Pandu Putra, Director (Asia), Co-Develop, Former Special Adviser to Minister of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform, Indonesia

1) What does public service mean to you? Can you share more about your role in the public sector?

Public service, to me, is about building trust at scale. Citizens do not judge governments by how sophisticated their systems are, but by whether they can access healthcare, receive assistance, or renew a licence without unnecessary friction.

I have worked at the intersection of technology, policy, and reform, from founding civic tech initiatives and building West Java's digital service unit to Indonesia's national agenda. Today I advise Indonesia's Minister for Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform on digital transformation (Editor's note: this interview was done before Pandu moved to Co-Develop).

My clearest lesson is that transformation is never about technology. It is about people: once they accept the need to change, everything else follows.

2) Tell us about a project you championed. What impact did it have on the community?

In 2018, I founded Jabar Digital Service, the digital delivery unit of the West Java provincial government, on a belief that government could build like a technology company rather than buy like a procurement office.

We grew it into a 90-person team serving 48 million citizens with in-house talent, and many who passed through it now hold roles across Indonesia's digital government.

That same idea now runs nationally: using Digital Public Infrastructure to reform how the state serves people. In social protection, trusted data sharing across agencies means verifying a family's eligibility for assistance, once a process of up to 200 days, can now take minutes.

What makes me proud is not the technology, but institutions that always worked in silos collaborating around the citizen.

3) How has your unique background or perspective allowed you to identify a solution that others in your organisation might have overlooked?

I came into government as a builder, not a bureaucrat, and that taught me to see government through the eyes of citizens rather than organisational charts. Governments organise around ministries and regulations; citizens organise their lives around moments: starting a business, having a child, applying for assistance, seeking care.

That changes the question from “how do we digitise this agency?” to “how do we simplify this journey?” Most people inside a ministry never ask the second, because their mandate stops at the edge of their agency. Seeing across those edges is where the overlooked solutions hide.

4) What is your personal strategy for maintaining your creative energy when faced with bureaucracy?

I have never treated bureaucracy as the enemy. It exists because government must balance speed against accountability, fairness, and continuity, so the task is not to remove it but to help it evolve.

When I hit resistance, I ask what is behind it: competing priorities, a worry about risk, or someone who has not been heard. There is no formula for coordinating a country this size. The most effective tool is not persuasion, it is listening. Every reform takes longer than expected, but every honest conversation builds trust.

Beyond work, my wife and children, friends, and good food keep me from running on empty.

5) If you had just one area to invest in to accelerate transformation in the public sector, which one would you choose and why?

Talent, without hesitation, but also institution for those talent.

Neither cheaper technology nor rewritten regulation matters without people who can sit between a minister and an engineer and translate in both directions.

Yet hiring them is only half the answer: they need an institutional home, or they can’t do their best, which is why many countries built dedicated GovTech agencies. In-house capability, not dependence on vendors, is what compounds.

And I would point also to the mindset citizen's journey, not the technology. This is why we focus on user-centred design and interoperability rather than shiny apps.

A mindset shift toward the user, plus systems that actually talk to each other, is what produces transformation a citizen can feel.

6) What is your greatest ambition as you grow in your public service career?

My ambition is to help build institutions that keep improving long after any individual leader moves on. Too many reforms depend on a handful of passionate people.

For me that means governments that stay close to what citizens need and can move nimbly, with the internal capacity to act rather than wait on someone outside.

That is how a government earns trust.

Personally, I hope to grow into roles with greater reach, whether as a senior public official or within an international organisation. And I hope Indonesia contributes more to the global conversation, because if our experience helps another country improve its citizens' lives, the work has reached beyond our borders.

7) What is a “universal value” that connects everyone in your department, from interns to directors, and how do you use that to drive collaboration?

Purpose. Titles differ, but almost everyone joins public service because, at some level, they want to improve people's lives.

I am realistic about this. That shared “of course we care about citizens” is sometimes only surface deep, with people still protecting budgets, mandates, and turf underneath.

But even surface agreement is useful, because it gives you an entry point and a guardrail.

When a conversation drifts into politics or territory, you can return to one question: what would create the best experience for the person using this service? It reorients the room toward what everyone at least claims to want, and that is usually enough to keep moving.

8) What is the best piece of advice you’ve got for the next generation of public servants?

Do not wait for authority before taking responsibility. You do not need the highest title to improve a process or introduce a better idea, but bring your idealism with humility.

Many talented technologists join government full of conviction and burn out within a year, because they never understood how the bureaucracy works.

Be patient about outcomes, because real change needs time, and you will often step back one pace to move three forward later. Learn to let go of your ideas so better messengers can carry them, because the reform matters more than being the person in front of it. Technology is only a tool.

Trust is the real infrastructure that lets government succeed.

9) What is a myth you wish to debunk about young public servants?

That young public servants are impatient idealists who will be worn down by how government really works.

There is a grain of truth in the impatience; many of us get frustrated at how slowly things move.

But that frustration is not fragility, it is the opposite. The young public servants I have worked with are some of the most resilient people I know. They hold high hopes and strong values, and keep grinding through thankless, invisible work to push the needle even slightly, long after it would have been easier to quit or coast.

Endurance here is not about age. It is about mindset, humility, and the willingness to keep showing up.

10) Write a letter to your future self in 2035.

Dear Pandu,

I hope you never forgot that this work was always about people, not technology, and that you measured success by whether government became easier to navigate and more human because of something you helped build, not by the positions you held.

Stay a builder. The higher you rise, the stronger the pull toward talking about change instead of making it. And I hope your wife and the children still know they came first.

If you ever had to choose, I hope you remembered which one you can never get back. 

Institutions matter. But the people we serve, and the people we love, matter more.

Keep building both.