Abstract
“Strategic Pathways in Achieving Critical Cross-Cutting Enablers for Digitally Empowered Sri Lanka with Special Reference to a Comprehensive and Transparent Data Governance Framework”
By
Gamage Sudath Pushpa Kumara
Doctor of Philosophy in Information Technology
Universidad Azteca, Inter-University Programs, Mexico City,
2024
Professor Friedrich Luhan, Chair
Keywords: Cross-Cutting Enablers/ Data Governance Framework/ Digital Empowered/ Strategic Pathways
Introduction
The complete transformation of society into a digital Sri Lanka opens numerous opportunities for economic growth and development. However, the transformation process to digital empowerment of the government sector has many constraints to overcome those prevailing even after 20-years of its initial phase started in early 2004 with the e-Sri Lanka initiatives by the ICTA.
The intended scope of the digitalized Sri Lanka is vast and most complicated as the ground-level readiness was minimal across many organizational structures of the government on data governance, in addition to the issues on other cross-cutting enablers along with underlying data management policies and procedures, access, use, analysis, storage, retention, and deletion of data outlining under the digital empowerment plan at the initial stage. The major challenges that had existed in digital transformation are still prevailing in a massive scale with the innovation of modern technologies and increasing demand for digital data from all key economic sectors for facilitation the process of government decision-making and catering the needs of public. This study explores the existing situation and identifies the level of barriers to address in formalizing the government organizations to facilitate in sharing data through the data governance framework that has intended to be established soon. The lack of critical information and communication technology infrastructure, Internet access, and related online services; presence of significance gaps in digital literacy and technological skills, outdated and not conducive environment to the rapid adoption of new technologies, inconsistent policies, lack of clear guidelines, and bureaucratic hurdles that stifle innovation and slow down the implementation of digital solutions in addition to the economic constraints including poverty and limited access to financing by businesses and individuals to invest in new technologies. The political instability, corruption, 30 years long civil war and lack of good governance are other significant obstacles with market size for the scalability of new technologies.
Analysis
The intensive investigations of the six major critical cross-cutting enablers and their relationships in to strongly build up the foundation of digital Sri Lanka identified the systematic way to establish a Comprehensive and Transparent Data Governance Framework enabling to establish digitally empowered society.
The organizational structures functioned under three-tier administrative and political system of Sri Lanka and each organization processes in generating flow of data were also assessed initially and verified the relevance of available data in terms of accuracies, standards, and completeness to share among the public for various planning and decision-making processes.
The results revealed that very few organizations shown successful implementation of data governance framework even these organizations unable to factor in every possible circumstance and contingency during implementation of the framework due to the inability of assembling the right resources, difficulties in clearly define roles and responsibilities, and setting up workflows for ongoing monitoring and evaluation in an effort to implement the framework within the uncertainties of the operational aspects of the organizations amidst various negative factors affect to the implementation.
Conclusion
It is recommended to identify the central organization responsible for the establishment of organizational Data governance framework leading to achieve the overall objective of establishing digital Sri Lanka.
Data policies, data catalogues, data & analytic definition, data quality & master data, data operations, and data security are recommended to initially finalize for the data governance.
Further, the study shows to have a complete assessment of all the data and identify and ensures the availability including the production process, production years as daily, monthly, annually, etc, or periodically providing time series data in every four years, every 10 years, or so, and its data integrity with the requirements of cross-cutting organizational needs, system of collection, and security of data within the entire organizational systems.