Executive Summary
The world is in the midst of a technological revolution that is transforming economies and societies in complex ways. This changes how people live and work and affects their relationship with governments. Governments need to improve governance and public services to be able to respond to changing expectations and increasing demands.
Argentina’s adherence to the OECD Recommendation on Digital Government Strategies is an important sign of the government’s commitment to leverage digital technologies and data to better serve Argentinians. This review will help the country better link digital government efforts to related policies and to broader political agendas, and ensure that it contributes to a more connected society.
Several presidential decrees and laws were issued to reinforce digital efforts, and the guiding policy, known as the Digital Agenda, defines clear and common policy goals for digital government. Although these are significant steps, opportunities remain for developing a dedicated digital government strategy with a roadmap for the achievement of key goals and for better aligning provinces and cities with national targets.
The aforementioned OECD Recommendation underlines the importance of strengthening institutional capabilities, developing digital skills and shifting from traditional procurement to innovative ways to commission ICT services and goods for more efficient policy implementation and delivery. Argentina has focused on increasing institutional capabilities to support the digital transformation, but it still faces challenges in retaining talent and ensuring consistency in its calibre across government. Procurement has become more coherent in some circumstances, but there is room to develop a comprehensive procurement strategy to better plan, execute and evaluate ICT investments from a whole-of-government perspective.
Several important cross-government platforms were developed to make the government increasingly digital and paperless (e.g. a digital identity system and the digital services provided in MiArgentina). The challenge in moving forward will be scaling up the adoption of such solutions to improve overall service delivery.
Argentina has also dedicated energy and resources to improving the management of data as an asset in government, from its creation to its release as open data. The government established the necessary policy guidance (e.g. an open data policy) and developed initiatives to improve government data quality and sharing. Nonetheless, data governance in the public sector can be reinforced to scale up data interoperability, management, sharing practices and promote re-use.
In the past few years Argentina has made significant and rapid progress in catalysing its digital transformation. Yet, a number of actions could accelerate the evolution from e-government to digital government. To achieve this, the OECD suggests the implementation of the following policy recommendations:
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Clarify and formalise the governance framework for digital government at the central government and across public sector organisations, and develop a dedicated digital government strategy.
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Move towards ICT commissioning by bringing further control to the overall ICT procurement process (e.g. use of budget thresholds), develop framework agreements for ICT procurement, involve internal and external stakeholders in the development of ICT projects’ business cases, and adopt agile approaches in the procurement, management, monitoring and control of ICT products and services.
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Build public sector digital capabilities by clarifying the competencies framework; define job profiles that attract talent, promote career paths, and motivate communities of practice, and implement an agile talent-commissioning model.
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Improve public service design and delivery by supporting the alignment of ICT projects with digital services and data standards; promoting the adoption of central eID system, public sector APIs and the reuse of software developed by government for greater public sector integration; and underpinning citizens’ adoption of Mi Argentina as priority tool for digital public service delivery.
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Build on digital inclusion efforts, drawing upon the value of mobile-based solutions and multi-channel approaches for public service delivery.
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Reinforce public sector data governance, developing a data strategy and defining clear data leadership roles. Improve data federation, protection, quality and interoperability efforts in the public sector.
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Increase the maturity of open data in the public sector by leveraging existing efforts; prioritising the publication of open government data in high demand by external communities, and engaging users on data re-use for value creation.