Digital Strategy Design Lab (DSDL)
Accelerating the digital transformation for effective e-government implementation in Bangladesh
Challenges
Before the implementation of the Digital Strategy Design Lab (DSDL) project, most goverment initiatives in Bangladesh happened on a silo, ad-hoc basis, without standard approaches and methodologies. Government officers faced challenges of adaptability and ownership in the digital service delivery process and were confined to traditional service delivery practices. That often meant service recipients encountered difficulty in accessing government services, and were left out of the service delivery and quality improvement processes. Manual services were also not properly analyzed for digital designing and development and government agencies had inadequate digitization capacity with skilled IT human resources and a lack of proper coordination with the private sector.
Towards a Solution
Launched in 2017, the Digital Strategy Design Lab (DSDL) aimed to support the Government of Bangladesh in achieving its mandate to implement Vision 2021: Digital Bangladesh. Today, DSDL continues to support the achievement Vision 2041: Smart Bangladesh, an ambitious socioeconomic plan to support the country's transformation into a developed nation by 2041.
Consisting of a 6-7-day resident workshop at each ministry and division of the government of Bangladesh, DSDL has emerged as an innovative, comprehensive, and effective methodology for the digital transformation of government services. The implementation of the initiative begins with an initial analysis of the service of the concerned government agencies, with their subsequent inclusion in a specific service grouping. Each group consists of one team leader from Deputy Secretary/Joint Secretary/Director level, two domain experts who have the knowledge of the relevant services, one IT expert, two service recipients, and one Digital Service analyst or a resource person from a2i. DSDL then supports government organizations in analyzing, designing, and plannning the digital transformation journey with the active participation of the ministries, relevant authorities, stakeholders, service recipients, decision-makers, and technology experts.
To date, 30 ministries, and 150+ govt. service delivery organizations applied this methodology for digitizing 1600+ services – i.e. more than 500+ e-Gov applications complying with the Integrated Service Delivery Platform (ISDP) architecture. DSDL is one of the most popular digitilization methods among ministries of Bangladesh, and runs as a central unit for digital transformation of Government organizations in Bangladesh. The programme has also improved the capacities of government officials to perform manual service analysis, digital service design, and administering digital systems has risen, reducing total time, cost, and visit to avail public services.
Atesting the replicability and adaptability of the DSDL methodology, a2i has recently utilized South-South cooperation to provide digitization support to the Governments of Fiji and the Philippines, and is presently working on the same lines with the Governments of Cambodia, Ghana and Somalia.
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