It was a wonderful privilege for my first experience of completing a Digital Government Review to take place at the invitation of the government of Panama and under João’s excellent leadership.
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What’s the TL;DR?
Digital Government Reviews give us an opportunity to get under the skin of the digital government practices of a country. We send out a survey to every government agency, we use the material that countries submit for the Digital Government Index, and we spend a week interviewing (with country peers) as many government agencies as possible.
The whole process is quite intense but they offer a fascinating snapshot of what’s happening in a country. It was also great to spend the week on mission with Barbara and João as well as the peers of Frank (from Belgium), Kareen (from Chile) and Cristina (from Spain) to gain their insight and wisdom from their different backgrounds. We were also so well hosted by Irvin and his team at the National Authority for Government Innovation (AIG) in Panama.
In this case the focus for Panama was on governance, capabilities, data and services. I was asked to focus on data and services (chapters 3 and 4 of the review).
We recognised that Panama has long championed the value of digital government and built some good foundations and this sets up a lot of opportunities for future development, if they can build the cross-government momentum to collaborate and work together. We made a series of recommendations that I’ll include below but if you want to really understand the state of digital in Panama you should probably read the whole thing.
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