What can COVID-19 tell us about our digital achievements and failures in France ?
In response to this unprecedented crisis, many people and activities turned to digital tools to keep some semblance of normality. In my humble opinion we have a mixed set of results in France and here are some insights about it. More specifically, a fast and forced adoption of digital tools with insufficient leadership has left many confused about what technology can do to help. In addition, the half-heartedness of governmental actors and major industry players to embrace openness and transparency has made this situation worse, while trust is probably our best asset at the moment.
Remote socialization
This is probably one of the activities where digital tools play a key role to mitigate recommendations to keep our distance from fellow humans to limit the spread of the virus.
Remote communication
Digital media/communication usage has grown as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, as more users go online for information, entertainment and to stay connected with family, friends and colleagues through Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. Some studies reported up to a 50% increase in usage while the overall internet speed usually decreased only by a third of the increase rate. Thus, the internet is in pretty good health given the circumstances, probably thanks to the elastic nature of modern internet infrastructures and applications. According to the CEO of OVH, one of the biggest cloud providers in France, the network is far from being saturated, so if you experienced problems on your favorite online store for instance you can rather bet on service outages. The only sad thing is aggravated digital divides, among them age and skill gaps are probably the most obvious in our country.
Remote work and learning
Many workers, pupils and students are now forced to be remote, and they’re unsure of when they’ll be able to return their office, school or university. However, many companies and institutions lack the mindset and the technology infrastructure to offer that capability smoothly. People have learned the hard way that the main difference between in-office work and remote work is not the location but rather the approach and tooling. Shifting to remote triggers a shockwave of change: autonomy and trust, asynchronous communication, tool stack shrunk to a minimum. More particularly, leaders are responsible for embracing the remote transition process and communicate this to all employees.
During the first days, and often longer, most companies and institutions also experienced a denial of service of their “extended information system”. A lot never succeeded to scale due to technical problems or adherence on closed-source COTS (licensing cost overhead). External access to internal systems (e.g. through a VPN) is not easy and instructions on usage are not known or clear enough to many. Last but not least, even basic required features became buggy or unusable on mobile-like devices available at home because remote individuals were not treated as first-class citizens by IT departments thus far. As a consequence, a massive move to “remote solutions by design” like Google Docs, Slack, Zoom, etc. or Open Source alternatives has occurred. In the worst cases, weak leadership left many people home with no clear view of what they can do.
Response to the outbreak
Open Communities
A lot of hackathons or similar initiatives have hatched to help the public sector by connecting civil society and health experts in order to develop innovative solutions for coronavirus-related challenges. The key challenges being protective materials/equipment, medical ventilators and real time communication tools. Indeed, it still appears that digital transformation often means business processes based on decentralized but non-interoperable software or even worse “spreadsheets” (resource planning, project management, etc.). Simply put, these spreadsheets are leaking the essential of software capabilities we need to face the crisis like real-time collaboration, user-friendly ergonomic design (particularly on mobile devices) or fast error-prone editing. Typical examples of required tools are platforms to provide real-time information on intensive care unit (ICU) bed availability in French hospitals like ICUBAM or InnoMed360. Structured organisations like Health Factory delivered various projects from 3D printed protective shields for front line workers to universal video chat in a challenging time frame. It’s almost impossible to exhaustively identify all global or local community initiatives: mass-producible ventilators, protective shields for second line workers, low cost detection kits, …
Open Data
Health data is essential in the fight against Covid-19, and this has forced the public agency responsible for monitoring the pandemic (Santé Publique France — SPF) to accelerate digitization. In the beginning of the outbreak regional health agencies (ARS) did publish, in dispersed order and at disparate administrative levels, some numbers linked to Covid-19. But due to the lack of adequate tooling an automated daily report only started weeks later, and is not yet complete. A highly symbolic example is that SPF created its account on the French Open Data Portal on March 18, the first day of confinement. Moreover, this decision has been taken under strong pressure from the public opinion and community-driven initiatives like Data Against Covid. Since then, data has been updated every day with the support of Etalab, responsible of coordinating the implementation of the French data strategy, and delivered to the public through an Open Source dashboard.
Open Source
In order to prepare the end of the containment phase, the French government announced working on a mobile application to support contact tracing in the fight against COVID-19, the general motivation being to quickly interrupt infection chains. He put a stamp of approval on the PEPP-PT project, which France’s INRIA is a member. On the 1st April he expressed his confidence by estimating possible to deliver an app in 2 weeks although the EU issued a common toolbox for member states, which sets out the essential but ambitious requirements for these apps, on 15th April only. In the meantime, some big French IT players like Orange announced working on their own app (like many startups) to make it ready on 20th April, while Google and Apple partnered to build a Bluetooth-based tracking system on 10th April. Previously, the communications service provider Orange (but also SFR) shared aggregated anonymized geolocation data with public institutions (notably INRIA) while saying that France is not ready for a more intrusive approach. Then, INRIA published a preliminary version of the ROBERT protocol on 18th April and the French government welcomed it as a privacy-preserving Open Source alternative to Google and Apple efforts (although the github repository of the app itself has remained empty and Google/Apple also previously published their own API/protocol).
In my humble opinion the Government has forgotten that Open Source is more a end-to-end transparency process than the act of making something publicly available at some point. Because most people know that this application is only a small part of a global strategy (with massive testing, etc.) and will not save us all from the disease, it raises justified concerns about privacy and civil liberties. As a consequence, the ongoing crisis calls for the highest standards of openness and transparency, there is no room for ambiguities on governance and communication, while the Government strategy is more like a black box at the present time. According to their publications on social medias many people and institutions withdrew from the PEPP-PT project to support DP-3T instead, which adds confusion. The expressed concern is that PEPP-PT is attempting to steer its partners into closed discussions with only permitted governments/industry and a centralized approach to contact tracing instead of following the decentralized academic standard maintained by DP-3T. Even the European parliament called for a decentralized approach to COVID-19 proximity tracking, which is also now supported by Google and Apple. For better or for worse we need them in the loop as, just like push notifications, you cannot carry out Bluetooth tracking in the background on mobile devices without privileged access to the system. Otherwise, users would be required to have the app open and active all the time with associated impact on battery life and device usability. In a nutshell, it’s a very dangerous way to coordinate a crisis response by supporting such a divide and conquer approach (should we call it “business as usual” ?). It appears to me more like a bad soap opera than a responsible attitude at the level of what is at stake.
Digital transformation: could do better ?
Like everyone, I would like to highlight the heroism of front line workers in the health system (hospitals, retirement homes, etc.) facing one of the most challenging public health issues of our time. I also want to highlight the strength of second line workers supporting our essential needs and all citizens applying containment rules in order to curb the outbreak. Undeniably, we expect to use our digital technology as part of disaster response to support all of this. However, we faced many difficulties like the lack of crisis management tools in real time or the reluctance of certain administrations when it comes to opening their data and process to the general public. Moreover, it has highlighted our strong adherence to foreign digital solutions. For instance the most popular dashboards about the pandemic rely on closed source foreign software like ESRI ArcGIS or Microsoft BI. Similarly, tooling for remote activities mainly rely on GAFAM solutions. The good news is that internet infrastructures and applications know no borders by design (ironically like coronavirus) and help all of us to make the outbreak more bearable.
Yet, we own some of the largest European information technology service and consulting companies like ATOS or Capgemini, with a similar number of employees than Google or Microsoft, so this strong adherence to foreign digital solutions is not a matter of capabilities doesn’t it ? I strongly believe it is not. On the one hand, our largest companies seem to exhibit a risk aversion that lead them to focus on professional IT services and strongly rely on public funded R&D. On the other hand, they sell the digital transformation as a Holy Grail, with a technology dominant thinking, which is not always working effectively, especially in the public sector (cost overruns, delays of delivery, deceiving projects and even massive failures is commonplace). Conversely, it appears to me that foreign companies focus a lot more on products for the crowds instead, valuing the experience of people with technology more highly, with the underlying belief that they do so to create a better world. Last but not least, it also seems to me that a lot of foreign companies (Google being probably the archetypal example) are more involved in pushing open initiatives, at least on some of their tools (for Google think a little bit about how many people are using Go, AngularJS, Kubernetes, etc.), even if privacy concerns are naturally at play due to their hegemony on the deployment of these tools (e.g. Android).
Another pitfall is that we are building communication infrastructures to support fiber, 4G, 5G, etc. expecting a natural spread of digital technologies. Yet, humans are naturally resistant to change — particularly change that is forced in a time of crisis and uncertainty. Open Communities, Open Data and Open Source initiatives all increase trust in digital technology when correctly used as a transparency process, and should therefore be more recognized as such. As citizens we were told that the only thing we were good for was to spread and apply recommendations distributed by experts but that’s not true. In times of crisis, most people want to help and an open digital transformation can get them involved in being a part of the solution and brought obscure technology down to the people.
