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Managing digital talents to provide high-quality e-government
Indonesia is currently ranked 88th out of 193 countries for electronic-based government services, lagging far behind our neighboring countries in Southeast Asia.
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'What can I help you with?': Across Indonesia, chatbots and digital assistants are becoming a normal, everyday element of customer service solutions. (Shutterstock/NicoElNino)
G
overnment-owned websites and/or applications in the country are frequently criticized for inadequate user interfaces and user experience. The applications are mostly rated lower than 3 or 4 on the Google Play Store or Apple Store.
Ironically, these services and applications are crucial to constituents and cannot be substituted by parties outside of government, such as business license registration, passport issuance, registering for social fund assistance, administration and resident services and other various important public services.
There have been many application services provided by giant tech companies that are highly convenient for users and even succeeded in blending seamlessly into our daily life. User comparison between the two can cast doubt on the government's commitment to providing quality digital-based public services.
Looking at examples of applications that have been developed by the government and the private sector, there are differences in the quality of services produced based on user reviews. It seems that the private sector, the majority of whom have in-house digital talents who develop their applications continuously, can produce higher quality digital services and have the continuity to make periodic improvements and maintenance as needed based on user feedback.
Learning from this, it is time for the government to prioritize its digital services reliability and high-quality availability for its constituents to be on par with the widely-used technologies from the private sector.
The government needs to improve its digital-based government services. Indonesia is currently ranked 88th out of 193 countries for electronic-based government services, lagging far behind our neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. One main issue is the lack of high-quality digital talents to build national digital services in Indonesia, both at the technical and managerial levels. Only 19 percent of the total workforce in Indonesia in 2021 have digital skills.
Hence, there is intense competition in Indonesia's market for digital talent, especially in talent remuneration and incentives. Worse, the government has yet to implement suitable mechanisms to meet the talent market demands with competitive offers. This ultimately hinders talent supply for digital government initiatives. A large contributing factor is the systematic issues in our ongoing government-procurement mechanism for digital needs.
