An open source service delivery and governance platform
To enable good citizen service, citizens, employees, vendors, administrators and policymakers to collaborate and exchange information seamlessly.
DIGIT is a service delivery and governance platform. It enables ease of access to services for citizens, ease of coordination for employees & vendors, ease of administration for administrators and ease of policy-making for policymakers & researchers.
The diagram below abstracts the typical information exchange flow that needs to be enabled between the various actors to deliver effective citizen service.
A digital service must provide the following capabilities to enable effective citizen service.
Register/Login - Ability for the citizens to register or sign in or identify themselves.
Apply/Upload - Ability for the citizens to request services by filling out an application form and uploading a set of valid documents.
Pay/Bill - Ability for the citizens to pay for the service and be able to download a bill for the payment made.
Inform/Track - Ability for the citizen to track or receive updates about the applied services.
Assign - Ability for the employees or vendors to assign the service application or trigger a workflow that would assign it to an employee or a vendor.
Search/View - Ability for the employees or vendors to search and view the application.
Update/Comment - Ability for the employees to update and comment on the service application.
Deliver/Verify- Ability for the employees or vendors to deliver the service e.g. set up a new water connection or verify/certify the information provided such as verifying economic status.
Support/Feedback - Ability for citizens to raise support requests in case of an exception or provided feedback in case of closure of the service request.
Monitor/Improve - Ability for the administrators to monitor service performance and identify areas of improvement.
Plan/Budget - Ability for administrators and policymakers to plan and budget continuous improvement of services.
Each government agency builds applications that provide some or all of the above-mentioned capabilities. However, most of these applications are not built to scale or have the ability to exchange data with other applications. This results in locked data within application siloes that renders it unusable to other services. It is a primary cause for the fragmented experience of the citizens - who find it difficult to discover and use these services. The employees are forced to remember multiple passwords and use several applications at work. Administrators fail to get the integrated information required for monitoring performance and identifying areas of improvement. The result is poor planning and inflated budgets.
DIGIT is built using platform-based principles that enable the seamless sharing of data and functionality through well-defined building blocks. The building blocks can be integrated into higher-level services that can also be recomposed further to deliver unified data and experiences.
Core services and core data registries are grouped together to define the "Foundation" or "Core Platform". These services and registries are reused by services that are part of Urban, Sanitation, Health Platforms etc. All services and registries are exposed through well-defined APIs which can be used to build applications that deliver a unified experience to citizens, employees, vendors, administrators and policymakers.
Refer to the platform design principles that define DIGIT capabilities.
To enable the capabilities required to develop a good service, DIGIT provides a set of reusable building blocks (microservices) listed below that adhere to the above principles. A developer can build any service or registry by reusing the DIGIT services. DIGIT also provides accelerators like DIGIT Web Dashboard that can be extended to develop citizen, employee and administrator dashboards. More details on each of the services are available on the Platform Architecture page.
To install and start developing using DIGIT, visit the Get Started page.
The list of developer Checklists/Guidelines ensures that the services built using DIGIT are robust and easy to use.
Check out the platform training resources page and access our multiple walk-through videos.
The value proposition for DIGIT stakeholders
Governments have used DIGIT to transform the way they deliver public services.
By establishing a digital public infrastructure (DPI), multiple states have built capacity, removed administrative burdens and improved governance for faster, better, and cheaper delivery of public services.
Governments face multiple challenges in transformation initiatives. Capacity issues, emergent needs and behaviours, variance in context and requirements at a different scale.
DIGIT was designed ground-up to address such challenges and has evolved over multiple years of implementations to solve for accelerated reforms.
Timely and trustworthy data for effective decision-making at different administrative levels and to fix accountability. DIGIT comes ready with data dashboards to enable decision-making at all levels of government, right from administrators to frontline workers.
DIGIT makes possible:
interoperability
Easy sharing of data
Single source of truth
This ensures that products built on DIGIT enhance visibility, increase trust and reduce the cost of coordination across multiple departments and programs.
Reduce overheads for technology teams and learning curve for the final product users.
Single login for multiple applications and a standardised user interface make adoption quicker and easier. Role-based access takes away the overheads of multiple environments for different systems and multiple user accounts for each system.
For employees, it removes having to do tedious, repetitive tasks by automating processes, improving productivity, and allowing them to focus on more meaningful aspects of their jobs.
Scalability is at the core of the DIGIT platform. It has been deployed as a digital public infrastructure serving large-scale sub-national and national populations.
What makes it possible? A technologically robust platform with open and freely available specifications and standardised APIs that have proven its performance at massive deployments at the population scale.
DIGIT's source code is open source, data is stored in shared registries and data stores are owned by the government, mitigating the risks associated with vendor lock-ins, and allowing digital transformation initiatives to move ahead with speed at scale.
Products built on DIGIT can be accessed by multiple channels. So that, services can be delivered to citizens via mobile, web, WhatsApp, chatbots, through intermediaries or over the counter in physical offices. All are seamlessly connected.
It comes ready with a well-defined design system with a standardised user interface that has been created considering the realities of population-scale digital products. The user interface is straightforward, minimal and follows a guided approach for citizens using these digital products.
All products on DIGIT are designed to be configured, customised, and extended to suit the needs of the local context. These changes can be made at different levels of government.
A federated architecture supports the different realities of each unit of governance.
A set of reusable building blocks can be leveraged by market players to build products and services rapidly. Well-defined specifications, documentation, guides, and training materials make deployment quick and easy for teams. Thus, making it possible to build products for different programs and services, urgent needs and take them to the ground as fast as possible.
The DIGIT team works actively with partners and has created a robust ecosystem of application developers and system integrators that are trained and certified in DIGIT.
Open training sessions on design, development, deployment and implementation are held regularly. In addition to that, DIGIT provides certifications to trained personnel.
For governments using DIGIT as their technology platform, the DIGIT team offers:
Advisory support in vendor selection
Product design review, architecture design review
Enablement of system integrators selected by the government
Open training sessions | Certifications | Implementation guidance | Platform performance review
DIGIT promises long-term support of the platform for all its core components and also underwrites the performance of the core platform.
DIGIT has the capabilities needed to rapidly develop digital applications to address global development challenges. From its origin in solving for urban governance, the platform has rapidly evolved to address challenges in areas of sanitation, public health welfare, public finance, rural governance and legal case management among others.
DIGIT is certified as a Digital Public Good (DPG) by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA). The DIGIT team sits on the technical advisory committee of the Govstack that works to identify and support the advancement of digital public goods with relevance to the whole of the government transformation approach.
