By Farahdiba Abdullah
According to the Budget 2020 on 11th October 2019, Digital News Asia (DNA) (2019) pointed out that there are several challenges for the government to boost economic growth in the New Economy and Digital Era, such as:
- The amount of RM11 million is relatively a small amount to the Ministry to support the implementation of STEM education for preparing upskilling talents;
- RM70 million is not clarified clearly. The actual building for 14 facilities and 100 Go Digital Programme is still questionable to assist SMEs Go More Digitally. Additionally, MDEC only stated that, this a very new program;
- RM50 million grant is inadequate when considering RM25 million to spur pilot projects on applications such as drones, autonomous driving, blockchain and 5G development; and
- SME incentives around RM5000 each to digitize their operations may not seem enough for them to take advantage and will be limited only to the first 100,000 applications.
Consequently, lack of citizen-centric measures will result in very few sectors and people able to gain benefits for our nation to bring forward Digital Malaysia. Malaysia still needs more Digital Transformation (DX) Plans to build a strong citizen-centric government and improve our livability because the most important piece for digitalization is putting citizen first not technology. First, the government needs to understand the principles of citizen-centric system as stated below:
From the Figure above, the Budget 2020 has not fulfill to encourage citizen-centric approaches as key driver to contribute our digital economy growth. Besides that, governments are more focused towards industry levels rather than tackle the real positive outcomes that are still uncertain such as:
- To improve quality of life
- To improve citizen experience and satisfaction with digital services
- To achieve essential efficiency gains and improve service delivery levels
Hence, the government needs to look back from the foundation of the Digital Transformation for significant Digital Economy growth. Identifying the right paint-points from the eyes of the citizens is crucial because these are the only way to force digital adoption onto them that result to strong backbone for industries and country development.