Innovation in government: Indonesia and Colombia
To become more responsive and effective, governments are experimenting with the way they monitor services (Indonesia) and work with the private sector to expand the economy (Colombia).
February 2012
Source: Public Sector Practice
McKinsey’s public-sector practice, under the editorial leadership of Eric Braverman and Nick Lovegrove, presents a collection of “snapshots” that capture people, places, and strategies now bringing about bold, rapid, broadly applicable management innovations in governments around the world. The series—based on field reporting and on interviews with officials, senior executives, academics, and nongovernmental organizations—examines sustained, significant initiatives to help governments become more effective and responsive rather than endorsing political choices that are not ours to make. We continue the series here with two entries: a report on Indonesia’s experiment with new ways to monitor government services, as well as an update on Colombia’s work with the private sector to expand the economy. Stay tuned for more insights later this year. For more information on innovation in government today, we invite you to visit the Innovation Navigator.
How Indonesia hears the voice of the people
The government is helping citizens on the street to monitor and verify the delivery of state services.
J. R. Maxwell and Adam Schwarz
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Challenge: The Indonesian government must work to alleviate poverty, improve education, implement economic and financial reforms, stem corruption, address climate change, and control infectious disease—all while responding to natural disasters. Delivering these services effectively is essential to maintain confidence in democratic government at a time when the country is just 12 years removed from almost four decades of authoritarian rule. To address the challenges, the world’s fourth-most-populous country (and third-largest democracy) has to communicate in an open, reciprocal way with a heterogeneous citizenry of 245 million people, who speak dozens of local dialects and live in 30 provinces across more than 17,000 islands and three time zones. Emerging solution: In December 2009, the government set up the Presidential Unit for Development Supervision and Control (UKP4) to monitor and verify the delivery of state services with the help of engaged citizens and to break bottlenecks among ministries. UKP4—led by Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, a former energy and mines minister who led Indonesia’s recovery after the 2004 tsunami, and reporting directly to the office of the vice president—provides real-time information on the state of Indonesia’s key economic, infrastructure, health, and poverty indicators. In November 2011, it launched a Web and SMS-accessible platform called the Public Participation Information System (LAPOR, its acronym in Indonesian, means “report”). The new unit lets citizens monitor and verify the delivery of government services in real time. Indonesia’s government also uses this information to improve the way it allocates public resources in areas ranging from education and health to energy and defense. In November 2011, for example, the Ministry of Public Works reallocated resources for its 2012 infrastructure action plan in the Aceh region after a citizen sent UKP4 an SMS text message about a bridge that hadn’t been rebuilt after it collapsed in June 2011. |
LAPOR enables Indonesians to communicate with the national government through brief text messages, e-mails, online comments, or uploaded photos. To use mobile phones1 for these postings, users simply download an app that lets them send SMS text messages directly to UKP4.
When UKP4 receives a message, it conducts a preliminary verification through government databases and open-source research. After determining that further investigation is warranted, the unit posts a summary of the problem on LAPOR’s Web site (so that the public can view and provide additional commentary on it) and notifies the relevant government ministry. Ministry officials then follow up on the problem and may release a public statement explaining what they will do to fix it. Citizens have up to a month to monitor and verify this response. UKP4 refers to the ministry any additional comments received and closes the ticket if it doesn’t get any.
Two days after LAPOR launched, the 22-year-old computer programmer Arkka Dhiratara, one of the 24 members of the UKP4 team, logged on to its Web site at 6 AM. He saw more than 1,500 SMS messages for the unit to review before its next meeting with Indonesia’s vice president. The comments came from citizens all over the country, on topics ranging from traffic congestion in the capital, Jakarta, to the delayed reconstruction of a rural bridge. Dhiratara feels a sense of satisfaction about the decision to leave his successful Internet start-up last year to take a program-management position at UKP4. “Increased information to improve decision making remains key in a country so large and diverse,” he asserts, adding that “all software people like a challenge, and this is the challenge of my life.”
Dhiratara has been working on the SMS part of LAPOR’s Web site for months, and it is getting the response the team had hoped for, although the program wasn’t heavily advertised. He says that the reaction “was really inspirational.” LAPOR got so much attention in the early days “that a police commissioner in Jakarta approached me to find out how it could help him fight crime.” Dhiratara told the commissioner that he would provide a demonstration. “The next day, I sent an SMS to the LAPOR site with a photo of a car, with its license plate clearly visible, driving illegally in the bus lane.”
Indonesia had roughly 220 million mobile-phone subscribers in 2010. The many hundreds of messages the team received during the first few days of live action represented only the beginning of a robust two-way dialogue with citizens. The government acknowledges that given the country’s geographic diversity and large population, it must not only get citizen input on the delivery of services but also actively solicit that information instead of waiting for complaints to arrive. On occasion, UKP4 will even ask people in specific places to report on the way local governments deliver services: after determining which registered mobile-phone users are close enough to investigate, it can send them inquiries via SMS. As of November 2011, the government had agreements with two mobile-phone operators, Indosat and Vodacom, to disseminate these messages.
Last year, for instance, UKP4 asked the people of Fatukanutu, a rural village on the island of Timor, how a water supply system built by the Ministry of Public Works was functioning. It learned that the pipes had been installed, but the water wasn’t flowing. An investigation by UKP4 and the ministry found that a neighboring settlement had shut off the flow of water, believing that there wasn’t enough of it. The government brokered a deal between the two villages ensuring that both received water in a timely manner. This process embodies the important notion of a feedback loop: citizens ask for help, the government acts in response, and the citizens are kept informed, so they can verify the progress made. UKP4, says Dhiratara, “appears to be giving the public in rural areas—in particular, the islands—a voice in what’s happening.”
