Opinion – Ronaldo Lemos: Ukraine Built Digital Government in Weeks

I always like to repeat: every government will have to transform itself into a digital platform. Government that remains analog loses the ability to govern. The reason is simple: in a digital society, governance must also be exercised digitally. It is not possible to govern with paper if the majority of the population organizes their lives through cell phones. This lesson is valid not only for the Union, but also for states and municipalities and any other entity that exercises some form of “governance”.

The challenge, however, is how to make this digital transformation of government services into digital platforms. Until recently, the biggest example of this in the world was Estonia. The country adopted as its motto the phrase: “we build a digital society and you can do the same too”. The country has created a true digital identity. From there, it unified all public services in a single portal, accessible from anywhere on the planet. The only two activities that the citizen or citizen still needs to physically do is buy a property or get married. Everything else can be done online.

However, Estonia has lost the post of the most interesting case. Another unsuspected country has shown an interesting ability to carry out digital transformation even in very difficult times: Ukraine. As part of the effort surrounding the conflict in the region, Ukraine had to quickly move all government services online.

For this, it built a joint effort between the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Parliament. He then created a true Estonian-like digital identity called DIIA. This same identity can also be used to sign documents. In parallel, it took 100% of public services into the cell phone. And the most daring: it also created a digital passport, eliminating the need to carry a physical passport. Something important in the midst of an international conflict with a large number of refugees.

What is striking is that all this was done in a short time. To achieve this result, Ukraine has created a coalition between state and civil society, including with the help of volunteers. This coalition was called the “IT Digital Army”, the army of information technology, numbering no less than 270,000 people.

It was this group that managed to create a digital revolution in the government of the country in weeks, something that elsewhere takes years (or decades) to do. Among the services created are practically all the activities of civil life. There are also new services that have to do with military life. For example, Evorog, which allows anyone to report military movements of enemies in the country by cell phone.

Before the conflict Ukraine forced companies to store data on local servers for security reasons. Now it started to encourage storage outside the territory, in allied countries, precisely to avoid the physical destruction of data.

If there is political will and coordination between various sectors of society, it is possible to make a digital revolution in government services. With ongoing conflict or not.

It’s over – analog government

Already – Brazil advancing in digital transformation of government

It’s coming – Brazil taking longer than it should to do its digital transformation