A conversation with Fabian Bigar, CEO of Malaysia's MyDigital Corporation
Edition #58 The head of Malaysia's digital government implementation unit on pesticides, AI, and why the WEF is Putrajaya's ideal partner...
Malaysia’s digital revolution has been a long time in the making. Starting in 1996 with the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), which introduced high-tech business districts and special economic zones in an attempt to grow the country into a leading digital nation, it has seen a wave of nationwide transformations over the past 25 years.
Over time, on the basis of these various initiatives, the digital landscape has become a complex one, with digitalization responsibilities divided between several government arms and regulators. It is little surprise then that Putrajaya’s latest efforts - signaled by the introduction of Kuala Lumpur’s “Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint (MDEB)” in 2021 - called for the creation of a coordinating body “to inculcate a digital and innovative mindset amongst the Rakyat (public), Businesses and the Government”.
Fabian Bigar, and his team at MyDIGITAL Corporation, is the man who has been tasked with this coordination over the past two years. In a recent interview with GovInsider, he spoke of the early days when he was “given a title, but had to build the agency from scratch”. Today, he begins our interview by saying, there is still a lot more the organization can do in terms of efficiency improvements in reporting and ways of working, but its place is much more assured in the country’s digital ecosystem.
This is clear in its broad organizational mandate: to serve as the Secretariat for the Prime Minister’s National Digital Economy and 4th Industrial Revolution Council; to work with ministries to progress their digital targets; to drive digital upskilling efforts; and to host the Malaysia Centre for 4IR, a collaboration with the World Economic Forum bringing together leaders from across society to contribute to the country’s digital transformation and energy transition. Through these four activities, the corporation coordinates strategic digital change throughout the country.
MyDigital Corp. is responsible for hosting Malaysia’s Centre for 4IR
The glue between Malaysia’s digital agencies
Taken together, these tasks are no mean feat, especially for a body with just over 20 employees. The key to successful delivery, Bigar says, is to solve problems collaboratively with other agencies, rather than parachuting in as a supervisor. “We can’t operate alone”, he tells us, “we have to work with the various moving parts in the government, various agencies to drive this change”.
By now, this is familiar territory for the corporation, following the experiment with the MyDIGITAL Catalytic Projects Task Force (CPTF) last year, which sought to identify and tackle systemic barriers to the country’s digital change. Looking across five verticals – healthcare, transport, manufacturing, agriculture and utilities – MyDIGITAL Corp. “engaged more than 90 public and private entities to delve into the potential problems that they face, and from there, identified initiatives to address the issues”.
The task force received a particularly encouraging response from agriculture stakeholders, for instance, in addressing bottlenecks in the use of drone technology for precision farming. During their consultations, the MyDIGITAL Corp. team discovered that it took on average 120 days to obtain a drone flying permit, meaning that by the time they were granted permits to spray pesticides, the trees were often dead.
Part of the challenge behind this was that 7 different agencies maintained partial responsibility for controlling the use of drones, each working in silos and processing their section of the permit request sequentially. While MyDIGITAL Corp. lacked the authority to change the process themselves, they were able to convene representatives from each agency for a series of workshops on reducing approval processing times. Through the workshops, the agencies jointly developed a plan to work in parallel on processing the application, identifying areas in the country to serve as experimental sandboxes. Subsequently the permit lead time was reduced from 120 days to just 30.
A digitally upskilled future?
The ability to convene agencies – and have recommendations accepted by them – is predicated on their leadership fully buying into the idea of digital transformation, we remind Bigar. As the secretariat of the Digital Economy and 4IR Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, MyDigital Corp. enjoys strong political backing at the highest levels of government. But it is not a given that this authority flows through to the rest of the government machinery.
As far as Bigar is concerned, resistance to digitalization is caused by a lack of understanding of what it (as distinct from digitization) really means. That is to say, not understanding the difference between evolving a process with the help of technology and adding a digital component to an existing service. He tells us about a recent panel experience voicing his frustrations with elements of the government that are not as digitally advanced as they perhaps ought to be. When he finished speaking, a senior civil servant raised his hand to tell Bigar that “we are already doing that, we are already giving digital training”. It transpired that this training was firmly technical – the likes of coding skills – rather than focusing on transformation and business change skills. Without the latter component, Bigar says, it is difficult to see digitalization as a chance to transform the way government works in its entirety.
In a civil service context, recent upskilling efforts have included a joint upskilling program with Microsoft, which brought together 80 civil servants from across 12 public sector agencies for a collection of workshops and self-paced courses on digital skills, including Internet of Things, Data and Artificial Intelligence. In a piece for The Edge, Bigar lamented how Malaysia is a country predominantly of digital consumers, not digital creators. To meet the goals of the MDEB, he wrote, it is necessary to move from being consumers to creators by developing both general technological skills and a predisposition towards continuously adapting to a rapidly changing technological culture.
It is on the latter that our conversation ends. A recent report from MyDIGITAL Corp’s Malaysia Centre for 4IR identified a potential GenAI uplift of USD113.4 billion for the Malaysian economy, equivalent to one-quarter of the entire nation’s 2022 GDP. Bigar’s vision is for a Malaysian role in setting the terms for AI governance – “a voice from the south […] especially with the current explosion of conversation on AI”.
As Malaysia looks to realize that vision, the MDEB and Center for 4IR (the first in Southeast Asia) are statements of intent. But MyDigital is testament to the fact that it is the more quotidian activities - scaling upskilling efforts or convening cross-government stakeholders - that will determine the realization of Malaysia’s digital government ambitions.