. I'll give you a few examples if you allow. The national platform for civil service is called Abshir. Last year, 2023, the projected savings were about 26 billion Saudi riyals. That includes the government and the beneficiaries. Eliminating trips to the offices. No one goes there anymore. Everything is done through an application for the entire users. There's CO2 emission. There's no more papers. There's no more printing. Everything is done electronically. And the amount of saving beyond technology advancement is so far. Justice system. Power of attorney is now issued in three minutes, wherever you are. Just a few clicks and you get it done. Health. I'll tell you a brilliant example of using emerging technologies such as 3D printing. Up until very recent, I thought 3D printing was mostly done for design modeling or architecture or something like this until I sat with my colleagues from the King Faisal Specialist Hospital of Saudi. And honestly, they gave me a new hope in life. They actually use 3D printing to print the organs for the surgeons before they go into the operation. They take all the scans, the MRIs and whatever. They create a 3D print of that organ and they give it to the physician. Before you start cutting this patient in and going into that risk of time running out and possibly, God forbid, dying or so, here's the organ. Here's its situation. Take a look and make all of your analysis or testing or whatever you want to do. That is giving a new hope. It's not just about technological advancement or using. It's a new hope for humanity. If I have a few more hours, I can give you all the examples and numbers that we have, but I don't think. Well, now that's some great insights into how this practically works and how it actually benefits people's life. Rude, is it possible to quantify the impact on revenues, on the quality of public services like education? If all of this is happening, can we see that it's working, that it's making things better yet? Yeah, that's a good question because these examples are really fascinating and really inspire you on the GovTech solutions. But ultimately, it's of course the question, how big are these effects for society? For instance, we work a lot with revenue administrations. If a chooses a path of digital transformation, which often builds on the digital public infrastructure, you need an ID, you need digital payment system, you need data exchange. There needs to be the foundation and a revenue administration can build on that. But this foundation is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The revenue administration needs to think very carefully about their strategy on the digital transformation, which goes so much beyond just the technical aspect because it changes the entire organization. What we have been doing is trying to identify, well, if a revenue administration becomes more and the most common ways of measuring that is by e-filing, e-payment, e-registration, e-invoicing, electronic fiscal devices. These are measurable aspects and we can look at whether this has had an impact on revenue mobilization by these organizations. What we found is, if you do this, that this can have a massive impact. If you move from being non-digitalized to fully digitalized, the difference is about 3% of GDP in revenue. This is a staggering number in terms of revenue mobilization. You can do a lot in your policy and your administrative efforts. The 3% is a very big number. Digitalization is a really big thing. But you have to do it right. What we also did is we look at confounding factors. Do you see the same impact if you have, for instance, a very small IT budget versus a high IT budget? IT budgets really matter. If you don't resource it well, your project is going to fail. Governance is a big issue. If you have very poor governance, we don't find these significant impacts. If you have good governance, you'll be fine. There's also impacts of the number of staff, the quality of staff, so the educational level, and the tenure of staff. There should be experienced people who know how the organization works. To us, this teaches us that to do things right, you have to do all the pieces right. I think that is an important lesson from the empirical research. But I think it's also consistent with what we find in the day-to-day exchange with revenue administration. This is entirely consistent. For us, as the IMF, we do both these things. We work a lot with governments. We provide the advice. We bring that advice at home. We share. We develop our own ideas of what are the best practices, and we share that with others. We also do this systematic analysis. This defines our business model to combine the quantitative analysis with the practical experience. Here, I think, it's not always the case that it is fully consistent. But here, it's very consistent that the lesson that this needs a holistic, comprehensive approach to reform. This is the final part of our conversation. I'd like to ask you all about the future. Hisham, you mentioned that things are good now, but you're not where you want to be. Can you describe your GovTech utopia that lies ahead, and how you will get there? I probably mentioned the predictive government services, and that's a long way. We're still at the early phases. But definitely, if the government can reach that level where it really provides all the comfort and support to its beneficiary, then yes, we've achieved our target. Remember, the government is here to serve each and every one, and leaving no one behind. Even if they are underprivileged, we need to find ways to get to them, to provide them with the services. If they are very underprivileged, they cannot access those services, we need to find means and ways for them to get it. We need to make sure that the government services, the transformation that is happening, is impacting positively their quality of life. This is what I mentioned in terms of the civil services. Today, any citizen or resident of Saudi can do his services any time of the day, anywhere on the planet, with your application or accessing the website. You don't need to worry and bother and stress yourself about timeframes. Making sure that we, down the road, we continue to involve the beneficiaries to understand what is it that they're looking for. Previous days and years back, a typical government would just predict, oh, this is what you want, this is the service I'm giving you, here you go, take it. No, this is all changing, and we're changing it. We're sitting in their seat and bringing them alongside with us just to understand from them, from a group of people, from society, civil society groups, from NGOs, from everyone. We need to understand what is it that they want so that they can provide it better, and we need to embrace innovation. We need to enable it big time, private sector, academia, inter-government as well. We're looking at listening and working together to exchange those ideas. If a ministry or if an agency has a brilliant idea, why don't we replicate it? It's for the benefit of everyone. Additionally, we need to work on regional and global alliances. That way, we can always share our experiences, share sometimes our pain, and understand together how we can fix it. Definitely, there's no one size that fits all, so probably some of the examples successfully in Cambodia might work in Saudi. Some of the successes in Saudi might work in Cambodia, but you cannot take everything and anything. You have to understand what is it that you need, what is it that you fit. Very recently in Saudi, well, actually, four years ago, it was 2020, an initiative to found an organization, a regional organization. It's called DCO, Digital Cooperation Organization. That is an organization with several member states from Africa, Asia, and Europe, making sure that no one is left behind in the digital economy era and eliminating or minimizing the digital divide. That is the type of cooperation that is needed for the future between the countries so that they can work for a better community and society within their borders or beyond their borders. Thank you. Lee, when you think about Cambodia's future, is there anything that keeps you awake at night in terms of what could prevent you or challenge you in getting to where you want to be? Well, I mean, although we move to the ecosystem based on the things that I described, it doesn't solve all the problems. But instead, it brings another challenge. That is called the coordination. Because, I mean, in order to make things work together in light of mess, so somehow we need to have a proper coordination. But a bit luckily that we are fitting in the Ministry of Finance that control the government budget. So whenever the ministry asks for the budget to implement their IT projects, then we need to be sure that they follow our standard. They click to the point. Otherwise, we cannot accept their proposal, things like this. So hopefully that from now on, we will have a better public services. But another thing that in order to make the things really work in harmony for all or for the whole government, maybe we need to work on a little bit on building the base registry. I just would like to recall what David just presented this morning, that they divided the GALTEC into three main layers. The first layer is about the data, it's about the base registry. The second layer is about the data exchange, and the top will be the services that presented to the citizen. So right now, we need to make sure that all the necessary base registry being built in a proper way, so that they all hold the single source of truth, so that the other service can rely on. And the thing that just mentioned by Ruth, we call it a transactional data that happens repetitively, and later on it can become a good source for machine learning, for AI to predict certain things. So these are the things that we need in combination. So as long as we have a very good foundation of this data, plus the existing DPI, the digital public infrastructure that we have at the moment, you can expect that the service is getting better and better, especially in terms of efficiency, in terms of less time to get certain things from the government, let's say, request the ID card. Maybe also the government can open that data to the private sector as well to get a revenue stream. I call it an API economy, where we open the government data based on the API and allow the private sector to use it. And at the moment, we have proven this is a good case. So for example, when we open the national ID database to the bank, so that the bank can take advantage from this verification, so that they can open an account online quite easily, that there is no need for the customer to visit the bank counter anymore. So it's quite successful in the sense that each month there are nearly a million transactions that have been requested by the bank in order to open that account for verification. At the moment, it's free of charge because we try to pilot it for a year, and after this, we're going to charge a certain amount per transaction. So not only that we provide the seamless integration, provide better public services to the citizens, but at the meantime, we also can get the revenue from not selling the data but selling the service for the verification to the private sector. So when the more data is being ready, being more open, I think we also can collect a lot of revenue from this as well. So this is the second thing, or the first thing. But the third thing, I think we are not a technology capability in an understanding. I mean, I would say we're just a country that tries to embrace new technology, but we are not creating a technology by itself. So we try to push, keep learning, to build the institutional capacity to both the government as well as the citizens, because they are the stakeholders. The government can be a service provider while the citizens can be a service consumer. So in order to allow them to transact properly, both of them need to be digitally equipped. So we are in the process of providing the skill set to the government as well as to the citizens to adopt this solution better. So overall, if this structure works well, all the data is in place, the service gets enhanced. So hopefully, although we cannot call it a utopia, but perhaps we can close to that in the coming future. Thanks a lot. And David, what do you, when we hear all these great ideas and initiatives, what kind of worries you about what might stop them being brought to life more globally? And just to chuck a bit of AI in there for you, what impact could that have? Well, first, actually, before I answer that, there's just two observations I want to make. First is, I'm so happy that you talked about the role of the Ministry of Finance in thinking as kind of a coordinator and having an active role in thinking about what the government of Cambodia should look like. Because I think, at the end of the day, most Ministry of Finance have some, they have a challenge function and they have a spending control function. And so if you're in this room, you probably are with the Ministry of Finance and you have an active responsibility. I think big challenge at the moment is the default assumption in the Ministry of Finance is we should be giving the ministries money over and over again to be building the same things like in the silos. And no one in the Ministry of Finance is saying, well, no, no, no, no. What would an horizontal service look like? How could we think about that? And so that's the first observation I just want to make. The second is, you're reminding me so much. So I used to get to host, I still do actually, with our friends at Public Digital in the audience, we'd host this convening of governments from around the world. And I remember this one time, Anir Choudhury from Bangladesh came. Hey, Neil, we got all these OECD countries in the room. And Anir gets up and kind of shuffles up. And he gives this presentation that's not dissimilar to what you're doing. And he's talking about how they're using a platform, like a public infrastructure approach, to not just deliver services to citizens, but actually to enable people in communities to become effectively a franchise deliverer of government services. They can really do last mile. And all the OECD country people in the room just jaws hit the floor, because they can't even do these things. And so the second observation I just want to make here is, I think most of the action is happening in the Global South. And this is maybe one of the first times, I'm so nervous about this moment, because actually this is a moment where the models are not in the North. And the funders and the consultants and the whole orientation is about how you replicate good practice from the North to the South. And it has traditionally been problematic, but it is enormously problematic on this particular topic, where the innovation and leadership is happening in the South. And so I'm so glad that we have on the stage here examples, because this is where I think the leadership is, and this is where the bank and the fund need to be looking. I think the things that get me a little bit worried, first is, I do worry that we're going to get distracted. So I think AI will be important, but it's going to be very hard for you to do AI effectively if you don't have infrastructure in place, if you don't have your data organized, if you haven't laid all the foundations that we're talking about here, I'm not sure you get to go play with the shiny things, and you certainly don't get to do them in safe and secure and inclusive ways. So I want to, like, let's go do it. And that's the second thing is, again, I'm really tired of this notion of there being a digital government and a normal government. I'm like, no, it's all digital. And the technology is happening at different phases now. So you've got to stop lumping the technology into some big bucket. There's technology that's very cutting edge, like AI, where you should at best be experimenting. But then there's technologies like cloud, where we're kind of, like, migrating from an emerging to a good practice, and we should be trying to accelerate that practice where it makes sense as quickly as possible. And then there's technology where it's like, it should be good, it should be best practice by now. And my big frustration is it often takes us 40 years for practices that are best in the private sector to become best in the public sector. So what are we doing to accelerate that faster? And for me, the digital public infrastructure conversation and IDs, this is all best practice. And so what are we doing to accelerate that? So don't lump it in with the AI conversation. These are very different conversations depending on the maturity of the technology and the maturity of the services around them. So how do we accelerate that? And then the final thing that really keeps me up at night is this. I've been meaning to write this piece. I really worry about this conversation around CapEx and OpEx that no one is talking about. My experience, I was a government vendor. I had a software company. We sold to government. And I'll tell you, all the contracts we signed were for CapEx budgets. And I'm like, this is not CapEx. But you can't touch the OpEx budget. Because if you do that, you got to defend it like for all of eternity. But CapEx is the delusion that you can cut it tomorrow. And I think all of this tech is getting shambled. I'm willing to bet good money that in this city right now, all of the AWS contracts are sitting under a CapEx budget. And the delusion there is that you could turn that off tomorrow if you had a fiscal crisis, you had to save money. And I got news for you. You can't go turn those servers off. We're dependent on their operational cost. And so we're not having an honest conversation. And then this CapEx problem leads to all sorts of additional dysfunctions, which means if it's going to be CapEx, we only get the money once per year. So we've got to ask for a lot of money, which means we front-end the projects with loads of cash, which means we over-specify, and we over-build. And we don't do any of the learning and agile work to actually build these things in sustainable ways that actually meet citizens' needs and do all the learning. Instead, we ask for all the money up front so that we can pay for it up front. And then we do quick rush jobs. And then we have no money to make it better once we figure out that it doesn't work anymore. And this is a conversation this place needs to be taking a leadership on, because you are the ones who are influencing all the finance ministries, and they're the ones who are making the rules around CapEx and OpEx. And we have huge problems here. That's a good opportunity to move to Rood. So lots of exciting opportunities, but lots of challenges as well. What role is the IMF, and looking into the future, will the IMF play in getting all of this in place? I think we do play an important role. I mean, the Fiscal Affairs Department has a lot of exchange with Ministry of Finance, Revenue Administrations. I think our role is to help these organizations to get things right, to do it right. And we continue to learn from experiences. We learn from the exchanges. So I think that's one of our roles. I think also, you also asked about utopia. So if you allow me to sketch a little bit more about how I see utopia. So one is to get the operations right. But I think once that's done, I think we also have to think innovatively about policies. Because fiscal policy is often about constraints. If we think about a value-added tax, we have a value-added tax. You go to a store, you buy a product, you pay a value-added tax. That's on the transaction. The government doesn't have to know who you are. So there's a non-personalized tax. But if we have much more information, and we can link that information to characteristics of people, the needs, or how many children they have, what is their income, you can also design a very different type of value-added tax that is personalized, that is linked to how much income or how much wealth you have. So you can redesign something that we have had for many decades in a very different way. And the same holds for, for instance, taxing capital income. So what we've seen over the past decades is that taxes on capital income have been declining and declining, because governments thought it's very hard to do that. How can we tax capital income, especially from the affluent? Because it was very easy to put that offshore and without any oversight of the government. Nowadays, there is automatic exchange of information. But what we see is that many governments don't use the information. What if the governments are going to use, especially in developing countries, what if countries can use that information? They can rethink the design of the capital income tax in order to shape the way they redistribute income. So I think we should also not only focus on the operations side of GovTax, but also the policy side. There's so much innovation we can think of. Think about property tax with satellite imagery, with valuation methods that we can apply that can allow for good property tax. We can also think of transfers. If we have more information that we can verify quickly, we can also design better systems for protecting the poor in a very targeted manner. So there's a whole range of policies, I think, that we can rethink if we allow the innovation, as you said, to take place. We're out of time. It's been a real pleasure being part of such an enlightening conversation. I hope you all enjoyed it too. I'm sure we've all learned a lot. Here's to an improved future through GovTax. You can physically toast that because it's happy hour just outside. You'll all be very pleased to hear. But thank you for joining us and being part of the conversation.