Tokyo, Bangkok Japan’s digital agency’s first day of work started with an apology. As soon as their website went online on September 1st, it collapsed again. The office reported promptly on Twitter that the website was in “unstable operation”. “We apologize for the inconvenience, please wait a little.”
But the breakdown does not slow down the ambitions of the agency, which is to lead state and regional governments in the future. It starts with around 600 employees, one third of whom are digital experts from the private sector. While there is still talk of a digital ministry in the German election campaign, Japan has created facts.
The government sees the accelerated digitization of administration and economy as an important pillar of its growth strategy, said digitization minister Takuya Hirai. Japan must recognize that previous IT strategies have failed and that it is further behind the world’s best, said the minister. “That means that we have to catch up a lot.”
In Asia, however, it is not only Japan that is going on the offensive when it comes to digitization. The Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, which has been a pioneer in online administration for years, is experimenting with new regulatory approaches to drive digital innovations.
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And Taiwan won praise for its swift digital response to the pandemic and is trying new ways to digitize citizen democratic participation. From the perspective of political advisors, Germany can learn a lot from the approach of the three countries.
Germany is lagging behind in digital administration
Christian Echle heads the Political Dialogue Asia department of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) in Singapore. Shortly after arriving four years ago, he found the way the authorities there work impressive.
“At the offices in Berlin, it wasn’t even possible for me to get an international driver’s license within six weeks before moving,” he says. “Everything was much more efficient in Singapore,” he says. “From registering to applying for my work permit, everything worked online.”
Together with colleagues and researchers from local universities, Echle has examined the digitization efforts of several leading Asian economies. “In terms of digital administration, we are five to ten years behind countries like Singapore in Germany,” he says. “We need targeted efforts in order not to fall further behind.”
From Echle’s point of view, the Asian economies serve as role models in various areas: Singapore demonstrates how states can offer private companies the freedom to test new technologies in a targeted manner. Taiwan shows the benefits of an open data policy. And Echle also thinks a digital agency like the one in Japan is worth emulating: “In several Asian countries it is becoming apparent that it is less important to set up digital ministries,” he says. “Instead, strong state digital agencies are needed to implement the transformation in practice with their own apps and online applications.”
Japan is on the digital race to catch up
In Japan, it was the pandemic that gave the impetus to action. In the ranking of the digital competitiveness of the Swiss Institute for Management Development (IMD), the country was even nine places behind Germany in 27th place in 2020. Online applications and teleworking were hardly used. But with the pandemic, drastic reforms became necessary, said Japan’s Minister for Administrative Reform Taro Kono at the GovTech summit of the Handelsblatt. He was entrusted with setting up a digital agency in 2020.
“The digital agency should not be a normal authority,” said Kono. Instead, he envisions a kind of super-ministry for the digitization of all levels of government. “The agency will control the government’s IT budgets and systems and hire its own IT engineers.” But the experts are not only responsible for knowledge transfer. “We hope that they will bring a new culture to the administration.”
The speed with which Japan is tackling its years of backlog of reforms in digitization is exemplary, says Pierre Gaulis, founder and head of the Tokyo digital consultant Cream, which supports companies in Japan in the implementation of digital transformation. The government is really trying to accelerate digitization together with the private sector.
Even before the agency was founded, Kono ensured that most applications no longer had to be stamped by hand, as was previously the case. The procurement system has been reformed in such a way that the authorities can also award contracts directly to small businesses and start-ups – and no longer just to large companies.
The digital agency has already hired smaller IT startups that, for example, create common rules for the websites of ministries and authorities. On the other hand, the authority is supposed to encourage the 1,741 municipalities, all of which have set up their often incompatible IT systems, to work together more closely and to centralize purchasing. A big challenge, but it is Japan’s business.
Singapore: the pioneer in digital government
In Singapore, the state technology agency GovTech has been responsible for implementing the city-state’s “Smart Nation” strategy for five years. Since then, she has developed hundreds of apps and online services that citizens can use to pay for parking tickets or apply for a new passport.
Last year, GovTech also released the world’s first corona warning app that could use Bluetooth connections to show possible contacts to people who tested positive. It took Germany two and a half months longer to start a similar system.
One reason for the long development time was high data protection requirements. “In the end we saw that because of data protection, a lot of data in Germany could not be used effectively to fight the pandemic more effectively,” says KAS expert Echle. He thinks: “Germany must strike a better balance between data protection and public interests.”
Data protection is also an important issue in Asia. A representative survey by the KAS in Japan, Taiwan and Singapore showed that a clear majority in all countries is concerned about data misuse. At the same time, however, there is also great openness to new technologies: In Singapore and Taiwan around 80 percent agreed with the statement that digital innovations would bring more benefits than they cause problems. In Japan this value was around 70 percent.
In Singapore, the government is trying to maintain the people’s trust with a regulation that on the one hand allows innovations early on, but can also react quickly as soon as difficulties arise.
The so-called sandbox license system enables start-ups to obtain an operating license on a trial basis. It was most recently used by providers of rental bicycles that can be rented via an app. A full license is only granted if it has been found after the trial period that the service is actually received predominantly positively – and does not cause trouble due to chaotically parked bikes.
Singapore also relies on such trial licenses in the fintech sector. According to the KAS analysis, this approach differs from the approach that is often predominant in Germany of considering and ruling out all eventualities in advance.
Taiwan wants to invent digital democracy
Among democracy researchers, Taiwan has become a showcase for the fact that digital technology can not only be used to control the population. “Taiwan has succeeded in using information technology and citizen participation to create a uniquely successful system of ‘digital democracy’,” said the American Consilience Project in a recent report.
The pioneer of this attempt is the former hacker Audrey Tang. As digital minister, she wants to implement the idea of a digitized “high-frequency democracy” in which the government can react quickly to trends on the Internet and the world and convey transparency.
“In terms of digital administration, we are five to ten years behind countries like Singapore in Germany,” says Christian Echle.
(Photo: imago images / photothek)
During the pandemic, the work on new “CivicTech”, i.e. technologies to support civil society, has already proven its worth. When the masks became scarce at the beginning of the pandemic, Tang’s team created an app within a few days that could show the availability of masks. When there was another Covid-19 outbreak, she also immediately put up a check-in system for restaurants.
However, the ambitions go further. In the current five-year plan for digitization, the government wants to create a smart system in which, thanks to digitization and artificial intelligence, power comes from the people even between elections. For example, the government has set up the “Polis” platform, where officials can ask citizens for advice and suggestions on specific issues, Tang explained at the Handelsblatt’s GovTech Summit.
There the discussions are moderated with the help of artificial intelligence, so that a kind of consensus quickly emerges. “If we emphasize the idea of cooperation rather than political confrontation, we can change Taiwan quickly, fairly and joyfully,” Tang believes.
In particular, the data collections on citizens are also the subject of controversy in Taiwan. But in its analysis, the KAS believes that Taiwan’s civil society will use digital technologies for greater participation in political and public affairs, for monitoring the government, and for the advancement of public interests.
More: Third to last of 20 countries: France and Italy depend on Germany for digitization