The X‑Road programme.

This is brilliant, because even people who are not planning to have a Estonian company nevertheless find it cool to engage.

Estonia did it very well with their e‑resident.

Right, it’s about a relationship with its users.

This is what I’m thinking now, is to have service design as the main thing to convince the ministries with, but also then build a workflow that enables open data automatically. That’s what we’re doing. We don’t see a lot of governments doing this. As you said, this actually is ...

It takes a while. Open data, it really only benefits people who already have technical expertise, so it’s seen as part of the people serve the whole people, but a better service design, of course, affects everybody.

We found that for citizen‑facing ministries, this is actually easier to sell than data analytics because it is instant. Just by engaging in design thinking, and design workshops, and so on, there’s a lot of rooms for citizens with no special training to participate and see that participation actually makes ...

Because the PDIS, the Public Digital Innovation Space here, our first hires are a interaction designer, and then next we have a service designer who came from RCA, from the Policy Lab in the UK. Then we expanded by having a lot of service design methodologies.

Apple, unlike other Valley companies, design is on the top, then the engineer, and then project managers. It’s exactly the reverse of many other companies.

Right, because before I entered the cabinet I worked with Apple for six years, so I’ve got this design thinking indoctrinated.

Of course.

Exactly, that’s what I have heard.

The coding part.

What are your experiences in introducing it?

Especially in a government or a traditional business thinking, if they don’t have customer demands that changes weekly, then it’s actually very easy to convince them to use analytics and data, but hard to convince them to use design thinking, interactive design, and user‑centric design, things like that.

I’m looking at point 10, saying design thinking and speed. I wonder how you connect those two, because, of course, design thinking allows very fast iterations.

In a typical software startup, of course designers, and software people, and PMs work together. It’s very natural, but in government it’s very different job trainings, and if you don’t say they have to work together, they don’t. That’s what those Singaporean counterparts have told me.

There is a difference because, according to them, at least, the Singaporean GDS has only the digital part, which means the more algorithmic, the more data‑oriented part, but it doesn’t really do the design thinking part or service design part, which is actually very different disciplines.

They also say that the Singaporean digital service, not only do they use Facebook for work, but also have something like our participation officers in every department, in this kind of horizontal organization.

I actually talked with the Singaporean officers, some of their people working on this kind of a transformation. The social department staff actually came to our hackathon Wednesday, and we compared a lot of notes.

We can promote them to senior advisors, or whatever.

That’s great.

They move an entire office, like 20 people, or 50 people, or something?

It makes alliance, it makes people more friendly, but it doesn’t really transform their workflow. It becomes a extra workflow that’s more efficient for some cases, but it doesn’t really change their core or their workflow.

If it’s once per week what we see is that they do build some personal connections, and then there’s, at least, their affinity for this kind of thing, and they are no longer resisting to it. On the other hand, that kind of culture is hard to bring back to ...

This is very impressive. I’ll have to check it out.

It’s osmosis. [laughs]

It’s like a fellowship in reverse, right?

What I think is different is that in this model it is every Wednesday or every Friday. It’s one or two days per week. In your model, you’re referring to full‑time for six months.

We’re scaling this up every Wednesday, maybe next month, at the Taipei Air Force square. That is going to be focused on social innovation, but still a lot of startups and a lot of young talents. I’m going to have my office hour there and bring the other ministries along ...

We’re doing that. Next month, starting...actually, I’ve been doing this, myself. Every Wednesday I go to this startup place, a co‑working space, and bring with me some ministries who have some engagement and let them see that this is how the startup world works.

Of course.

Yeah.

We do have the role models, as you’ve described. I’m more wondering how we can get people who are more internal facing, instead of external facing, to see that this is also business as usual. It is not some special event that you plan that happens once a year, but ...

Right, and we’re very fortunate that our President and our Premier are both very welcoming this kind of digital communication. As we know, that the Premier, Lin Chuan, has appeared on multiple live streams and video blogs. Both of them have a very successful Facebook campaign going on.

We have about 20 people here that’s doing this.

Right, the champion.

Of course, as you said, the head of IT or head of digital, it’s easy for that one single person to go live stream for all the time, like I did, but how do you convince the ministries or the organization units? Because it could be seen as increasing their ...

What are some suggestions that you would have to bring people who are not trained in a communication background or in a background to actually deliver?

I think this is great. This is why we tell those participation officers, even if they come from an R&D or IT background, they really still need to learn communication and learn how to frame their communication phrases so that it maximize their impact and engagement. Actually, we’ve hired experts ...

How would a prospective young person know that this industry, plantation, or whatever has changed?

Of course, but how does this, let’s call it the federated model, shape their job openings so that the talents seem them as digital? It is partly, of course, still internal governance work that it has to really embrace digital transformation, but on the other hand, it is entirely internal.

It’s like federations.

That’s right.

There is a significant difference in adoption rates in the internal‑facing and outward‑facing ministries. That’s my observation so far. If you have any thoughts on that, they would be very welcomed.

Citizens. When they are internal, like if they are just offices for accounting, or for HR, and they are mostly serving the public servants, themselves, then they don’t have this much of a pressure to embrace digital transformation.

Basically, they have to do in their ministry what I have done in the national government. So far, we’ve seen that mostly the ministries who face ordinary people, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, of Interior, of Transportation and Communication, these ministries have a lot of buy‑in because they have ...

We do find some difficulties in scaling change ‑‑ that’s number eight for you ‑‑ because while these 40 people are empowered to make real changes and so on, when they are back to their ministry they have to also scale this, like a fractal, to look at their lower ...

Then we meet every Friday for workshops to meet with the stakeholders and identify the issues that we really need to address using either the e‑petition platform or some other platforms. So far, I think there’s very little resistance, because it’s democratic, so it’s those POs who voted for the ...

We try to bring those, about 40, what we call participation officers, or POs, into a single chat room, like Slack, but it’s internal and cybersecurity verified. Share the same comment board and share the same iteration cycle, where we meet every month to decide where to focus our energy ...