Cost of Change at the DPGA Annual Members Meeting

I was in Singapore last week for the Digital Public Goods Alliance Annual Members Meeting, with Public Digital colleague Sechi Kailasa. It was good to feel the energy of the community and see it growing with the addition of Asian Development Bank (ADB), Open Future Foundation and the Government of Uruguay/AGESIC.

It was great to see more emphasis on building capability better policy environments in government, and making smarter use of the private sector support. A highlight for me was joining Ambassador Nele Leosk from Estonia, Vice-Minister Armando J. Manzueta Peña Manzuela from Dominican Republic and Aura Cifuentes from Co-Develop for a discussion on making change happen in government as part of the D"igital Public Goods for Digital Public Infrastructure" (DPG4DPI) track.

Asked to draw on my experience working in the UK government and share how we worked with the private sector, I talked about distinguishing between different types of private sector actors (cloud vendors are not system integrators are not local software firms) in order to understand how best to work with each of them, and about the critical importance of leadership and hands-on skills within government to make sure you know what good looks like and make the reforms to get there.

I also touched on how I much prefer to talk about the “cost of change” rather than “vendor lock-in” as it helps us think about the broader range of factors impacting whether we can make the changes we want and doesn’t present a false binary. I got several requests for a follow-up blog post on that, and will get to it!

Thanks to the DPGA team and the Open Government Products team from Singapore for another great event. Looking forward to continuing the conversation about creating policies and teams to transform that cost of change.