Other developing countries do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to digital governance

This one-way conversation started a revolution in communication that is still going strong, with constant improvements expanding the geographic and spatial boundaries within which our conversations take place.

Although the first conversations took place between devices connected together by a single wire, as more and more households acquired these new-fangled devices, the complexity of connecting every new telephone to every other forced us to invent the telephone switchboard, or central office to which all the telephones were connected so that one call could be transferred to another.

But even that wasn’t enough to serve all the households that wanted to use the new technology. Demand was so great that in the early days of the telecommunications revolution, many homes were often connected in parallel—to the same phone line (colloquially called a “party line”)—meaning that every time a call was made, every phone in that home would ring.

During the telephone conversation, there was nothing to prevent anyone on the party line from picking up the receiver and listening.

The development of telecommunications technologies has always been based on continuous scaling – optimizing the degree to which different elements of the technology stack are shared to achieve greater efficiency.

This became even more evident during the transition from fixed to mobile telephony, when the development of technologies such as FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access) and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) allowed many simultaneous conversations to be carried out in the same radio frequency band, by converting them into data packets and then transmitting them together, separated by time slots or spread over the entire radio wave band.

When the Indian government first allowed the private sector to participate in the mobile telecom industry, it required telecom companies to build their own infrastructure before recruiting subscribers.

This meant that they had to build telecommunications towers in strategic locations within the counties they had licenses for, to ensure that every customer could talk to every other customer, no matter where they were located. And since each county had more than one telecommunications operator, there were many cell towers in the same area from different operators.

The government later liberalized telecommunications regulations to allow passive infrastructure sharing. Multiple operators could now install their radio equipment on the same tower, as long as quality did not suffer.

Regulations continue to liberalise and sharing now also covers active infrastructure such as the antenna, feeder cable, radio access network and transmission system.

Unfortunately, this approach of gradually sharing the core elements of a given technology stack has not been widely adopted across all sectors.

Take digital transformation of management, for example. Much of the investment in this space is in vertically integrated, full-scope solutions designed to address one aspect of management with no expectation that they will integrate with another solution.

The vast majority of identity and payment systems, as well as a number of other basic government services in developed countries, have been built in this way.

According to Gartner, total government spending on information technology in 2023 alone will be over $580 billion. If we break this down by country, we see that almost $500 billion of this amount was spent in developed countries.

This means that the remaining 150 countries, mostly developing ones, had only $80 billion to spend on developing the necessary digital government solutions.

If all these countries adopted the full-stack approach that the developed world has used, there simply wouldn’t be enough money in the world to fund digital governance. If we want to extend the benefits of the ongoing digital transformation to parts of the developing world that are lagging behind, we would need a much more efficient approach.

We need to borrow from our telecom experience and learn how to optimize the use of sharing in the management space. Instead of full-stack solutions, if we can build management solutions from reusable building blocks, we should be able to assemble diverse solutions across multiple sectors at radically lower costs.

This is the only way to bring digital transformation to the countries that need it most to accelerate their development.

Fortunately, we already know how to achieve this.

All of India’s public infrastructure has been built using modular, reusable structural components, and other countries will be able to leverage this experience in their own areas.

However, a first step in this direction would be for funding organisations to commit to only funding digital governance projects that adopt the principle of reuse.

Projects must not develop new technology if other components already exist for the same purpose, or if no such components exist, there must be a commitment that any new components created will be available for reuse.