Shashi Raghunandan, CEO of Oaken and also a hobby painter and dog lover, is making a mark in the digital public infrastructure (DPI) space. In 2014, McKinsey forecasted over $1 trillion annual revenue from government digitization. Despite this potential, challenges such as high implementation costs, skill upgrading efforts, and citizen buy-in campaigns impede the full realization of digitization benefits. Raghunandan believes the advent of DPI will change this landscape by providing a shared means to enable digital transformation and improve public service delivery at scale.
The United Nations Development Programme outlines three pillars of DPI – open standards for public interest, technology driving better governance, and supporting reusability across multiple sectors. One typical DPI use case is government-to-person (G2P) payments, which combines digital public goods like functional IDs, beneficiary management systems, real-time payment switches, and orchestration tools. However, challenges such as capacity building and governance on existing DPIs, developing new DPIs for various government functions, and establishing connective tissue to complement the DPI create hurdles that need to be overcome for DPIs to reach their full potential.
To unlock the benefits of DPIs, partnerships between the public and private sectors are essential. Private sector engagement beyond philanthropy can help drive thought leadership, development of new DPIs, and maintenance. Investment earmarked for the adoption of DPIs is crucial to creating a market and incentivizing governments to consider DPIs in their operations. Building the connective tissue that complements DPIs involves investments in public and private sector partnerships to implement, innovate, and develop technologies that work in tandem with DPIs.
Business leaders need to prioritize engagement in building the connective tissue for DPIs. Businesses that deploy DPIs must find partners that can help maintain the infrastructure, engage with government bodies and academic institutions for research, and contribute to community building. As DPIs offer a technology-driven approach to achieve better outcomes and scale, business leaders will need to allocate capital and resources for long-term results rather than focusing solely on quarterly gains. Business leaders must evaluate the strategic role they wish to play in driving DPI adoption on a country-by-country basis to deliver successful outcomes for their organization.
