The concept of digital governance seems very complicated in a system like Pakistan where government departments are handling information manually or those who happened to be digitised are still not connected with any centralised digital hub under one platform.

One of the articles Escher published says that a working example of digital governance is when a citizen of Singapore gets text messages from his government on a monthly basis, reminding him about different things like returning library books or upcoming expiry of driving licence or passport. Likewise, a street trader in rural Ireland can get a licence for a Christmas stall without leaving home.

Digital transformation in the context of better governance can be mapped to as many meanings and complexities, but in the end it’s about ‘simplicity’ and managing citizens’ experiences in the best possible way, and the governance to get the real time data to perform better every other time.

While reading some facts and figures, it came to my knowledge the World Bank has been reporting for the last few years that multibillion dollar credit finance projects have failed to achieve the required results. Mostly, the issues are labelled as poor project management, corruption, economic incompetence, a lack of control or governance or incompetency in visualising the holistic approach for selecting and deploying technology. If the current government is committed and needs to move ahead in the right direction, the path is pretty simple and clear.

The government needs to make the economy more connected and filled with opportunities. This is need of the time. The government is quite keen on building a stronger ecosystem for the ICT sector and gear it towards digital economy that will be more transparent, efficient and citizen centric. In order to do so, the governance needs to establish better controls, more visibility and an effective compliance mechanism. System driven controls through unified platform for finance, budgeting and planning, capturing transactions, procurement, inventory and assets, human resource and project management will ensure efficient utilisation of funds. Deploying core functionalities across ministries and departments will provide real insights to have a dashboard for effective decision making, which will lead to better governance. Whereas, effective digitised compliance environment will increase track and traceability, and transparent and compliant debt management.

To evaluate, analyse, allocate funds or manage projects, insightful data should be the basis to act on long-term goals. Without this shift we will remain in an equilibrium state and keep on loosing crucial time, effort and tax payers’ money. In fact, without any solid basis, we can’t perform on any strategy.

It is also impossible to run systems in silos, not digitising transactions at each point of service and not using the valuable insights (driven by the system). Having system driven insights could bring a lot of change in managing simple functions like deciding on releasing funds for promoting education or strengthening healthcare or spending tons of money on building infrastructure like roads, metro bus or investing on citizen facing government services or analysing the future expense.

The writer is an IT expert.