Last week, the cabinet appointed the first group of Chief Digital Officers (CDOs), as part of the efforts to accelerate the country’s digital transformation while simultaneously promoting innovation.

The CDOs were appointed in seven fast changing digital sectors, among them, trade, industry, investment, justice, agriculture as well as environment and disaster management. Other sectors include infrastructure, education sector and local government.

Ordinarily, a CDO helps a company or government institution to drive growth by digitising the traditional business operations.

According to the Ministry for ICT and Innovation, the challenges of the new digital age make the role of a CDO a no brainer.

The CDOs are among others tasked to promote standardization for achieving efficient service across the government while at the same time realising a better control of IT expenditure.

Similarly, the group is expected to consolidate and modernise technology platforms while ensuring smooth integration and innovation.

Other key roles include greater consistency and satisfaction for the end users through the introduction of better citizen oriented design principles.

Paula Ingabire, the Minister of ICT and Innovation told The New Times that the appointment of CDOs stems from the country’s need to accelerate digitisation efforts.

"Over the past years, we have had IT units within each government institution providing day-to-day IT support services.”

However, she added, "Going forward, with the vision of supporting data-driven policymaking and implementation; there’s a need to restructure the team with the right skills that support this mandate.”

Ingabire noted that given the need to accelerate digitisation , the government decided to streamline IT functions across key departments for three major reasons, including;

"Better coordination of IT implementation at a sector level, we want to eliminate silos/redundancies where you find current IT structures operate in silos and are not structured to respond to the changing demands and evolution of the industry”.

"We are working towards outsourcing support functions as a way of strengthening the local IT industry, whilst allowing the IT teams to focus on the more strategic digitization projects that contribute to any sector’s mandate; and most importantly building the necessary capacity to support this vision.”

A major development

"First, this in itself is a major development because it signals that going forward, carrying out digital programmes will not be done by institutions in silos but rather as a holistic, consolidated approach to improve service delivery in a specific business area. This is in my opinion the best way to successfully deliver digital transformation,” Clement Uwajeneza, affiliate at Public.Digital told The New Times.

Uwajeneza explained that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that information technology is now indispensable for business continuity, citing that it has also demonstrated effective digital service delivery is possible with the right sense of emergency.

"The health sector wouldn’t have handled the pandemic without rapidly deploying digital solutions to achieve things like contact tracing, test results management, among others,” he said.

Consequently, by leveraging this trend, the newly appointed CDOs can accelerate improvement of every aspect of service delivery, Uwajeneza added.

Solomon Mutagoma, e-commerce entrepreneur said that previously businesses have had to deal with the emergence of mobility, cloud and big data.

"This is a great response to the emerging technologies in the country. Soon people will have to adapt to digital services only and I think this is a major development from the government.”

Mutagoma added that CDO’s have previously been employed in major private sector institutions, adding that this will ensure the ease of better digital service delivery in government departments.

"These are not new professions. What we didn’t have is that they were not employed in government departments, something that has previously led to poor delivery of services. With the appointment of CDO’s one can confide in the fact that we will receive better services.”