Sri Lanka’s digital economy needs creative DPI business models: official

Sri Lanka needs to consider different types of business arrangements for its digital ecosystem, other than in procurement-based interactions, according to a top government official.

“We need to be open to other forms of interactions such as licensing off a service where the government issues a license for an entity to carry out that service and pay the government some license fee and be regulated about compliance, along with new procurement models, licensing models or public private partnerships where, the government can part invest or present a business plan which the private sector can also invest in should be explored. This approach then can change from buying and building to creating a business model, such as selling licenses, like in the telecom industry that we have seen here,” Chief Adviser to the President on Digital Economy, Dr. Hans Wijayasuryya, tells Biometric Update.

He also stressed that if digitalization or investments in digital transformation are to be sustainable, unique business models should back them. “These business models need to be bankable because, if you put cash behind the service or a technology process which no one pays for, it will not be successful. It has to be paid in terms of citizen satisfaction, or it has to be paid in terms of the returns to the various stakeholders who participated.” This is why we need to move from where the government predominantly buys digital systems, pays someone to set them up, and the state’s interaction in the digital ecosystem is confined to procurement-based interactions, He explained.

He said the same model could be explored for cloud infrastructure, and then applied to digital public infrastructure platforms, as well as industry platforms such as high-velocity, revenue-generating ones, like ticketing.

“We should be open to new forms of procurement, such as outcome-based procurement, which is a form of procurement where the government would come forth with an issue to be solved, which is the outcome, and not necessarily prescribe how the problem should be solved. That opens up opportunities for innovation where smaller companies can compete through innovative solutions better than their competitors to solve an issue cheaply and faster.”

Article Topics

digital economy  |  digital identity  |  digital public infrastructure  |  procurement  |  public-private partnerships  |  SL-UDI  |  Sri Lanka