2018•10•29     Seoul

Digital Transformation: exploring how emerging technologies meet the needs of a user-driven public sector

Home to almost 10 million people, the capital city of the Republic of Korea, Seoul, has been chosen by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to host the 2018 E-Leaders Meeting. Fittingly so, the country obtained the 3rd place in the e-Government Development Index, just below Denmark and Australia, as part of the UN e-Government Survey 2018 published earlier this year.

A recurring event in the past 10 years, the E-Leaders Meeting aims at bringing together senior digital government decision-makers, the private sector, civil society, and academia, from both member countries and partner countries of the OECD, to share experiences and discuss the challenges and opportunities encountered in applying emerging technologies to make public sectors more responsive and sustainable.

Delfina Soares, the Head of UNU-EGOV, has been invited to join the meeting as part of the academic sector, which is representative of the Operating Unit’s work on the various subjects of EGOV, including the recent participation of the institution researchers in the UN e-Government Survey 2018 with a chapter on local e-Government development.

The agenda for 2018 will examine the institutional, technical, and human capacities necessary to build a coherent, sustainable, and inclusive digitally-enabled state in an age of disruption. The previous three meetings in Tokyo (2015), Tallinn (2016), and Lisbon (2017) have underlined the importance of data-driven public sectors to create more intelligent, sustainable, and inclusive governments. Emerging technologies (such as Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain) have the potential to disrupt and reinvent the relationship between governments and their citizens and businesses. These emerging technologies form part of a Digital Transformation evolutionary trend, which characterises the efforts of governments to use data and technology in better serving the needs of digital economies and digital societies.