UN tech chief on digitally transforming a legacy organisation
By Si Ying Thian
Long regarded as the capacity-builder for governments of the world, how does the United Nations (UN) manage its own digital transformation journey – and the challenges that come with it? UN’s CITO, Bernardo Mariano Junior, shares more.
UN’s CITO, Bernardo Mariano Junior, shares his team's journey developing a digital ecosystem for the UN subsidiaries to better serve their beneficiaries. Image: Bernardo Mariano Junior
The United Nations (UN)’s Chief Information Technology Officer, Bernardo Mariano Junior, has been tasked to develop the digital ecosystem of the almost 80-year-old organisation.
Beyond modernising legacy infrastructure, creating a digital ecosystem also entails “revamping the way [UN] works, mindsets [of staff] and rules of the interactions [with beneficiaries],” he says.
His estimated 4,000-strong team at the UN Office of Information and Communications Technology (UN OICT) has been hard at work digitally transforming the UN from within by identifying the priority services across all its subsidiaries to onboard the digital ecosystem.
For instance, Mariano shares that his team supported the Office of Counter Terrorism with digital tools to better equip governments to fight terrorism.
These include developing the goTravel software solution which allows governments to leverage automated analysis of data from other countries and receive an alert when an individual terrorist is entering the country, as well as a financial intelligence tool to help governments track the financing of terrorism.
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Slow budget approvals, rapid tech advancements
“There’s no such thing as a transformation without a challenge,” Mariano shares with GovInsider. He highlights pace as a key challenge he must manage in the digital transformation of the UN.
There is always a gap between the time taken to get a budget approved by the UN to roll out a technology, and the rapid evolution of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.
“The question is then how do I work with internal systems to ensure that I'm able to still progress [with digital transformation], even though the approval for substantial investment will take some time to come?” he says.
To keep up with the state of innovation, he says that the UN has been looking at organising hackathons and crowdsourcing innovation challenges, and partnering industry and other non-profit organisations.
One example is Reboot the Earth, a social coding event that brings together diverse stakeholders to improve upon or build technology solutions that address the current climate crisis.
The event is a partnership between Salesforce, the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), and other UN subsidiaries.
A key piece of advice Mariona gives to his team even when they are not actively involved in AI projects is to always “prepare the data for AI, even if you’re not doing AI now.”
“There are things we can do to keep progressing while addressing the challenge of finance,” he says, highlighting the data quality as a component that affects the pace of implementing AI.
The UN currently does not have a large-language model (LLM) of its own, and uses commercial LLMs for its use cases. “This means that bulk of the work is in preparing the data and training the model with the data,” he adds.
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‘Better positioned for the AI era’
Mariano admittedly shares that the UN was not actively involved in tackling online harms, such as misinformation and bullying, that were present in the Web 2.0 era during the advent of social media platforms.
“As we move into AI, we have learnt the lessons and are much better positioned,” he says, adding that UN launched its first global framework to help governments addressing AI governance challenges in this September.
Today, there are approximately between 400 and 450 use cases of AI and generative AI (GenAI) within the UN subsidiaries.
These cases range from GenAI tools that cater to the needs of UN staff and beneficiaries.
For instance, human resources team within the UN can now use UNifyHR, a GenAI-powered tool, to quickly retrieve complex policy data and respond more quickly and accurately to staff inquires.
For beneficiaries, the GenAI tools range from making information about migration processes and even routes more accessible for people in developing countries, as well as making it easier for government agencies access insights from decades’ worth of policy documents in the UN.
As the Chair of the CIO Council of the UN, he holds a meeting with all the CIOs of the UN subsidiaries twice a year to coordinate on the technology implementations in their respective subsidiaries.
“We need to really break the silos and ensure we do not reinvent the wheel over and over again.
“We need to work in a way that we don’t duplicate, but leverage each other’s capacities to accelerate the adoption of technologies,” he shares.
Next priorities in digital government transformations
Mariano shares the next priorities for the UN-wide digital strategy, which has been submitted to member states and undergoing an approval process.
The first strategic outcome is to tap on digital government expertise to support the UN in better delivering its key mandates by modernising legacy systems and investing in digitalisation.
The UN’s mandate typically refers to its mission to maintain international security and peace.
The second outcome is to focus on stakeholder partnerships to not only tackle the technical aspects of digital transformation, but the cultural and change management aspects that come with it.
The third outcome will look into improving the security of the information and data assets of the UN.