ICTworks

I am Matt Haikin, an experienced ICT4D and Digital Transformation (DX) consultant.  I am looking forward to attending the Shift the Power Summit on December 5-7, in Bogota, Colombia, to explore how the Shifting the Power agenda can come together with my own experience in digital transformation – a power perspective is something I have long thought is often missing from DX work.

The goals of these two very different movements are both laudable:

• Digital Transformation: Improved access to and effective delivery of digital services
• Shift The Power: Overturning unequal digital power asymmetries

However, at best they operate in silos, side-by-side, while at times they seem to be actively working against each other.  Could we re-conceive things so the movements are brought together in a way that amplifies both goals and take advantage of digital technologies to fundamentally change unequal power structures?

Changing power structures is notoriously difficult, those with power often do not relinquish it easily, and we need to use every tool at our disposal to help.  Beyond traditional routes such as influencing and advocacy work, might Digital Transformation be an overlooked tool?

Shifting the Power

Power imbalances in the aid/development sector are well-known – between richer and poorer countries (Global North/South), between donors and implementers, between international ‘experts’ and local communities, the influence of multinational capital and other vested interests, overt or internalised racism, missing voices of affected communities etc.  The #ShiftThePower movement is a sector-wide response to this:

“A move away from top-down systems of international development towards people-based development . . . a people-led paradigm that shifts power closer to the ground . . . a call for new behaviours, mindsets and ways of working . . . new interactions are power neutral, those we seek to “help” have more power than they are given credit for . . . it is the job of institutions that are serious about real, lasting change to know when to give up their own power.”

[abbreviated  #ShiftThePower definition from GFCF]

And yet… changes in power dynamics caused by Digital Transformation processes are often absent from these Shifting Power conversations.

Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation (DX) refers to the ongoing digitalisation of almost all aspects of humanitarian aid and development; although, perhaps unhelpfully, it seems to mean different things to different organisations – spanning internal organisational processes and IT systems, to the use of digital in external programming work with communities – what some of us still refer to as ICT4D or Digital Development.

The vast majority of INGOs, bi-laterals, donors and host-country governments have either just started, or are about to start, Digital Transformation journeys, which tend to touch on every part of an organisation, every department within a government.  This creates a huge potential opportunity for power changes (whether positive or negative).

And yet… most of this work takes place without a focus on or an understanding of the power dynamics it is influencing, or the potential to harness such changes to overturn inequitable power asymmetries (or exacerbate them!).

Institutional Change through Digital Transformation

It is generally understood that, when we digitalise systems, we change power structures – this is true in all sectors (whether exacerbating or overturning asymmetrical power relations between workers and companies; by including and excluding different populations through choices of data collection platforms; or by creating or removing ‘workarounds’ to rigidly defined processes…)

Drawing a parallel with the typology from my 2016 work Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement: A Practical Guide, I see two types of institutional context where this digital power dynamic feels particularly impactful; each with potentially different routes to achieving positive impact:

• Institutions already committed to changing existing power dynamics

For those already interested in making positive changes to their power structures; harnessing the changes to power dynamics that come with digitalisation is a valuable tool to help move the needle: to entrench positive changes in the revised processes and structures that accompany digitalisation (or at the very least, to avoid unintentionally undermining changes being sought elsewhere)

For this group, it is relatively easy to envisage some form of advisory function – either directly to the relevant institutions, or indirectly via the many consultancies that already offer Digital Transformation advice.

• Institutions resistant to changing existing power dynamic

This group is, of course, harder, but due to the way Digital Transformation work touches every part of an institution’s structure, and often causes changes that were not intended by those in power (and sometimes not even understood by them), in certain circumstances perhaps DX could be co-opted to initiate or support positive changes somewhat under the radar of those in power who might be resistant to such change.

Digital Transformation as a tool for Shifting the Power

Can Digital Transformation be undertaken in ways that ensure the structural power changes it brings about, happen in favour of the poor – in ways that reduce inequality, reduce digital dependencies, give power to affected communities, to civil society and Southern democratic institutions, instead of to multi-national capital and Northern-based institutions?

Can this help to ensure that important decisions about technologies are made by those as close to the people affected by those decisions as possible?

Here are a couple of illustrations relevant to development work:

• Choosing technology partners

Choices of technology are typically based on ‘sensible’ factors such as scalability, reliability and cost; ignoring the fact that certain options can be of enormous benefit to local technology sectors while others effectively exclude them.

For example, choosing to use reusable building blocks that a local technology partner can rapidly tailor to local community needs . . . vs. rolling out the same multi-national tool globally because it is easier for the IT team to service.

Such choices can help or hinder country technology industries to move away from an emerging ‘digital dependency’.

• Creating new communication channels

Analog citizen engagement communication routes are often replaced with “efficient” one-to-one forms of digital communication such as SMS.  However, sometimes the previous in-person routes were “many-to-one” communications.

These offered a way for communities to come together with a shared voice to attempt to influence their local (at times corrupt) representatives.  The newer, more efficient mechanisms can remove this shared voice leaving individual citizens to fight their battles alone.  Might a different less ‘efficient’ choice of technology amplify these shared community voices instead of silencing them?

Four ideas that could help #ShiftThePower:

Bringing the concepts above together, here are four ideas that might help us harness the power of digital transformation as a new tool in the fight to #ShiftThePower:

1.  Bring a power lens to Digital Transformation

If we were going to do DX differently and include a Shifting the Power lens, what would be different? To understand this, it helps to first consider what are some of the typical recommendations for aid and development institutions on a digital transformation journey.

In my previous DX consulting work (for Oxfam, FHI 360, Chemonics, Practical Action and UNICEF), a number of common factors emerged, some of which are highlighted in the table below:

Would these recommendations differ with a Shifting the Power lens – do they need tweaking or should we throw out what we think we know and start over? I will be publishing an article exploring this soon – sign up to be kept informed.

2. Move from DX to DX4D (Digital Transformation for Development)

Richard Heeks and his team at the University of Manchester have been bringing a more robust academic lens to this and questioning what Digital Transformation can learn from Transformation Studies and by more clearly putting ‘development’ as its goal. There is a series of blogs on their current thinking:

• Development Transformation as the Goal for Digital Transformation
• Organisations Lead Digital Transformation for Development: So What?
• 13 Principles for DX4D Research and Consulting
• Lessons from Transformation Studies for DX4D
• Three Perspectives on Development as Transformation: Implications for DX4D

As is so often the case, the challenge here for the practitioner community is how do we go about translating these academic insights into something actionable?

3.    Integrate power dynamics into the work of DX consultants and advisers

While most development actors are either on a DX journey, or about to start on one; few really understand what is needed, so they are seeking external advice and support from an emerging cohort of individuals and organisations with DX expertise.

These range from individual consultants and all the usual private sector consultancies, specialist organisations such as the Digital Impact Alliance, Public Digital, the Blavatnik School of Government, as well as specific units within larger aid organisations such as UNICEF and the World Bank.

Could these intermediaries be influenced to embrace a #ShiftThePower agenda into their models and how might incorporating this lens into their existing Digital Transformation models change the advice and support they offer?

4.   Could digitalisation be a ‘trojan horse’ for shifting power . . ?

Key DX decisions are typically made by software-engineers, database administrators, systems architects, product designers and IT project managers, far removed from the users of their products and even further from wider communities impacted; often without understanding the social impact and changes to power relations that might occur.

If we combine these inevitable changes in power that come with the digitalisation of systems, with the fact that digitalisation tends to touch every aspect of an institution, every department, and that often those in power don’t really understand technology and so tend to look the other way and leave the techies to get on with it…  Does this offer a window of opportunity to steer DX work in a way that more intentionally creates positive changes to power dynamics?

To influence these actors, it is much harder to picture how in reality it might be possible to identify funding, partners, and support to effectively use ICT to sneak positive power changes past the gatekeepers trying to prevent this happening.

Perhaps by seeking to affect change via the ‘back door’ of the techies, developers and product designers who currently wield significant power over the changes that emerge from new digital systems. But how could we go about this in reality – worth consideration!?

What do you think?

These are just some early ideas, what else could we explore to combine the goals of Shifting the Power with the goals of Digital Transformation?

Given my experience, this thinking starts from Digital Transformation and looks to bring #ShiftThePower into this… What would it look like instead to start with the latest thinking around Shifting the Power and add in a Digital Transformation lens to see what new opportunities that might enable?

I shall be hosting a conversation on some of these ideas at the Shift the Power Summit in Bogota.

• If you will also be there, drop me a line and let’s have a coffee and a chat
• If you have ideas on this subject, please leave reflections in the comments below – I’d love to bring these in to the conversations at the Summit
• If you want to hear what emerges from the Summit conversations, let me know and I can host a Tech Salon to bring the conversation to a wider audience.