Single Window Systems
In the OIC Member States
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An “idea champion” approach rest on one person who is highly respected and can coordinate and
overcome obstacles through leveraging close personal ties and pursuing informal avenues of
influence. The problem of linking progress to personal ties is that this person may disappear.
A broad coalition rests on formal channels of decision-making but is more stable as it is based on
institutional rather than personal ties. It is more likely to sustain a change in government and
political appointees, but takes more time and persuasion to build, and requires more preparatory
work to mobilise support.
2. Adaptation of the Implementation Speed
SWs can adopt different paces and depths of implementation. The options are:
a radical pace of change in a shorter timeframe with a deep scale of change and delivery of
all objectives in one go
a gradual pace that has a longer timeframe and starts at a small scale to reach intermediate
goals before realising the full objectives.
The two options have their advantages and disadvantages that need to be considered.
Radical changes are often appealing to political decision makers because of their fast delivery of
results. The comprehensive view also supports cross-organisational design. The flip side is that
there may be high resistance to change as insufficient time is spent on building an understanding
and momentum, and that the complexity and breadth of changes to be achieved in short-time
drive up costs and are difficult to manage.
Gradual implementation tries to build on past successes to build momentum and support for a
deeper array of changes to follow. The risk is that it may results in too limited transformation and
insufficient change to make an impact on the overall. It is therefore necessary to carefully select
high impact changes and to signal future changes. Using a gradual approach leads to an overall
longer implementation process and there is the risk that political support can drop throughout
the process, or that an idea champion that drove the process disappears.
Examples from OIC Member States
Senegal
The first implementation phase achieved high adherence of stakeholders and built the conviction
that change is possible and leads to benefits. This helped to support the second phase, which was
a more radical transformation in terms of timeframe (1,5 years) and in terms of removing paper
from all procedures.
Indonesia
Indonesia has a similar experience where the first generation SW built a behind-the scene
integration of all agency processes with agencies adopting modernization and digitization on their
level. This lays the ground for a more comprehensive approach and SW design in the second
phase.