Yogyakarta, October 7th 2024─The development of digital technology today is not only as a medium, but also a new world for society. Almost all activities can be digitally transferred. This has led to various public discourses, one of which is the establishment of public digital infrastructure. The Center for Digital Society (CfDS) raised this issue on the 4th day of Digital Society Week 2024 with the title “Getting to Know Digital Public Infrastructure in Indonesia” on Friday (5/10).
Hafiz Noer, Head of Research of CfDS explained how public digital infrastructure can be built and guarantee the interests of the community. “Digital Infrastructure is a combination of software and hardware. The government is currently focusing on three things, namely personal identification, financial services, and data exchange,” he explained. As with the other public infrastructure development, digital infrastructure must also pay attention to aspects of public interest such as attribution and function.
An important aspect in developing public digital infrastructure is data management. Unfortunately, data in Indonesia has not been optimally managed. Hafiz conveyed, the existing data is still overlapping, not integrated, and not connected. “We see that data in Indonesia is still exclusive, there is still an ‘ego sectoral’ side. So who has what, I think this must be addressed if you want to integrate the data,” said Hafiz.
In addition, there is still a lot of scattered and incorrectly labeled data that results in duplicated data. For example, a person’s data on the KTP does not match the data on the Family Card (Kartu Keluarga). People also often find it difficult to follow the flow of replacing personal data that has not been fully digitized evenly. Problems like these should be solved by improving public digital infrastructure.
“The development of public digital infrastructure must pay attention to public values and of course be accessible to the public. Because we are the public who give our data rights to these institutions,” he added. Later, public personal data can be accessed openly but still strengthen the data security barricade itself. Therefore, data privacy management also needs to be improved.
The Institute for Innovation Public Purposes, represented by David Eaves, explained various forms of how Indonesia’s digital infrastructure can develop. David took the example of the benefits of digitalization that occurred at the Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) company. Since it was first released, the Wondr by BNI application has gained 1.5 million active users today. Even as many as 2.1 million people have registered the application in just three months.
Not only that, BNI’s mobile banking application also grew rapidly throughout 2021-2024 compared to 2017-2020. This growth is due to the ease of registration for new users. If previously users had to visit a BNI branch office to register for the application, in the last five years users can register with Dukcapil E-KYC data. “This is an interesting finding on how digitalization can increase business growth. In just three years BNI can increase their application registrants, reaching 15 million people,” he explained.
David mentioned that the development of data infrastructure has a strong urgency to start its management as soon as possible. He directed that data can be built with agile oriented or agile development. David divided the three main components that will form the proportion of national data. “The first and topmost part is the data that we can easily get. Data is fast because we don’t need to do anything. While in the second part we tend to move planning oriented, so how we plan to combine this data with existing technology. Then the lowest part prioritizes access for the community,” he explained.
Data infrastructure management does not need to force the entire government sector to move swiftly, but at least it can see the methodology to produce targeted public services. David also said that Indonesia has many young talents who are ready to build digital public infrastructure. “I am very impressed with what young Indonesians are doing. This country has talents, young people who are ready to work in government to help digital infrastructure, a solid team, Indonesia has it all. And that is the most important thing,” he said.