I am María Isabel Mejía, Senior Executive of the Directorate of Digital Innovation of the State, and today we are going to talk about digital government.

Even if you don't believe it, governments in the region have been working on their digital government initiatives for 20 years. But what do we understand by digital government? Digital government is the possibility for the government to make use of information and communication technologies to interact with citizens and businesses.

Initially, these strategies focused on building the websites of state entities—mainly informative websites. Later, the focus shifted to building more interactive mechanisms, such as systems for petitions, complaints, and claims, so that citizens could begin to interact with the state through digital channels. Finally, the goal became to digitize the processes and services that citizens need throughout their lives—for example, renewing a driver's license, requesting a certificate or permit, paying taxes, creating a business. The idea is that all those services and procedures can be carried out digitally, and this has been the main focus of digital government strategies for the past 20 years.

The big challenge now is to finish digitizing the procedures and services offered by the region's governments. The most advanced country in digital government in the region is Uruguay—they have managed to digitize 96 to 98% of their procedures. Why not 100%? Because new procedures sometimes appear. Other countries, however, are much further behind. So the main challenge is to complete the digitization process, but also to improve the quality of existing services and their integration.

Why? Because many of these digital procedures were designed internally by government entities without considering what the citizen actually needed. So, when citizens go to use them, they find them hard to use, the platform doesn’t work well, or it's unclear how to use it. This means we need to improve the user experience—make it easier and more satisfying for citizens to interact with digital government services.

We also need better integration. Since many entities digitized their processes independently, there are now thousands of websites. This mirrors the old problem where a citizen didn’t know which physical office to go to—now they don’t know which website to use. Governments are now working on building unified portals that act as a single entry point for citizens and businesses to interact with the state digitally.

Another focus is on promoting the use of these digital services. Often, services are already available online, but people don’t even know they exist. So they continue to wait in lines at government offices. The big challenge is to increase usage by both citizens and businesses.

For 20 years, governments mostly worked alone, but now the problems are more complex and many public entities lack the specialized talent needed to carry out digital government strategies—especially with the rise of emerging technologies from the Fourth Industrial Revolution like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data and analytics, blockchain, etc. The state lacks this knowledge and the specialized talent to take advantage of the massive amounts of data that could help it make better decisions.

This task can’t be done by the state alone. It needs to strengthen the digital ecosystem and build a culture of innovation and experimentation where citizens are involved. It’s a great step forward to design digital services with input from the people who will actually use them. There is a growing trend to create digital innovation labs and citizen labs, where citizens help design services to improve their user experience.

Since the public sector often lacks this talent, there is a great opportunity to collaborate with small businesses or startups that are growing quickly and have this expertise—people who know about data analytics, user interface design, agile development methods, artificial intelligence, blockchain solutions, and more. The state can hire these startups (known as GovTech) to develop digital solutions for public problems. So the current recommendation for countries is: don’t work alone. Involve citizens and the digital ecosystem to create a culture of innovation, experimentation, and agile development.

Governments today face serious challenges—major public problems that haven’t been solved yet, like urban mobility, security in big cities, school dropout rates, and more. At the same time, the Fourth Industrial Revolution brings enormous opportunities to help solve these problems. There is an abundance of data—structured and unstructured—about what people do online, what they buy, how they move around cities, what they like. This data, combined with state data, now comes in various formats: text, video, audio, etc. And there are technologies available to analyze all of it.

For example, artificial intelligence can help understand problems, predict trends, and even recommend public policies. Combining Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies with data can help the public sector make better decisions, understand complex problems, design better services, and even offer personalized recommendations—just like private companies do—so the government can offer relevant, timely services to citizens.

These technologies also help improve internal efficiency in the public sector. Many public servants do repetitive tasks that can now be supported by artificial intelligence software, becoming a helpful assistant in daily work.

There’s a lot of talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s impact on jobs. Some studies say many jobs will be lost to AI, while others say only certain tasks will be automated—not entire jobs—and that many new jobs will be created. In the public sector, jobs will definitely be affected. Unfortunately, according to a study by CAF, countries in the region haven’t yet developed strategies to mitigate this impact in public employment.

The call is to define strategies to improve skills and develop the new abilities that public servants will need for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The goal is to make these technologies a complement, not a replacement, for public employees. Strategies are also needed to attract and retain the specialized talent the public sector now requires.

CAF’s digital innovation strategy aims to support the governments of the region by helping them use data and new technologies to become more agile, closer to citizens, more participatory, and better at delivering public services. Ultimately, the goal is to improve people’s quality of life with better services and decisions backed by data and technology.

Personally, I love the work I do at CAF. I’m a systems engineer, and for much of my career, I worked as a public servant—mainly in Colombia, as you can tell from my accent. Now at CAF, I can extend the impact of my work to the entire Latin American and Caribbean region. That’s something I really enjoy—having a broader reach.

Also, I get to apply the experience I already had and continue learning every day. In this field, you never stop learning—it’s amazing. Professionally, it’s a spectacular opportunity. And through our work in the Directorate of Digital Innovation of the State, we are helping governments by giving them tools, data, and technology to address the big structural problems our countries still face and that we must solve.