When we think about digital transformations at McKinsey, we have a framework where, for a country, we think about digital society, digital government, and digital economy. Now, let me take them one by one in terms of how Asia has done over the last several years and how I think about the future for Asia.
Let’s start with digital society. If I think about access to healthcare and education and how digital is transforming this arena, there are many micro-innovations that digital has enabled over the last several years.
For example, schools in remote rural parts of Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, many of the South Asian and Southeast Asian countries have started using the power of tech to bring in, for example, Khan Academy videos to zoom in on some of the world’s best teachers. In remote rural parts of South and Southeast Asia, where you don’t have great access to high-quality teachers in sufficient numbers, this is groundbreaking micro-innovation.
There are many such innovations in healthcare as well, where tech has enabled remote healthcare so that you’re able to remotely monitor the parameters of a patient and send them in real time or with some delay to the doctor or to the healthcare system. They are then able to send back the titrated medication changes, and the medicines are delivered to the patients’ doorsteps. For remote rural parts of Asia, especially Southeast Asia, this is huge innovation. So that’s what I see on the digital society front.
When we think about the next pillar, digital government, there have been many innovations, but the one that comes to mind immediately is in India: the power of the national digital identity. In India, that has enabled a significant increase in universal healthcare access and ability to provide conditional cash transfers that are tied to monitoring outcomes. The doling out of this, which previously was not possible, is now made possible by the universal national ID, Aadhaar.
At the end of the day, the private sector is the lifeblood of the economy. I’d say there are two sides to it. One is what the consumers do in terms of driving adoption and demand for digital. Increasingly, with the proliferation of e-commerce and ride-hailing apps, et cetera, consumers demand more digital services at the press of a button, and therefore businesses are forced to innovate. But also, when you think about the business side of things—how businesses are thinking about transforming productivity—digital and analytics have been such important levers.
Last but not least, one underpinning factor that I want to touch upon is the importance of talent. The bottleneck, whether it’s in digital society, economy, or government, is the availability of high-quality digital talent. Increasingly in many of the countries, there are initiatives that are being put in place at many different levels, starting from the school level, to ask, “How do we put in place a STEM curriculum, a digital analytics curriculum, so that our students of tomorrow—ten, 20 years from now—are much more digitally savvy and ready?” So that’s the important job to be done, if you will, on providing digital talent to economies.