Leveraging technology to achieve impact for capacity building

With an objective of upgrading execution capacities of 20 million government officials, Mission Karmayogi is clearly intending to bring a transformation to the entire government machinery and therefore achieve an impact leading to framework change. This will necessitate breaking down and rearranging current workflows and structures that act as barriers to capacity building. The transition from rules-based to role-based capacity building is one such example. 

Technology provides a quicker way to achieve this process through visualization and systems mapping of the structures, processes, frictions, and decision flows within an ecosystem. It allows for rapid and iterative ideation by enabling quicker connections between people (irrespective of distance) and therefore drives innovation for achieving larger impact. By choosing to use technology as the solutioning space for capacity building, Mission Karmayogi can be resilient especially during challenging times such as Covid-19 shutdowns. Other complementary instruments (including the Prime Minister’s Human Resources Council, the Capacity Building Commission, etc.) will put people at the center of this new ecosystem.

Underlying the technology is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) that is already enabling lifelong learning solutions such as global MOOCs. The engagement of the participants on a digital platform should provide key analytics to help customize the course offerings to each user. The diversity of the users and their learning capabilities makes it crucial for this customization to work efficiently, guiding the course providers in making targeted recommendations and improving the user learning experience. Still, early adopters will have to drive the utility of AI by giving constant feedback for improvement, consequently casting the net wider to reach a larger number of government officials.

The ideation process for Mission Karmayogi and the role for iGOT Karmayogi platform acknowledged these possibilities. The iGOT platform is now envisioned as a solutioning space that services multiple stakeholders (ranging from training providers to individual learners to government agencies and human resources-HR managers) by mapping competencies to the available trainings both in demand and supply. The nature of the services depends on the role of the stakeholder: for example, the HR managers will want to know the competencies acquired by specific individuals they oversee, while training providers will want to know aggregated anonymized data about demands for specific competencies to tailor their offerings and price them accordingly. 

The C-LOP team has been working with the senior leadership at DoPT to develop these analytical tools to build the AI underlying the iGOT platform. Once fully functional, the AI will drive the FRACing process - the mapping of all positions, roles, activities, and competencies of all 20 million government officials.- FRAC stands for Framework of Roles, Activities and Competencies. An indicative example of this mapping process applied to a position, Director (Vigilance) will look like 

The power of AI to mine datasets and deduce information will help expedite this mapping of all government officials in India. This mapping will further enable matching of competencies to trainings offered globally. The various ministries will be able to benchmark their own capacity building performance against other ministries by looking at scoring metrics built from analytical data of user engagement, learning, and assessments. An annual capacity building planning exercise becomes administratively and operationally simpler with access to this data. 

These datasets will be both individualized and aggregated, and will then be represented in competency passbooks (banking equivalent of account statements). These insights are just the first step in an evolving journey of continuous improvement of this model, enabled by technology. The insights will drive personalized feedback on learning and assessments, collective feedback on institutional capacities, and pricing feedback from the impact of the courses. All stakeholders will therefore be guided throughout their journey on the iGOT Karmayogi platform. 

Assimilating this data through traditional methods would have slowed down government reform and minimized impact. The importance of the innovations this data allows are especially highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has challenged governments to deploy new technology and train thousands of frontline workers. Meanwhile, this crisis has also demonstrated an appetite for online learning; Mission Karmayogi has rightly tapped into this trend and set up a broader vision for iGOT than seen through traditional MOOCs or other online learning platforms.