[Public Voices] The Great Digital Government Transformation Hinges on 'Execution Details'

The ultimate goal of the government's digital platform government initiative is to improve government efficiency and, ultimately, enhance national productivity. While companies see some hope, transforming the government?the nation's largest and most cumbersome organization?is truly a huge and challenging task.

Currently, attempts at transformation through IT, which can be seen as a preliminary stage of digital transformation, are akin to efforts to transition to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. It is well known that the failure rate of many IT organizational transformations, including ERP, is empirically over 50%. However, IT technologies have continued to advance, and despite the risks of failure, digital transformation has become an imperative to avoid organizational obsolescence. How should the government successfully achieve digital transformation?

First, each agency must relinquish its vested interests in information. While legal regulations should be resolved before opening data, refusing to open information even when agencies have the autonomous authority to do so stems from an excessive tendency to avoid responsibility. Under such information closure and refusal to make efforts to open data, the success of a digital platform government, which fundamentally requires public information openness, is impossible. Even very basic system information within agencies is still heavily controlled to the extent that internal utilization is often impossible.

Second, data integration between agencies must be enabled. Although data integration among public institutions is currently being actively pursued by the government, showing some promise, a pricing system for data transactions has yet to be established, so the activation of actual data market transactions remains distant.

For private institutions to participate in data sharing to realize significant value, companies must be motivated to voluntarily provide data. It is not feasible to force sharing of carefully processed and created information at below-cost prices based solely on the principle that the data belongs to "the people themselves." Such forced loss-making transactions resemble the failed social service-level transaction coercions that no one has practiced so far. This is akin to failed policy enactments that ignore market systems and individual entity desires, such as the extension of lease periods and maintenance of existing leases that even the original policymakers of past administrations did not uphold. We must shed hypocritical moralism and find practical, acceptable solutions that everyone can embrace. The price for data provision transactions should not be too high for the value utilization of information, but it should be at least a reasonable compensation above cost for the efforts made by institutions to generate value.

Third, far more time should be invested in preparation for execution than in proposing structures. One reason for past ERP failures was setting budgets only for software purchases and other implementation costs, while underestimating the budget needed for application. It is well known that training for actual ERP utilization costs twice as much as the implementation expenses.

Now, the Korean government has reached a considerable level in making plans. However, it seems that there have not been many instances where the government's impressive plans have led to excellent execution. There is concern that the failures of past administrations’ initially enthusiastic policies fading away might be repeated. Digital transformation must succeed to move to the next stage, and the government should recognize that the key to success lies in the micro-level execution details, as is the case with private companies.

Byungjun Yoo, Professor, Seoul National University Business School