 So we will move on. A slight change of tack but very related. We're going to talk about enabling government architecture and services in low resource settings with perspectives from the International Telecommunications Union, ITU and the open group. And we were delighted back in November last year, I think it was that we signed an MOU with the ITU to work on this exact topic. And we've been doing that through our government enterprise architecture work group. And you're going to hear from two of the main champions of that group right now. The first is Hani Eskandar, who's the senior coordinator of digital services at the ITU. Hani is involved in providing assistance to several developing countries by advising on e-applications, strategies and policies, assisting in implementing technical cooperation projects in areas of digital health, agriculture, governance and education. He's leading several collaborative initiatives on ICT4D with the WHO, FAO and UNESCO. And in addition to the development of several guidelines and best practice reports on e-applications. So warm welcome Hani. Joined by my colleague, Dr. Parab Sahar is the chief architect South Asia for the open group and president of the Association of Enterprise Architects for India. Dr. Sahar has been identified as a thought leader by IBM Smart City Connect and featured by Forbes Magazine. A Metine NEGD senior lead expert in enterprise architecture and a visiting professor of digital architecture at the Indian Institute of Management. Dr. Sahar advises various ministries and states in India on matters pertaining to government-wide architecture initiatives. So a warm welcome from the open group, please to Parab Sahar and Hani Eskandar. Over to you gentlemen. I know you're both there. Thank you, Steve. I hope I'm audible and good morning. Good evening to all of you. And both me and Hani are very happy to be doing this short presentation, which is intended to provide you all a summary of what we are wanting to do in this new work group that we have built together in collaboration. And as Steve was saying, we were very happy to sign the collaborative agreement with ITU in November, December timeframe. So the work group itself is currently in operation for the past three, three and a half months or so. So this presentation today, just a very few slides, is basically intended to provide a summary of what we want, what is the objective and the goal of this work group. And as you can see here from the title of our presentation, and this focuses a lot on digital government architecture. And in the previous few presentations, you have definitely seen the value of architecture that typically brings in the corporate settings. But one thing that I would like to highlight here is that, let me see if I can change the slide. Yeah, there it goes. Yes. All right. So to provide some context and background, I think from a historical perspective, we do know that many of the frameworks that we talk of today has, they have their origin in governments or public sectors. I'm not going to name any country or any specific framework per se, but typically, governments have been at the forefront of adopting architecture practices in driving their e-government initiatives and a vast majority of the current body of knowledge in architecture, in digital government and e-governance comes from the government sector, which is quite obvious because governments, no matter what we think, because obviously the context is very important in terms of what is the political system currently in practice in a specific country, they are more open to medium to long-term planning, which is where architecture plays a very important role. The other part which I'd like to highlight here is that if some of you follow, there is this United Nations e-government survey, which happens every two years, which ranks countries on their e-government maturity. And one of the key takeaways from that survey year after year is the need for countries to take a holistic approach to ensure that their e-government systems, so to speak, are operating in an integrated manner. And these e-government systems actually help in improving the quality of life of the people, which is very important because here, when you're talking of in the public sector in the government domain, it's very important that it's very important that there is a direct improvement in the life of the people who are going to use that service, e-government service or digital service, whatever you want to call it. And from the year 2000 onwards, and now that we are in the 21st year of this century, UN also has a framework called the Sustainable Development Goals that Honey will briefly talk about in one of the slides later. I think the important point for us to understand is that the SDG is an excellent framework in terms of governments to define their development agenda in terms of defining their goals and objectives and targets. So that framework is already available and every country really follows that framework in some way or the other. There are more than 17 goals. I'm not saying all the 17 goals would be relevant to all the countries at all times because they may be at different phases of their development maturity. Nonetheless, it is an excellent framework for us to provide the overall vision and direction for countries. So with this context and background, there are certain things which we thought which are very important is that if you see the current frameworks that we talk of, be it architecture frameworks or any framework where the architecture aspect is a majority, is a majority impact, you will see that they are not specifically talking of countries which have limited resources because somehow implicitly we assume that the framework will be adopted in situations where maybe the organization, maybe the country has almost access to unlimited resources, which is not true because if you look at the way it is, we have roughly 190 plus countries in the UN ecosystem so to speak and ITU is part of the UN ecosystem anyway, you're aware of that. Out of the 190 plus countries, at least 120 odd countries would qualify or would fall in the category of countries with limited resources or low resources and that is very important. Let's see, I hope the slide changes, it's taking time, yeah. Now when you're talking of countries with limited resources, they have some inherent challenges that we have put together for the purposes of our work group. The first challenge that they face is they have fragmented service delivery methods with inconsistent outcomes. What that means is they typically operate in silos, I'm sure that's true in all countries but I think the problem is more acute in countries with limited resources and the outcomes that the citizens get out of the services be it digital services or non-digital services tend to be very inconsistent so it's entirely possible that in one part of the country you will get a very good outcome which where the citizens are very happy with the service versus other parts of the country where it's absolutely, you know, you really cannot figure out what's really happening. The second characteristic that we see is that there is minimal use of standards and therefore what happens is there is no scaling which means that if a system or an IT solution is provided in one department or one ministry, the other ministries are not aware of the good practices that exist within the government ecosystem itself let alone the rest of the world. Third is of course weak governance, I think many countries kind of have that challenge and this is something we have to, you know, take into consideration when we try to adopt any framework or any best practice in the context of countries with limited resources. We do know that these countries have uneven and inconsistent ICT infrastructure so, you know, all of the digital services, all of these are good stuff but if there is no basic technology infrastructure available in those countries especially in the remote area then everything comes undone, you know, it just doesn't make sense. So we have to see for instance how a person who could be semi-literate, who can adopt or consume a digital service on a feature phone, it's not even a smartphone which runs basically runs on a 2G network kind of situation. Typically there are multiple initiatives which really don't last, it doesn't sustain so that's another characteristic and many of these characteristics are highlighted and they kind of exist in some way or in some form in multiple countries. There are limited financial resources, the digital competency of government staff and citizens itself is low, so the question is, are they digitally literate, you know, for them to be even consuming a digital service. When I'm presenting architecture, typically architecture is presented to architects, it is for architects and that's not the situation here. How do you present the benefits architecture for instance to bureaucrats and technocrats? So the audience is very different here because these are the decision makers who are going to decide what digital services are required and how it's going to help the constitution they are working with and, you know, there are other aspects which also come in are the social and cultural barriers and we know that in many cases, especially in domains like agriculture and health and, you know, in education, there are social and cultural barriers for us to deal with when you're talking of digital services. So these are some of the challenges that we have kind of documented so to speak and we don't see this as something that we need to avoid but these are characteristics that exist in countries with limited resources. With this background, what we have done in the work group in the past, you know, three months that we have operated is that we have defined two things is that first one is we've defined a high level, you know, methodology so to speak, you know, in terms of what, you know, how the organizations or how the countries actually go into their digital government process. So I can't see it yet. So let's see. So this is basically a four step process. Next slide. Yeah, this is basically a four step process which tells in a very high level in terms of what are the key phases and what are the key sub steps that need to be followed for countries to adopt architecture and which enables them to implement the sustainable development goals, which is very important for us because as I said earlier, the SDG provides the development agenda, the guidance in terms of saying that when I when I'm building the digital government architecture, it's going to help the country improve their development maturity. So my intention here is not to go into the details of the step by step approach. But this is the broad approach that we have developed the fundamental intent of this is for us when we come up with the deliverables from the work group, we would like to fit it into some of these boxes saying that yes, if we come up with a digital government strategy guide, for instance, which is one of the sub groups that has already been established in the work group, then we know that it basically addresses the phase three of the step three of this process. So we know that this is almost like a validation mechanism providing us with some level of checklist. So in association with the process, what we have also done is highlighted in the next slide highlighted the 10 areas, the 10, you know, I would say imperatives that are required for us to have successful government architecture. And this is where I would like to invite honey to come in and elaborate the next two slides so that we understand what are the key areas that we are going to work on for us to be able to come up with a very useful set of body of knowledge, which is relevant for countries. And I will then, you know, finish my presentation with the key principles that we have defined for the work group. So let's see. I can't. Yeah, there it is. So honey, all yours. Okay, thank you very much, Palab and thanks, Steve. Maybe let me first say a couple of words about the ITU's International Telecommunication Union. As maybe some of you know, the ITU is the specialized UN agency for ICT and its mandate is really to connect the world and to, you know, assist countries in deploying digital service for social economic development. It has 193 member states. And what is also special about ITU is that it has membership from the private sector. So it's really kind of bringing together a lot of the expertise in the ICT sector. And we are very glad actually to come to this partnership with the open group. And this is really because we have seen recently more and more, you know, increased demand on accelerating the digitalization of governments and of the whole of the economies of particular countries in the low resource settings. This is also kind of pushed by the pandemic and the realization of many countries that digital is becoming the new normal. And it's extremely important for the business continuity. Of course, giving that we are, you know, part of the UN family, we have a focus on countries, you know, that are still in the development process. And having looked at, you know, where the governments are in terms of digitalization of government public services, but also in different sectoral digitalization, there is huge gaps. And many, many countries are still lagging behind. And, you know, many countries, even they don't have a kind of a strategy or a roadmap. And even for countries who do have a strategy and roadmap, it's still not implemented. So there is, you know, significant need, there is huge gaps in terms of capacity as well. You know, you can find, you know, digital government units, digital transformation units in those types of countries, but they are still to large extent, you know, not sufficiently resourced, not sufficiently capacitated. And one of the kind of the biggest observation is that definitely architectural approaches are not mainstreamed. And that's why we felt it's extremely important that, you know, giving, giving that it's a, it's a, it's a quite a challenging environment, but that's at the same time we can see it as an opportunity, an opportunity because, you know, giving that they don't have yet a lot of legacy systems, if we can catch up and, you know, help countries to leapfrog and adopt architecture approaches from the outset, I think countries will probably have a better opportunity to avoid many of the mistakes and lessons learned that many, many countries have, you know, faced the before. You know, when you look at the digitalization in countries, you see that very, very, very few number of digital services has been digitalized. And even if some of the services are digitalized, you, they are not digitalized end to end. And in some cases, it boils down to just download the form and fill it manually. So this is, you know, the kind of, of, of digitalization that countries where they are now. Palab, I don't know if we can put the slide back. Yeah. Yes. You have the control, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's fine. Thank you. So in terms of the guidances that we would like to kind of bring together, definitely, it's very important that we consider all the different elements and factors and components of what you can call an enabling environment for digital government services. Just imagine kind of a citizen in one of those countries. First of all, they need to have access to the, to online. They need potentially to identify themselves. You know, they need to have a kind of a digital identity because, you know, having the ability to do, to interact with the government without being physically present can have huge implication because of the kind of the remoteness of some of the communities. It's very, very different context than countries in, in maybe developed world. When, once they identify themselves, they can, they maybe have to pay for the service and they need to do this with a confidence that, you know, their data will be protected. But also they need to have the capacities, a minimum level of digital literacy and all this cannot function unless you have the legislation. If the services are not really integrated within the re-engineered processes, I don't think that we will reach any improvement in terms of the governance, you know, of the strategy of the, of the government. So it's really unless we consider all those types of factors together, we cannot really see an impact or what you can call a kind of a, kind of a digital government transformation. And, and that's why I think in the government, in the type of guidance that we are trying to pull together, we need to consider kind of all those types of elements, but consider them putting in mind the low resource setting context that Palab was talking about. And what is extremely important that, you know, countries in those category, they are not all at the same level. So it's very, very variant. If you look at in Africa, for example, you cannot say that all the African countries are at the same level of maturity. You can easily identify three or, or even four different levels of maturity, you know, from countries like Kenya and Egypt, for example, where they do have a strategy, they do have some digitized, or, you know, digitized services, they do have very, you know, clear institutional frameworks to, to kind of govern a digital government. But, you know, you have different groups of countries who are very, very different levels of, of maturity. So one of the biggest question that we are trying to deal with in the working group is how we provide guidance is that is maturity sensitive. How can we provide guidance is that makes sense to the governments. So we don't try to ask them to do things that they still don't have the capacity to, to kind of manage, including the architecture, because we all know that, you know, building an architecture requires a lot of capacity and maintaining it also requires capacity. So how can we come up with a kind of a maturity, sensitive type of architecture, type of approach, what kind of, kind of reasonable type of guidance that we can give under each of those types of elements that can build up the ecosystem and build up, you know, the country capacities in, in, in a, in a kind of gradual manner. One of the things also that is extremely important, and maybe this is maybe not even relevant for developed countries is that in many areas, we need to consider regional approaches as opposed to national approaches. Just think about, you know, just think about, you know, countries in the Horn of Africa region. You know, can we imagine that each country of those will build its own kind of data infrastructure, build their data centers and have capacity to maintain them, have capacity to develop, you know, their service platform, etc., etc. That, that would be quite costly, first of all, and even, even will take a lot of time and we require huge capacity. So regional approaches in those types of contexts makes a lot of sense. However, it also requires a number of, of, you know, approaches, including architectural approaches where you think of shared infrastructure in a slightly different manner. You start to significantly think of cross-border type of transactions, regulations that can manage this cross-border type of payments and cross-border sharing of data, because if the data is hosted outside the country border, then countries needs to have the confidence and the right regulation in place to make sure that, you know, there is enough confidence that the, you know, the data can be stored outside the country and can flow easily in the countries that is no geoblocking of data and all of, all of those kinds of things. So the regional type of approaches actually also is another dimension that we need to think and all of that is really stemming from the fact that what would you do concretely and pragmatically in order to build up those capacities in a way that, you know, can, can also reach economies of scale, because let's face it. I mean, even, even in countries, let's give Ethiopia as an example, they have digitized some of their services, but there is no uptake. There is very, very little number of uptakes. So citizens are not necessarily using those types of digitized services, because maybe lack of literacy, digital literacy, but also lack of access to those services. So the, the size of the markets are very small and you cannot reach economies of scale unless you aggregate across different government departments, first of all, within the same country, meaning adopting a whole of government approach, but also aggregating across a number of countries within the region. And otherwise you cannot reach, you know, those economies of scale. So what I'm saying that all the elements that you have in front of you now, we have to think in terms of maturity, as I mentioned, but also in terms of what we can do at a regional level that many countries can benefit at the same time without having to reinvent the wheel. Can we develop a regional data sharing framework and the protection, privacy protection and data protection type of framework that many countries can adopt? Can we come up with an interoperability framework that would be adopted within countries and within a region? So it even facilitated the inter-regional type of and cross-border type of transactions and payments and recognition of digital identities and all of that. So all of, all those, the type of issues and questions that we need to kind of consider and tackle in this working group to be able to leverage the strength and power of the enterprise architecture, but really bring it to the level that could be adopted and used and consumed in those types of countries. Going to the SDG, maybe I can say a couple of words. I think, Palab, you mentioned that SDG now is becoming almost the de facto framework for, you know, guiding countries on where to invest. What is extremely important about the SDGs that they are all interrelated, there is a kind of recognition that you cannot deal with health, unless also you deal with education, you deal with nutrition, i.e. agriculture, you need with gender. So all those 17 type of development goals are somehow integrated and this really calls again for adopting this whole of society or whole of government approaches and is really trying to think of citizen journeys as opposed to standalone kind of discrete digital services. So this whole leads really to, you know, and calls for, you know, adopting, you know, frameworks that are holistic but also that can be interrelated, interdependent and integrated. So I would definitely encourage those who are not maybe familiar with the sustainable development goal frameworks to really look how, you know, those has been built and the countries now are developing reviews report on how they are doing vis-à-vis the SDGs. And I think this should be also integrated into the guidance, particularly when it comes to, you know, outcomes, architecture, where we can leverage some of those SDGs targets to use them in some cases, like KPIs, of course, it depends on each country. So anyway, I'll stop here, Palab, and hand it over back to you to kind of complete the presentation. Thank you. Yes. Thank you, honey. Yeah, I'm cognizant of the time. So quickly, these are the last two slides, I'll quickly summarize the guiding principles of the work group. So as honey has already alluded to, whatever we create in the work group should be something that can be used by the countries, which is very, which is very important, because, you know, as he said, there is a lack of body of knowledge for countries with low resources. And that's what we are trying to address here. We have already spoken about the resource constraints settings. We have spoken about the UN SDG. We have created a frame of reference. And that's what me and honey have actually elaborated in the last two slides. And we will be open to more collaboration. Just wanted to highlight is that this work group itself is not specific to a forum. It is open to all members of the open group. You belong, you could belong to any forum, and you could still contribute to this because if you see the SDG, it impacts everything. So, you know, you must have heard of open footprint, for instance, one of the forums that we have open foot footprint directly affects one of the SDG goals if you really know what the SDG is. So I'm not going to get into the elaboration of that. But I'd like to finish this presentation with the last slide, which actually shows us what are the, what is the current body of knowledge already available. Please note that this list of six is only specific to government and government EA. So I have excluded the generic material, which is, which is non-government specific. I know that we have lots of material in our library and all of you access that, but I'm only looking at the material, which would be specific. But this is not the list. We would like to add to this list. And as honey has said, the opportunities are almost unlimited, you know, the kind of 17 goals and the impact they have on countries are almost unlimited. And we are in a long-term collaboration with ITU. So with that, we will finish this presentation. And I know that we have a panel discussion later on. So we will take the questions during the panel discussion. Thank you all. Thank you, Steve, for your time. And we really look forward to taking this work group forward and making a difference to the world in terms of the, how architecture can make a difference to people's lives. Thank you very much. Absolutely. That's a great point. This is a real opportunity to take some of what we do and really make a difference. It's great. So thank you for now, Palab and Honey. We'll have you back for the panel session after our next speaker. But meanwhile, a warm round of applause for Palab and Honey. Thank you.