Shaping the future of a smart government in ‘E-Mongolia’

In 2020, a comprehensive programme was launched to digitally unify government services and make as many as possible available online. The programme takes much inspiration from the ambitious digitalization project of the Social Service Authority in Mongolia’s Orkhon province, home to the country’s second largest city Erdenet. Anar Bayarsaikhan leads the project and explains what can be gained and which obstacles have to be overcome when bringing digitalization and automation to public administration.

You are managing an extensive digitalization project of the Social Services in Mongolia’s Orkhon province. Can you give us an overview of the project?

Our project started in 2017 and is called Smart & Green Office. We aim to create a highly productive, transparent and innovative way of administrating the government agency which services the highest number of citizens. The project was implemented in three main stages. First, we extensively analysed our organizational operations as well as the needs of our clients. We focused on how to serve the needs of our clients most efficiently and to their satisfaction. Second, we re-engineered the workflow of the Orkhon province’s Social Insurance Authority to create a more productive and transparent process by digital means. We payed special attention to closing gateways for corruption by digitally improving the transparency and accountability of our agency. Third, we gradually implemented these innovations, i.e. by creating a digital archive for our case files, setting up an AI-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and an automated appointment system. Additionally, we digitized as much of our workflow as possible and used the gathered Big Data from various aspects of our project to reliably allocate personnel and funds where they are actually needed. Today, the entire case management is processed digitally. The progress of our costumers’ applications is fully transparent. Everybody can see when, how and by whom decisions were made. I believe, that in times of the Fourth Industrial Revolution public administration should go ahead and not fall behind.

How did you manage to implement a project of this scale with limited resources?

You need to focus on finding the right partners and the right people and commit them to a shared vision. It was crucial for our success that we knew exactly what we wanted – from the first stages of conceptualizing the project to its actual outcomes. Early on, we reached out to key stakeholders and got them onboard. They soon realized that each of them would benefit from the project in a different way. For instance, the central government saves money if we achieve the same outcomes as earlier with less time and personnel involved. Clients benefit from faster processing of their applications and the near elimination of corruption. This saves a lot of time and unnecessary hustles. And the society as a whole benefits from a more targeted deployment of social services that eliminates redundant or obsolete payments to recipients who might not be entitled to them and would have slipped through our old paper-based system.