Governance and Digitalisation
Hoorcollege 1: Introduction to Digitalisation and Governance
Data savvy? Video by Jordan Morrow
- “Everyone needs to be comfortable with data to be able to succeed in the Fourth
Industrial Revolution”
Fourth Industrial Revolution: Four phases of industrial revolution:
- 1700: steam trains
- 1800: creation of electricity
- 1970/1980: computer revolution
- 2000: internet
Comfortable with data in 3 aspects:
- Reading data
- Working with data
- Analysing data
Things to master:
- Curiosity (be willing to ask questions to understand the data better)
- Creativity (laptop won’t buy itself, creative in how you use the data)
Digital technologies
What are the ‘hot’ technologies in today’s public policy and discussion?
- Large language models (drive AI, because they have learned to assess textual data and
process that data and give a certain output to for example ChatGPT)
o Videos and images by AI (Zohra) generative AI for images and videos.
- Blockchain (in things like Crypto)
- Bodycams (police)
- Robots (physical human-like technologies)
- Biometrics (information in fingerprints, irises)
- Sensors (speaker system, NS toegangspoortjes)
Hit or miss? (could we do without them, yes or no?)
- MX3D bridge in Amsterdam: bridge with no regular maintenance with a build-in smart
system
- Digital twins in healthcare: take patient data and make a digital twin, a simulation of
someone’s physical characteristics.
- Use of fraud detection algorithms: try and predict if it is likely to be fraudulent
- Facial recognition in policing: match people to a database and find security threats
,Substitute, replace, or transform? (Lember, 2018)
Flop
- The technology won’t work or won’t get much use
- Google Class, hoverboard
Substitute
- The technology brings new tools to the table that complement what is already being
done
- Social media
Replace
- The technology rivals existing technologies and approaches to the extend that the
alternatives disappear
- Mobile phones,
Transform
- The technology offers something new that wasn’t available before
- Smart watches, hackathons
What are digital and digitalisation?
Digitalisation is a digital transformation that “includes a number of interconnected and evolving
technologies” (OECD)
- Digital technologies are often contrasted with analogue technologies:
- Benefits of digital:
o Can be stored for longer and more cheaply (on very small micro-chips)
o Can be reused and combined in new forms (code reused to make new apps)
o Possible to share at speed, to multiple devices over long distances on the
Internet
= much more powerful
Digitalisation and information burden
Each day:
- 500 million tweets
- 294 billion emails
- 4 million gigabytes of Facebook data
- 65 billion WhatsApp messages
,Digitalisation and information burden
- Data is growing and becoming more burdensome.
59 times increase each year = 463 exabytes of data created everyday by 2025
- Moore’s law: 2-fold increase every 2 years (approximately)
In about 150 years = more energy than the globe is currently able to produce for all (digital)
human activities
The rise of Big Data and data science
“Data science is a set of fundamental principles that support and guide the principled extraction
of information and knowledge from data” (Provost and Fawcett, 2013)
- Made possible by growth of data and digitalization
E.g., digital patient records in a hospital
- Digitizing records
- Storing in the Cloud
E.g., modelling outcomes or automating decisions in a hospital
- Designing algorithms to prioritise types of patients
- Linking types of data (e.g., treatments and budgeting or personnel needs)
- Researching hidden patterns in treatment
Recap
- Digitalisation and data have grown rapidly due to new technologies
- Digitalisation is the growing use of such technologies and their (global) interconnectivity.
- Digital technologies have real impacts: they can substitute, replace or transform
- Digitalisation gave rise to Big Data which is a way of mining insights from huge amounts
of data, often in an automated way that needs human supervision.
What is governance?
Governance is a change in the role of the state from intervention and control to steering and
coordination (Bevir, 2010)
What questions come out of this convergence for data
- Where do we see the best innovations taking place in the public sector?
- What do governments need to do to control data science and put it to good use?
- What role do/should tech companies play in governance?
- Are all citizens getting equal benefits from data science?
Paper: optimistic or pessimistic about what technology has done for us?
What kind of impact does technology have?
Techno optimism
- A result of fast-moving field
- More and bigger data gives us more knowledge
- Changes will be substantial and will transform government for the better
Policy pessimism
- A result of slow-moving field
- Data quality is poor, and the policy translation process is what matters
- Digital technology is neither good or bad in itself, but its naivety and instability might do
more harm than good. (disruption is causes to society might do more harm than good)
, Technological optimism?
Darrel West
- Author of the “evolution of e-government” concept.
- As human society gets more and more technological and the impacts are only going to
be magnified.
- We know, for example, what impact the printing press had and what impact television
had.
- If we use it properly, we already know what kind of benefits technology will give us.
Ex. Amazon: Pleased in progress: analogue information non-manipulable non-reusable -> digital
information diversity of products and services -> user generated digital information personalised
diversity of products and services algorithms (How amazon changed)
Phases:
- Billboard phase (websites and email)
- Partial service delivery (pay parking, buy library card)
- Portal stage (digital ID systems)
- Interactive democracy (deliberation and co-production)
Policy pessimism
Shoshana Zuboff
- Author of book “surveillance capitalism” 2019
- Data is generally owned and exploited by platform companies that use the data to
manipulate rather than to enhance society and policymaking
- We might consume more data but if that data is biased and designed to help us buy
products or ideas then it will just make our democracies poorer.
- Tech has taken away our choices.
Conclusions
- Digitalisation has led to an explosion in digital data and to data science, which is a
collection of techniques that try to turn data into knowledge and organisational value
- Governance matters here because data management and data science needs regulation
and collective decision making
- Two main perspectives have emerged to understand these trends: techno-optimism and
policy pessimism
Hoorcollege 2: E-Government: the impact of digital transformation
The remarkable case of e-Estonia (TED talk)
Digitalisation
- Tech skills are strong
- All services are digital
- Cloud computing and the x-road
o X-road = digital backbone to the entire government system, different actors have
access to the same data.
- 844 work years saved annually
Citizen needs
- High degree of trust
o Guarantee privacy (no unauthorized views of citizen’s data)
- First country to use e-residency
- First country to use e-voting
- Once only principle (can only ask for the same data once)
- Among the best protection of cyber attacks
Goal: increasing bureaucracy and trust. (citizen centric) (citizen satisfaction)
Hoorcollege 1: Introduction to Digitalisation and Governance
Data savvy? Video by Jordan Morrow
- “Everyone needs to be comfortable with data to be able to succeed in the Fourth
Industrial Revolution”
Fourth Industrial Revolution: Four phases of industrial revolution:
- 1700: steam trains
- 1800: creation of electricity
- 1970/1980: computer revolution
- 2000: internet
Comfortable with data in 3 aspects:
- Reading data
- Working with data
- Analysing data
Things to master:
- Curiosity (be willing to ask questions to understand the data better)
- Creativity (laptop won’t buy itself, creative in how you use the data)
Digital technologies
What are the ‘hot’ technologies in today’s public policy and discussion?
- Large language models (drive AI, because they have learned to assess textual data and
process that data and give a certain output to for example ChatGPT)
o Videos and images by AI (Zohra) generative AI for images and videos.
- Blockchain (in things like Crypto)
- Bodycams (police)
- Robots (physical human-like technologies)
- Biometrics (information in fingerprints, irises)
- Sensors (speaker system, NS toegangspoortjes)
Hit or miss? (could we do without them, yes or no?)
- MX3D bridge in Amsterdam: bridge with no regular maintenance with a build-in smart
system
- Digital twins in healthcare: take patient data and make a digital twin, a simulation of
someone’s physical characteristics.
- Use of fraud detection algorithms: try and predict if it is likely to be fraudulent
- Facial recognition in policing: match people to a database and find security threats
,Substitute, replace, or transform? (Lember, 2018)
Flop
- The technology won’t work or won’t get much use
- Google Class, hoverboard
Substitute
- The technology brings new tools to the table that complement what is already being
done
- Social media
Replace
- The technology rivals existing technologies and approaches to the extend that the
alternatives disappear
- Mobile phones,
Transform
- The technology offers something new that wasn’t available before
- Smart watches, hackathons
What are digital and digitalisation?
Digitalisation is a digital transformation that “includes a number of interconnected and evolving
technologies” (OECD)
- Digital technologies are often contrasted with analogue technologies:
- Benefits of digital:
o Can be stored for longer and more cheaply (on very small micro-chips)
o Can be reused and combined in new forms (code reused to make new apps)
o Possible to share at speed, to multiple devices over long distances on the
Internet
= much more powerful
Digitalisation and information burden
Each day:
- 500 million tweets
- 294 billion emails
- 4 million gigabytes of Facebook data
- 65 billion WhatsApp messages
,Digitalisation and information burden
- Data is growing and becoming more burdensome.
59 times increase each year = 463 exabytes of data created everyday by 2025
- Moore’s law: 2-fold increase every 2 years (approximately)
In about 150 years = more energy than the globe is currently able to produce for all (digital)
human activities
The rise of Big Data and data science
“Data science is a set of fundamental principles that support and guide the principled extraction
of information and knowledge from data” (Provost and Fawcett, 2013)
- Made possible by growth of data and digitalization
E.g., digital patient records in a hospital
- Digitizing records
- Storing in the Cloud
E.g., modelling outcomes or automating decisions in a hospital
- Designing algorithms to prioritise types of patients
- Linking types of data (e.g., treatments and budgeting or personnel needs)
- Researching hidden patterns in treatment
Recap
- Digitalisation and data have grown rapidly due to new technologies
- Digitalisation is the growing use of such technologies and their (global) interconnectivity.
- Digital technologies have real impacts: they can substitute, replace or transform
- Digitalisation gave rise to Big Data which is a way of mining insights from huge amounts
of data, often in an automated way that needs human supervision.
What is governance?
Governance is a change in the role of the state from intervention and control to steering and
coordination (Bevir, 2010)
What questions come out of this convergence for data
- Where do we see the best innovations taking place in the public sector?
- What do governments need to do to control data science and put it to good use?
- What role do/should tech companies play in governance?
- Are all citizens getting equal benefits from data science?
Paper: optimistic or pessimistic about what technology has done for us?
What kind of impact does technology have?
Techno optimism
- A result of fast-moving field
- More and bigger data gives us more knowledge
- Changes will be substantial and will transform government for the better
Policy pessimism
- A result of slow-moving field
- Data quality is poor, and the policy translation process is what matters
- Digital technology is neither good or bad in itself, but its naivety and instability might do
more harm than good. (disruption is causes to society might do more harm than good)
, Technological optimism?
Darrel West
- Author of the “evolution of e-government” concept.
- As human society gets more and more technological and the impacts are only going to
be magnified.
- We know, for example, what impact the printing press had and what impact television
had.
- If we use it properly, we already know what kind of benefits technology will give us.
Ex. Amazon: Pleased in progress: analogue information non-manipulable non-reusable -> digital
information diversity of products and services -> user generated digital information personalised
diversity of products and services algorithms (How amazon changed)
Phases:
- Billboard phase (websites and email)
- Partial service delivery (pay parking, buy library card)
- Portal stage (digital ID systems)
- Interactive democracy (deliberation and co-production)
Policy pessimism
Shoshana Zuboff
- Author of book “surveillance capitalism” 2019
- Data is generally owned and exploited by platform companies that use the data to
manipulate rather than to enhance society and policymaking
- We might consume more data but if that data is biased and designed to help us buy
products or ideas then it will just make our democracies poorer.
- Tech has taken away our choices.
Conclusions
- Digitalisation has led to an explosion in digital data and to data science, which is a
collection of techniques that try to turn data into knowledge and organisational value
- Governance matters here because data management and data science needs regulation
and collective decision making
- Two main perspectives have emerged to understand these trends: techno-optimism and
policy pessimism
Hoorcollege 2: E-Government: the impact of digital transformation
The remarkable case of e-Estonia (TED talk)
Digitalisation
- Tech skills are strong
- All services are digital
- Cloud computing and the x-road
o X-road = digital backbone to the entire government system, different actors have
access to the same data.
- 844 work years saved annually
Citizen needs
- High degree of trust
o Guarantee privacy (no unauthorized views of citizen’s data)
- First country to use e-residency
- First country to use e-voting
- Once only principle (can only ask for the same data once)
- Among the best protection of cyber attacks
Goal: increasing bureaucracy and trust. (citizen centric) (citizen satisfaction)
