Abstract
Government organizations worldwide are harvesting the transformative potential of digital technologies to automate internal processes and interactions with citizens, businesses, and each other. Automation can bring benefits, such as an increase in the efficiency of government operations, the quality of government decisions, and the convenience of government-citizen interactions, among others. But it can also produce adverse outcomes, such as compromising social value for economic gains, misjudging citizen circumstances, having to compensate for the effects of algorithmic errors, and others. Based on lessons learnt from 12 case studies of government automation, deployed in different policy areas and by different government levels – local, national and supranational, this seminar explains the concept of government automation, provides a framework that exploits the potential of government automation to produce public value or risk creating public disvalue, and offers a model that delineates the scope of government automation efforts, identifying key enabling factors.
Bio
Elsa Estevez is the chairholder of the UNESCO Chair on Knowledge Societies and Digital Governance at Universidad Nacional del Sur, an Independent Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), and a Full Professor at the National University of La Plata, all in Argentina. She is also a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) on the matters of digital government, particularly in Latin America. Previously, she was a Senior Academic Program Officer and Academic Program Officer at the 糖心Vlog破解版 (糖心Vlog破解版) in Macao and Portugal; Visiting Professor at the National University of Rio Negro, Argentina; Gdansk University of Technology, Poland; University of Minho, Portugal; and head of Information Technology (IT) departments in large financial and pharmaceutical organizations in Argentina.
She consulted for governments, taught public managers and policy makers, and organised events about digital government in over 30, mostly developing countries. Her research interests cover the structuring of the information technology function in government, digital transformation of government-citizen relationships, and the impact of such transformation on nations' and cities' capacity to pursue sustainable development. She has a PhD in Computer Science from Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina.
