GX Talks - Leadership Dialogues with Jaideep Prabhu, Aleeya Velji, Anir Chowdhury, Ryan Androsoff and Ian Khan

The year 2020 has been a crucible for governments, for services they provide, public servants they employ, policies they create and technologies they rely on. Moving out of the year, the public sector has realized it is much more capable to react quickly, adapt, and scale using the tools that were not available a decade ago. Digitization has enabled governments to get closer to citizens and to better understand their needs. But where do we go from here? How will government services shape over the next decade? What do civil servants and leaders need to go beyond pure service design and delivery to achieve predictive and anticipatory government? 

To reflect upon this and more, GX Talks brought together four illustrious global thought leaders and practitioners to talk about what they have done, lessons they have learnt, and how they see public service delivery evolving in the next decade. This special session was the second edition of the Leadership Dialogues series and was conducted in collaboration with the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK. The knowledge partners for this session were Futuracy and Dinar Standard.

The session was titled: "Government services - About resilience and trust & digital and predictive". Tech Futurist Ian Khan moderated the conversation between Aleeya Velji, an innovation specialist from Canada; Anir Chowdhury, Cabinet Office Policy Advisor from Bangladesh; Jaideep Prabhu, author and professor at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Ryan Androsoff, Director of Digital Leadership at Institute on Governance and former co-founder of Canadian Digital Service. The session saw brief presentations by the speakers, as given below, followed by a panel discussion.

• Aleeya Velji: Mission driven policy making - The Building Blocks
• Anir Chowdhury: Repurpose, Collaborate and Hack - The Story of Digital Bangladesh is hardly digital
• Jaideep Prabhu: How Should a Government Be? The New Levers of State Power
• Ryan Androsoff: Lessons learned from a decade of digital transformation in Canada

In this section, you can watch the entire session, see the highlights and read the session summary report. 

GX Talks is a dialogue series created and hosted by the Prime Minister’s Office of the UAE. GX Talks unites government decision-makers, global practitioners and renowned innovators to re-examine and re-define government experience for the future. Watch more talks at GxTalks.com.

Selected Quotes:

• “From citizens’ perspective, governments should look like a platform in their pocket.” - Anir Chowdhury
• “We need inter-organizational governance to work better across the silos in government, and digitalization can help us get there.” - Aleeya Velji
• “If we are moving to a more individualized and customized service delivery for citizens, then the traditional sense of how governments work will not make sense in that world.” - Ryan Androsoff
• “That balance between effectiveness, efficiency and freedom is precisely the challenge that I take up in the book (How Should A Government Be?).” - Jaideep Prabhu

How to Watch?

Watch the full session here.

 

Watch the session highlights here.

 

Learn more about the future of government service delivery on GX.ae

Speaker Profiles:

Aleeya Velji is a Senior Specialist Innovation and Research, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Edmonton; formerly Strategic Design and Innovation, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Aleeya understands systems and blends together interdisciplinary skills sets to support organizational, social, and financial innovation. She has worked across all 3 levels of governments, and is now based within a crown corporation in Canada, exploring sustainable investment in the housing space. She aims to build a smarter government that is effectively equipped to solve intersectional problems. 

Anir Chowdhury is the Policy Advisor of the a2i Programmme of the ICT Division and the Cabinet Division of the Government of Bangladesh supported by the UNDP. In this capacity, he leads the formation of a whole-of-society innovation ecosystem in Bangladesh through massive technology deployment, extensive capacity development, integrated policy formulation, whole-of-government institutional reform, and an Innovation Fund. His work on innovation in public service has developed interesting and replicable models of service delivery decentralization, public-private partnerships, and transformation of a traditional bureaucracy into a forward-looking, citizen-centric service provider. He is a regular speaker in international conferences on public service innovation and reform, digital financial inclusion, civil registration and digital identity management, SDGs, youth and community empowerment, educational transformation, public-private partnerships, and South-South Cooperation.
 
He is a member of the Prime Minister’s National Digital Task Force, Education Minister’s National ICT in Education Task Force, UNESCAP Regional Steering Group for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS), Co-Founder and Board Member of South-South Network for Public Service Innovation (SSN4PSI) and Co-Founder of South-Asia Civil Registration Network (CR8). He co-founded several software and service companies and non-profit organizations in the US and Bangladesh. Anir graduated magna cum laude in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Brown University and did post-graduate work on management, marketing, and education reform in Harvard, Columbia, and Boston Universities.

Jaideep Prabhu is Professor of Marketing, Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise, and Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. 

He has published in and is on the editorial board of leading journals such as the Journal of Marketing. He has appeared on BBC News24, BBC Radio 4 and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and has been profiled in BusinessWeek, BBC World Service, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, The New York Times and The Times. He has consulted with executives from Bertelsmann, Barclays, BP, BRAC, BT, GE, IBM, ING Bank, M&S, the NHS, Pearson, Roche, Shell, Siemens, Unilever and Vodafone. 

He is the co-author of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, described by The Economist as “the most comprehensive book yet” on the subject of frugal innovation. His 2015 book Frugal Innovation: How to do Better with Less won the CMI’s Management Book of the Year Award 2016. His most recent book How Should a Government Be: The New Levers of State Power was published in February 2021.

Ryan Androsoff is an international expert on digital government and an enthusiastic advocate for the use of digital technology and user-centred design approaches. With a passion for public sector entrepreneurship, Ryan has two decades of experience working with a variety of government and international organizations in Canada, the United States, and Europe. An experienced and dynamic presenter, Ryan has delivered hundreds of presentations over the past decade on various aspects of digital transformation and public sector innovation to audiences ranging from senior executive committees, to keynote addresses at conferences, to live webinar training sessions. Currently Ryan has partnered with the Institute on Governance to lead their Digital Executive Leadership Program for public sector executives, and is serving as a consultant for government organizations to advise on their digital transformation efforts. 

Previously, Ryan was a Co-Founder of the Canadian Digital Service, a startup organization within the Canadian government launched in 2017 with the mission of helping government design, prototype, and build better digital services. From 2010-16 he had served as Senior Policy Advisor on a variety of digital government initiatives in the Government of Canada's Treasury Board Secretariat, and in 2015 took on a one-year assignment with the OECD's digital government team in Paris, France. Ryan is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he earned a Master in Public Policy degree, with research focused on the impacts for governments of new digital technologies. 

Ian Khan is a CNN featured Technology Futurist, 3 times TEDx Speaker, Director of the highly acclaimed documentary “Blockchain City”, “GX Now” and “AI the Next Frontier”; Bestselling author of “7 Axioms of Value Creation”, and contributor to many publications including McGraw Hill,
Forbes, Entrepreneur.

Download the session report below. Please contact Chetan Choudhury for more details.