The state of the art in the use of emerging technologies in the public sector.

The work conducted by Italy together with other 19 countries, the European Commission and the OECD Secretariat in the last two years, and that I had the priviledge to coordinate, has generated a Working Paper published by the OECD on the State of the art in the use of emerging technologies in the public sector.

This Working Paper is intended to highlight the main opportunities and challenges for the use of emerging technologies (ET), and in particular emerging digital technologies, in the public sector.

Digitisation is viewed as a new source of growth, efficiency and relevance in today’s increasingly digital world. Governments and public sector organisations are embracing new and emerging technologies for developing innovative approaches to policy making, service delivery and public value creation. Based on the first results of the analysis of evidence collected in 20 countries, the paper offers a few insights on the state of the art on the strategies and practical examples on how governments are attempting to integrate ET in the public sector.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain hold considerable potential for making the public sector smarter, i.e. more agile, efficient, user-friendly and, as a result, more trustworthy. Governments can play multiple roles to strengthen national research capacity and translate technological progress into public sector applications that deliver public value. Worldwide many public administrations are experimenting with emerging technologies to better meet the needs of public-service users and steward coherent use ofresourcestomaximise public value. AI strategies (and in the case of Italy also a blockchain national strategy) have been published or are in the course of being published. Ethical standards have also been addressed by both the OECD and the EU in the last few months (along with more than 100+ documents on ethical AI at world). A clear role on the use of ET in the public sector is not really mature yet. But this paper captures many of the ongoing experimentations and piloting that the public sector is carrying forward. It also provides a set of recommendations that countries and policymakers might take into consideration so to ameliorate their capacity to govern the technological tzunami that is coming forward.

Drafting this document would have not been possible without the support of my colleagues in the Agency for Digital Italy, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Korea, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Panama, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Uruguay, and the European Commission (DG Connect and DG Digit). The OECD took the first draft and made this a mature document to be published as an OECD working paper.