Phuc Nguyen, Mark Considine, Fadillah Putra, Anwar Sanusi
The worldwide movement toward digitisation in public service delivery presents a range of opportunities and risks. The potential benefits include improved efficiency, more consistent service delivery decisions and enhanced responsiveness to citizens' demand. The potential risks range from challenges in data use and privacy, to uneven service accessibility and the costly ICT investment required for digitisation. Researchers have begun to assess this important movement and its impacts. There remains a lack of in-depth understanding of digitisation of public service delivery in developing countries. We aim to address that gap by examining a fully online welfare-to-work programme in a developing country, that is Indonesia's Pre-employment Card Program. Using data collected from semi-structured interviews with policymakers and service providers, we found evidence that digitalisation contributed to the programme's efficiency and effectiveness via, for example, automated registration processes and quick and revisable rollout. Its implementation however was not without challenges such as a digital divide among users and some technical problems. Indonesia's experiences with this fully digital programme suggest that a developing country, despite limited financial and administrative capacity, can embark on the digitalisation journey to improve their public service provision, even during the time of crisis. © 2024 The Author(s). Australian Journal of Social Issues published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Australian Social Policy Association.
La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia; University of Brawijaya, Kota Malang, Indonesia; Ministry of Manpower, Jakarta, Indonesia
