Shai-Lee Spiegelman last served until the end of 2021 as director-general of the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology in government of Israel, leading the formulation of long-term science, tech, and innovation strategy.

In her previous role as head of the Israeli National Digital initiative (Digital Israel), Shai-Lee led the formulation of the government's National Digital Plan, and its implementation in collaboration with various government ministries.

She first joined Digital Israel in 2014 as vice president for planning and external relations, after extensive experience in the high-tech world. Before government, she served last as VP of marketing at Microsoft's R&D Center in Israel and previously also as director of regulation and corporate affairs in Microsoft Israel.

Shai-Lee has a Bachelor's degree in Law from Tel Aviv University, and a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard University in the United States.

I probably have to use the prefix of “super” a lot now to try and describe Shai-Lee. She simply is a Superwoman in many ways.

She is super-energetic. Talks fast, decides fast, delivers fast. Shai-Lee seems to get energized from fighting bureaucracy, which Israel and governments anywhere have a lot of, and which usually is tiresome instead. Because Israel is a “start-up nation,” Shai-Lee truly managed to bring a start-up spirit to the government and perhaps helped to “break things” that had to be broken to unleash the digital government in Israel.

Shai-Lee is super-effective and super-practical. She can handle dealing with a dozen things, communication lines, workstreams at once. At the same time, every meeting with her has to have a concrete outcome, a concrete follow-up. I guess if you are raising four children and managing a super-busy digital agency on a super-big mission at the same time—like Shai-Lee was doing at the time of Digital Israel. She has no other option than to be super-effective and super-practical.

Shai-Lee is super-strong to have lasted through the political cycles—or even cyclones—that Israel has been through in the last years and all the while keep growing the team, keep doing the delivery of their digital agenda. Stamina is her thing, and her word.

—SIIM

How Did You Rise to the Role of a Digital Government Leader in Israel?

I had worked in the high-tech industry in Israel and then reached a point where I decided that if I am working so hard, I might as well do it for greater good or impact. It happened that at the same time the government started building up Digital Israel and they were looking for people. I met with Prime Minister's Office staff who were leading this work, and they thought I would be a great candidate and asked me to apply. Myself, I felt the Digital Israel opportunity was the right combination between technology and policy and impact.

So I did apply and became number two in the agency. When Yair Schindel, the first head of Digital Israel left the government for the private sector, I was appointed to succeed him and served as CEO for more than four years.

Did You Hesitate at All When Taking the Job?

I did not hesitate at that point, although I had a lot of questions about how to succeed with such a big challenge and what should be the right first steps. But I loved the position; it was exactly what I wanted to do. Working for Microsoft, I had built up relations with people in the government. I had the expertise. It was just the right setup.

How and Why Was the Digital Israel Initiative Born?

Back in 2013 or 2014, we had people in Prime Minister's Office, led by the Director General Harel Locker and the Deputy Director General Yossi Katribas, who thought that making Israel more digital had to be one of core strategic priorities of the new government. They did not call the initiative Digital Israel then yet. They understood that we had a very difficult bureaucracy, that the government ministries were not very digitized. We did not use data in a meaningful way; we did not work with citizens in the center. They were also concerned about the gap between the Israeli successful start-up industry and the Israeli public sector.

Then they started doing global research on how other countries have managed to do it, met with the UK government and others, and the concept was born. At end of 2013, a government resolution was passed to establish a unit called Digital Israel under the Prime Minister's Office. The initial aim was to bring in people from the private sector and with an initial budget for six or so people to design and structure out what this entity would do.

What Was Your Role at First?

We started with only some very high goals given to us to help government services and small- and middle-sized enterprises (SMEs) in digitization. One of our first jobs was to build out the national digital strategy. Nobody knew ahead what exactly the Digital Israel project or team would have to be.

Fast-forward five years and we had a team of seventy people and budget of $US200 million a year. Back then it was all open: do we go for health care or education or smart cities? It was our luxury and an opportunity to design it all the way it should be. But where do you start, if digitization is going everywhere and everything needs work? Also, do you start with infrastructure, which might take three years of work before anyone sees any results, or start with quick wins and low-hanging fruits that are not as impactful, but people will see the results? What is the right combination of things?

Bringing this strategy together was my duty, role, and privilege.

What Was the State of Digital Government in Israel at the Time More Precisely?

Israel as a country was and had always been quite advanced in technology in general. We are known as a start-up nation, after all.¹ Government was used to working very well with start-ups, so the high-tech relationships were there. The country was also already well connected in terms of the internet; almost every house had access to broadband and mobile penetration was high.

Yet, the government services were lagging behind and were not citizen-centric. A lot of the services you could start online, but it was not end-to-end—at some point you had to print, fill, fax, or deliver something in person. Some ministries were more advanced, such as the Ministry of Health with health records and data. Many were lagging behind, and our development level overall was medium to low perhaps. Not as advanced as it should have been, given our overall tech scene.

The digital gap between the government and the private sector was unbelievable. The government and the prime minister understood that this gap is unbearable and made it a priority to change it to have the public sector meet the expectations of the people and meet the DNA of the start-up nation.

What Was the Concrete Expectation for You to Deliver?

To build the strategy, to build the national plan, and to do so in the next six to twelve months.

Also, we were put in charge of some priority projects that had started before but needed delivery. For example, there was a project to build an e-commerce platform for SMEs—for mom-and-pop shops to sell their products, especially from remote or conflict areas. Another one was to get more people to training, for which we realized early that e-learning had to be the way. So we started building a national e-learning platform based on Open edX called CampusIL.

What Did You Set Out to Achieve as Your Own Ambition or Objective Then?

I came from a very digitally advanced organizational environment and was surprised by the amount of work to be done on digital front within the government. My ambition became how to overcome these hurdles, to make this change happen. Many people inside government were initially suspicious. They thought that the politicians were simply saying some nice words, that it was another government resolution, but nothing would happen.

My ambition was to make this new unit the best, to bring in the knowledge from the private sector, and to actually change the government. This drives me all the way to today.

How Did the National Digital Strategy Then Come Together—and What Became the Strategy?

It took us more than six months, almost a year or so. On the one hand, you want to come up with a very wide and comprehensive strategy that will last for three to five years. On the other hand, you want to include a lot of ministries, and they all have unique perspectives and interests. We did not have mandate yet; we had to convince others to partner with us and take us onboard. This partnering, convincing, building of trust took more time.

Today you can go to any ministry and digital and technology innovation is among their main objectives, no need to argue about it anymore. Back in 2014, a lot of director-generals thought that digital is something that IT people could handle, what the CIO would do. Digital transformation was not understood the way it is a common phrase today, and we had to build this understanding up one-by-one with each executive. We had to show examples of opportunities, and it was a tiring process of bringing everyone onboard.

However, it was important because when we would go with the strategy to the government, it would not then be just us making the case. A ten-person unit alone cannot make all Israel digital. You need to have the whole government behind that or at least some of the major ministries.

We worked with ministries to understand their strategies, their priorities, their challenges to propose ways how we and digitization can help them. The aim was for every ministry to have their own digital strategy, as part of ministerial strategy. I made a presentation to each ministry with inspiring demonstrations based on my own ideas, other country examples, other sector examples on how their challenges could be met through digital tools or data. Then we proposed quick pilots to try some of it out in practice.

As the next step with overall strategy, we had to figure out how to prioritize and what would be the right time frame for the strategy, anyway. Three years? Five years? What would either allow to achieve?

I must say that back then there were not many good examples internationally to look at either, because we were trying to come up with a comprehensive digital strategy for the whole government. Most other countries focused just on changing the delivery of frontline services, but we wanted to go after the core government value delivery like health care or the educational system, too.

We ended up with three goals in the strategy: promoting economic growth, narrowing socioeconomic gaps, and making the government smarter and friendlier. The last is about better services, data-based decision-making, putting citizens in the center, managing privacy issues, and so on. For economic growth, we had initiatives to work on digitization of SMEs. We also brought to focus the govtech sector, to help this industry emerge and thrive. For the socioeconomic gap reduction, we focused on education and digital inclusion. Each goal had three or four more concrete objectives, then various projects underneath. It could have been projects from any ministry under any goal, and it worked as a matrix in that sense with ministerial strategies.

How Did You Set Out to Deliver the Strategy and to Sequence the Various Initiatives, Which Had Been a Puzzle First?

We built the strategy a bit like a working paper, to be updated regularly—say, every two to three years. For each year, we put together an annual plan and a budget based on the strategy. Each year we had about a hundred different initiatives and projects going. Each of these lined up to a high-level objective or goal, forming a map of sorts.

We had to keep things flexible and agile. Initially, we did not mention artificial intelligence (AI), for example. When we were refreshing the strategy more widely in 2019, AI was a big thing and there was no way to do a strategy without some focus on it and data. So, regular updates enabled us to add or change directions.

Within the strategy, we sought for a balance between a few long-term infrastructure projects like CampusIL, our online learning initiative and platform. Today, it is the online learning platform in Israel with a million learners and hundreds of courses, but it took us four or five years to make it happen. Or another bigger initiative was to build the data infrastructure for all health care data, adding each hospital one by one.

Next to these we had to deliver quick wins in order to get and keep legitimacy, plus have the ministerial support. Ministers need quick wins and political gains. Nobody will otherwise give you the budget you need for longer-term stuff, too. The quick deliveries were things like a website and e-commerce platform for SMEs, or digitizing the process of getting new medical doctors approved for their practicing license. The last one was a three-to-six-month manual process before, while these talented people had to wait idle in unemployment after medical school before they were allowed to start practicing. By digitizing the applications, we brought the bureaucracy down to a week, and the impact was amazing.

How Did You End Up in the CEO Role of Digital Israel after Two Years in the Team?

Digital Israel started as a unit under the Prime Minister's Office but then with the next elections we were moved under the Ministry of Social Equality. The current government is finally building a new digital authority—bringing Digital Israel there together with ICT Authority, aka the central technology agency for government, in charge of technology platforms.

With the move happening back in 2016, Yair decided to leave. I was willing to take over because of the ambition I had to change the government, as explained. The team was also worried that everything we had set out to work on would be gone. I wanted to step in to ensure the path we had started on. I thought it was really important at that point to have someone from inside take the lead, someone who knows the organization's DNA. Otherwise, it would be hard to continue delivering on the Digital Israel strategy.

My request was that we would be allowed to continue working as a separate unit with our own identity and DNA, even a separate office in Tel Aviv, close to the high-tech industry and talent.

What Was the Expectation or Task Given to You as You Became the CEO?

The main one was: deliver, deliver, deliver.

Second, we were expected to support the minister's policy agenda, even if we remained at arm's length to be as autonomous as possible. As a team, we had previously been quite free to do what we saw fit. With the minister for social equality, Gita Galmiel, we now had for the first time a political leader with their own agenda, too. That is why we started to work more on smart cities and with municipalities, also on the equality initiatives like digital literacy for minorities. It was useful in my view, because in Israel eventually the citizens meet the municipality much more than they meet the central government. Thus, if we do not work enough with municipalities, the digital gap will remain in experience.

Given the Horizontal or Matrix Nature of Governmental Strategy, How Did You Build Up the Collaboration with Ministries to Ensure the Delivery on Their End?

Indeed, maybe only 20 or 30 percent of annual projects were managed directly by our team and the rest by all different ministries.

The key for being on the same page was that the ministry and Digital Israel together appointed chief digital officers (CDO) to each ministry, who would lead their digital strategy making and delivery. We then worked with these people hand-in-hand each year on the annual plan, on the budget, and so on.

A lot of our influence also came from our budget. We were able to go to the ministries and say, “let's work together; here are our terms.” The ministries had to appoint CDOs as part of their management, we would choose them together, and then in return we would match their budget for digital initiatives. Half of the money would come from Digital Israel, half from the ministry. This joint investment ability was also a great way to leverage the funds we had gotten for Digital Israel—we could double them for eventual strategy delivery.

The terms also included commitments on practices or how projects were to be carried out. For example, that customer journeys had to be done or data used. This was a way to bring the new practices to ministries real fast.

Very importantly, we also made an effort to raise the knowledge and skills and create a community of senior executives on digitization. We took some forty managers every year into a digital leaders program. We took them to weeklong custom-made digital leadership courses at world's top business schools; each month made them learning days on good service design and other new know-how. After four or five cohorts like this, we had some two hundred people from ministries who were our ambassadors and talked the language necessary for digital change. This way we could achieve way more than just with own people in our team.

Was There Ever Pushback from Some Ministries?

We were very lucky because a lot of the ministries wanted to work with us. First, there are not a lot managers who will say, “No, I do not need the funds; I have funds on my own.” Second, we also brought a lot of experience of good private sector methodologies, new ways of doing things. Our team was very talented and young, not like typical government or civil servants whom you do not want to work with. Third, if things were a success, they got credit for it.

Thus, we actually had more demand than we could actually supply for. In addition, we were ambitious and impatient. As a new or young entity, we wanted to make sure we were recognized and that people understood our value and direction. That forced us to be a bit everywhere. At some point we had to start saying that we could work with five or six ministries only at a time. We had to start to focus.

How Did You Manage to Ensure the Delivery of the Plans? How Did You Help Ministries along the Journey?

It was quite chaotic at times.

People did not first really understand what we do and how to do their part. Transforming government services is about more than making citizens go to a website. Making personalized services is not easy.

Plus, when you are introducing new jargon and practices to the government about customer journey or user interface (UI) or data and these are things that people did not know before, it does not come naturally immediately. Everyone will approach it a bit differently, unless steered or supervised.

As Digital Israel, we wanted to make sure that all digital projects are done in the right way. Therefore, it was important to be there in all the projects, at least in some meetings or initial meetings, to explain how things should be done. We brought in the practice of customer needs or journey workshops to get the direction right for transformation. Say, you want to open a pizza store (or get any business license)—you would have to deal with then different regulators. We would then bring all these agencies together and map it out so you see the customer nightmare clearly. From that we could then apply the different hats of digital transformation to make it better.

We adopted the concept that digital transformation has five different hats or lenses to look at. One is user need and user experience (UX), another is data, another is UI, then process management, also technology itself. In the middle of it all stands the product approach. In the government, nobody knew the product manager's role or concept before. We started to bring this role into agencies.

To help the ministries deliver quick on the transformation plans and sessions, we did a big tender to facilitate the outsourcing of work and bring in practical digital capability in larger quantity. It was a centralized procurement for all different ministries to make available to them a pool of necessary competences to build their solutions out in the new way. They could get product management or design or other experience this way fast.

In addition, I already mentioned how we were educating and skilling the leaders. We also started doing online trainings on CampusIL platform to support the spread of good practices, and extended the efforts to bottom levels of government, not just managers. At the end of the day, it is these people who do the work of transformation.

With the strategy review in 2019, human capital efforts really rose to the core of our work and plans.

One of the Keys to Make It All Happen Was to Build Out a Great Team. What Was Your Approach in This Area? How Did You Bring Your Team Together?

The key was in three critical special exemptions, which we were granted as a government entity.

The first was the location. Government sits in Jerusalem, but if we were to be based in Jerusalem, the right talent may not come. They are in Tel Aviv, in high-tech offices there. Also, we needed to be in touch with the tech community for collaborations.

Another thing was that we managed to convince the Civil Services Authority to give us exemptions from the usual hiring process. The standard process of government hiring is a long one. First, you have to have an internal call for the positions, taking probably three months. Only then you can go outside and have a public competition, then you have to have the candidates pass exams, and so on. It can be eight to ten months of bureaucracy to bring someone in. We needed to attract people from industries where offers are made within forty-eight hours! So, to be able to hire right talent, we needed a different kind of recruitment track. We managed to bring the process down to a month or six weeks by going straight public with calls for applications.

The third exemption we got was on salary. Most of our staff were not on civil servant but special expert salary grade. This still forced us to offer pay at some thirty percent below market value, but not significantly below the market value that product managers or design or tech experts would have gotten on civil service pay otherwise.

We also were getting a good publicity buzz, so we had dozens or sometimes a few hundred résumés for each position—this was amazing. We did build this brand consciously, too. We had our own people bring their friends in a start-up company fashion. We made a point to be present at every conference in the high-tech industry for marketing who we are and what we do.

Seventy percent of the team was from private industry background, from start-ups to sectors like banking, which had experience with practical digital transformation. We also hired for some roles from inside the government because we also needed people who understood government. Fundamentally, we were looking for entrepreneurial people who can do their own job. As we had to work so much with other ministries, we also needed people who knew how to work with other people and convince other people into partnering.

What Did You Do to Keep the Good People?

We made a point to build a culture and DNA of a small start-up.

We also really tried to get people to attach to Digital Israel and the team. We had a lot of events, like Thursday² happy hours or celebrating holidays together with spouses as a big group.

One of my biggest prides is that while I was the manager for four years, almost no one left the team on their own volition (some I had asked to leave). Ultimately, what kept them was a chance to build things with impact and feel the impact.

Can You Tell a Bit More on the Culture You Were Building for the Team?

As said, we were going for the start-up DNA. We were building the bridge between the country's start-up nation identity and the government, reshaping the start-up nation spirit into the government practices.

But we also emphasized the need to have impact, to focus on delivery, to build partnerships and have less ego. We understood that we had to work very closely with all other ministries. If we would have taken credit or had behaved in a political way with powerplays to them, nobody would want to work with us. People even told us that we were not marketing our achievements enough, that people did not hear enough about our projects. I said that was fine. If the ministry's manager is getting the credit, and they are happy working with us, that was fine!

What Were Your Guiding Principles as a Leader?

We were working really hard so that everybody in the team would feel significant and important. In our biweekly team meeting, every time someone would present one of his or her leading projects. We gave credit and recognition by giving out stars every week and we mentioned what the person got the star for. This was important because there was so much work to be done.

Each employee was managing a lot of projects in other ministries and a lot of it had to be based on good relations. We did not have a forcing power over the ministries. Our impact came from our professionalism. Every one of us had to be on top of our game. Each time they had a meeting with someone, the team members were representing us all. If they did not perform—say, did not come to the meeting prepared, this would have affected our brand. This also meant that people had to be confident in themselves, and that is why giving recognition exactly mattered.

I always said I had the best job in the government. I truly felt this way because the team was the best in government. Because our unit was the best place to work in.

In addition, I am not a very hierarchical and formal person. With our team, as we were working together, we were developing together and attached to each other. For example, with my management team—my five or six “right hands”—we are still really good friends to date.

What Were Your Most Effective Management Routines?

There were the whole-team biweekly meetings that I mentioned, for recognizing and overviewing the work across the whole team and for informal knowledge transfer in the team.

With my management team, we had a weekly meet-up and it was always a very in-depth meeting. For two hours, we would bring issues and discussions to the table on what we needed to do. It was not about sharing information on what each of us does and then going our separate ways. Instead, we debated and decided together.

It was very important to have people involved in the annual planning because this ensures delivery. It was a bottom-up process with everyone involved from day one, starting from the lowest employee until the management. Each person would submit in their own project proposals, then team managers approved them, and then it went to the management for discussion and debate. Then we would present the whole plan to the whole team so that everybody could see all the projects.

We also very openly did the quarterly review of the annual plan's delivery. Each person reported what was done, what was late, what was going on, what were the barriers, what was working or not. We would sit each quarter for half a day with the management team and review each line of work, giving guidance as necessary. An efficient project management software was an essential part of making all this transparency and involvement possible.

Probably some 20 to 30 percent of my time went to managing up. It involved taking time to introduce to the minister or my director-general all the projects we were doing, explaining to them what digital is about. We spent time especially on preparing them for every conference or public speaking event, because they did not know our area themselves. Obviously, we had to also work with the minister on getting government resolutions put together and passed if we needed them.

Each quarter I did a one-on-one with all director-generals of ministries to review delivery and plan ahead for the next stages.

Looking Back, What Do You See as Your Biggest Achievements in the Job?

First, I am proud that I managed to build and get approved the national digital strategy for a first time in Israel, and also to update it a few years later. This is now a document that everybody knows.

I also think I did manage to influence the culture of the government in terms of digital transformation. Everybody in the government speaks about it now. Ministries have their CDOs, everyone understands the importance of data and digital, everybody wants to do it.

Everybody also wants to partner with Digital Israel, and that is an achievement in itself. This step from six people whom nobody knew who they were or what were they going to do, from start-up to a sustainable organization—this is what I am extremely proud of. It is not easy with a growing headcount and budget, changing strategy, changing ministries and ministers, and so on.

If I look at the product-level things I worked with, I would say CampusIL is definitely the achievement. It was my baby, my idea. We managed to build the platform, agree to have global leading institutions offer their courses in Hebrew on it, get our own universities to offer online courses, too. It has brought real impact, whether in form of low-income families having free access to exam preparation courses for their kids, or by enabling the move to distant learning during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. We made it take off ground with a few courses that were very popular—to get the platform known and people on it. At the core, CampusIL success came from an amazing product team who did not give up even if hurdles emerged.

Are There Things You Regret or Things You Think You Failed At?

Focus is one—we were trying to be everywhere. We could have probably gotten more done by being more focused. It also made my managerial job harder.

We also did have problems telling our story, selling the strategy at first. It did not help that we were doing so many things at once, with all the ministries and so on. Being not focused enough made the mission harder to capture into an explanation for others.

When 2020 Came, You Decided to Move On—Why Did You Make This Decision?

I had been at Digital Israel for six years, four as the manager. I thought perhaps that is enough time and to have someone else take the lead. At the time, there was also another election and the new minister of science and technology, Yizhar Shai, offered me a director-general position in that ministry. He was from high-tech industry himself and was looking for someone with combined tech and government background. It is a very small group. I was very happy to accept his offer and to work with him.

What Were the Remaining or Next Challenges for Digital Israel as You Left?

Data is the challenge. We had started work on data strategy, but it was near the end of my term. I am talking about how can government really utilize and leverage the data in the right way? For making better decisions or providing access to data for academia and industry for building companies. There is also lots of work ahead to get data sharing going between different ministries' silos and agencies, to get the data governance right.

Second, we had only started work on AI and how to get government more accept the new technologies. For example, how to support with regulation the introduction of self-driving cars or build sandboxes for new technologies like cryptocurrency and blockchain. Inserting cutting-edge new tech into government is a big-big-big challenge.

How Did You Make Sure That What You Started Would Stick and Last?

I believe everyone is expendable in the end. My hope was that I had such a great team, who was sure to manage it without me. The management team were all strong managers, all my deputies.

We were also in constant touch with them for the first few months. Every time they had a question, they could come to me and we talked it through.

It was also very important for me that someone from my deputies would get the CEO position when I left. In fact, I had three deputies who were fully capable and wanting to take the role and put in the application. Succession is much easier in this manner.

Looking Back Now, What Were Your Biggest Learnings in This Job—Anything You Wish You Had Known at Start Already?

Obviously, a big learning for me coming from outside was that government is such a plane carrier. It is real heavy and massive; turning it takes a long time. When people ask me about the work in government, I say it is like moving walls. I had days when I was frustrated, and angry, struggling with this terrible bureaucracy. How patient you have to be, willing to again and again explain the same thing, meet the same challenges—that I did not know in advance.

However, when you succeed, there is magic in it. In its impact—like getting a tens of thousands of students to get free online preparation courses for university matriculation. It is the best thing ever when they tell you that because of your platform, they got a higher score getting into the university than they would have gotten before. There is nothing compared to that in any job that I have done before, and I was in the best companies, really.

Looking back, I knew some of it. I knew to believe in what you do and be passionate about it. I knew that I needed to have the stamina.

Did You Ever Learn How to Fix Bureaucracy, as You Had Initially Set Out to Change Government Ways?

No, I never managed to fix bureaucracy. After six years in government, I knew how to work better with it. I knew now where you can go around. I knew how to explain to the bureaucracy what I was doing. I knew what were bureaucrats' interests and how to talk to these interests to make things happen.

Today I can challenge the bureaucracy more by saying that I did this or that three years ago and it is possible. Before I did not have this to show for.

Fundamental issues have remained. In the private sector, if you have a good project, you can have the budgets, you get a green light from your boss and just run. But in the government you may have the budget, you may have a good project, you may even have a go from your bosses, and then it takes still a year to convince everyone because there are a lot of gatekeepers and procedures like tenders.

If Despite It Being Hard, Someone Still Wants to Do This Kind of Job, What Skills Are Necessary for It?

You have to aim high and be strategic. If you want to make the government more digital, it is never about this or that project. It is about national initiatives, vision, strategy. You have to learn to prioritize what to do and what not to do. Also, how to promote why you are doing this—why is it important?

You have to be willing to listen to others to convince them, also be patient not to get upset and understand that people have other perspectives. They are used to doing things in some way; you want to change that. You are moving the cheese for them, as the saying goes.

You also have to learn to think in the digital transformation hats: about UX and UI, about customer journey, about products.

These things mostly can be learned by practice only. I am not sure if maybe twenty years ago I would have known how to do the things that I am doing today. However, you still can have or learn the initial capability of empathy, working with people, being coherent and clear on what you are saying or want to do.

What Are Your Three Summary Takeaways from Your Digital Government Leadership Role, as Recommendations to Any Peer on How to Be Effective in This Job?

As said before, be strategic.

Be very professional. Otherwise, people will not listen to you.

Doing digital is a puzzle to solve. You have to understand what it takes and its parts. It is not enough to be a good manager: you have to be a great leader, understand innovation, understand tech, understand the moves, understand how digital can affect products and services.