eGovernments Foundation - Vice President - Public Finance Management

Vice President - Public Finance Management

Role :

This is a change at scale role with the responsibility of designing & building a National PFM Stack as public digital good and building an open digital ecosystem for enabling a national scale implementation in government bodies in states and center.

The Challenge and the Mission :

- A simple task of movement of money from one level of government to the final expenditure entity can be a lengthy process in India. The process results in significant delays in funds reaching the last mile; uncertainty for intended recipients; the administrative burden for front line managers; poor quality of audit and large amounts of unutilized funds. By one estimate, at any given time there is an unspent balance of approximately Rs.1 lakh crore parked in various bank accounts across the administrative system.

- The Public Finance Management Mission aims to improve the financial health of the Government, adapt to dynamic and evolving needs, ensure a functioning and responsive service delivery system by deploying available funds in ways that create and strengthen the enabling environment for businesses and individuals to prosper and stay healthy. This will be done by creating an Open Digital Platform for public finance management.

Job responsibilities :

1. Design and build the foundational national PFM platform: This will entail extensive work with the government and ecosystem stakeholders to understand the pivotal problems, how they manifest in various contexts, and abstract the components of the platform that can work across India.

The key areas of work are :

- The design of various layers of the platform: core data infrastructure, core services infrastructure, and solutions layer

- Development of key building blocks of the platform (principles, standards, and digital artifacts). These are more fundamental context-invariant components of the shared digital infrastructure.

- Build reference solutions (applications) on the platform for the most pressing problems.

2. Create a scale@speed exemplar of transformation to build acceleration: This will involve working with the local ecosystem and market players for a couple of key states to build a reference implementation. This reference implementation will be designed, tracked, and implemented to illustrate the platform approach in practice along with effectively capturing the interplay of PFM policies, institutions, and technology. The idea here is to demonstrate the value creation and impact to drive re-imagination action and accelerate adoption. This will also strengthen the advocacy (from concept to actual results) and accelerate the national level policy push.

3. Create a shared narrative and ecosystem coalitions: Catalyzing and driving reimagination in the FSM ecosystem will require a focus on building a shared narrative with key stakeholders across industry, academia, civil society, and governments on how a shared digital infrastructure can enable transformation and collaborative problem-solving. As platform thinking suffuses the PFM ecosystem, it will enable diverse organizations to leverage and repurpose the Shared Digital infrastructure for their FSM objectives.

4. Enable a national scale partner ecosystem to implement and innovate: Participation of the market players in the national rollout and building innovations is a critical step for sustainability and scale. This creates the requisite system capacity and provides impetus to the market players to build local solutions. This will entail engaging with commercial enterprises and entrepreneurs and enabling them with solution workshops, implementation playbooks, hands-on training, and certifications, as well as in market participation. In addition knowledge assets will be created, and hand-holding services will be provided to the partners.

5. Institutionalization for adoption & sustainability: For the long-term sustainability of the initiative, it is essential to institutionalize the shared digital infrastructure in a suitable public institution which has the locus standi and the capabilities to make it available at a national scale.

Who you are ?

- You are deeply motivated & have knowledge of solving hard to crack societal challenges with the stamina to see it all the way through.

- You can design a machine to orchestrate a mission and you are able to beat a drum that keeps multiple teams (both at eGov and outside) marching together in alignment.

- You are ruthlessly goal-oriented and composed under pressure.

- You have the strong organizational capability and are reliable and dependable. You are able to separate out the big deal stuff from the noise. You understand risk, interdependencies, and probabilities.

- You have a nose for out of syncs and resolve it decisively. You are able to synthesize and provide transparency and escalate effectively. Able to make 80/20 common sense cut through decisions.

- You are a people person - you are able to work with a wide range of people from technologists, to government employees at many levels, development partners, and System Integrators.

- We believe that you should have 15+ years of experience in delivering multiple programs at scale and some experience in working with the govt in tech-driven transformations. Prior knowledge of IFMIS and the Treasury system or exposure to the public sector, development sector, or consulting is desirable.