Embracing digitalisation, challenges and all

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”

As a gift for my parents’ wedding anniversary this month, I surprised them with a trip to Rome, Italy, a destination they had longed to visit throughout their lives.

Last Saturday, I set everything in motion, sending them off on their first voyage to the historic city.

My mother, excited but slightly nervous about travelling alone with my father, was relieved when I included my wife, who speaks Italian fluently, and our children in their plans. I assured my parents that I would handle all the arrangements to ensure a smooth and enjoyable trip.

In October, my mother encountered a problem, arguably more challenging than a cancelled flight or a closed border: renewing her passport online. While she dealt with this, I indulged in watching my favourite football team, Real Madrid, play in a UEFA Champions League match. However, the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system was frustrating me. In both cases, the issue is technology and how it seemed to complicate things instead of simplifying them.

For my mother, the online passport application process introduced a series of preliminary steps before she even reached the immigration office, when previously all she (and we all) had to do was walk into the office and patiently wait. For football, the debate was whether the VAR system was helping to make offside calls more accurately because now all we fans seemed to do was just sit and wait.

Both innovations were part of the widespread shift towards the digitisation of services that happened as a result of the pandemic. In Malaysia, online non-food shopping surged by 53 per cent, while grocery shopping and food delivery saw even more dramatic increases of 144 per cent and 61 per cent. The government followed suit. By mid-2021, nearly 60 per cent of government services were end-to-end online or fully digital, with many ministries reporting a jump to 70-90 per cent by 2022.

And why not embrace digitisation? I found that technology could boost productivity by up to 27 per cent through avenues like social media and e-commerce.

The passport renewal system was also caught up in this wave of digital transition. Before May 2022, we could renew their passports either online or in person. However, the Immigration Department then shifted most renewals to an online-only process, likely influenced by the pandemic’s digital push.

One major benefit of this system is the convenience of doing the initial work from home. When it’s time to collect your passport, you typically wait for no longer than an hour at the immigration office. Previously, you would have had to arrive at dawn, fight your way for a place in the queue (latecomers were unceremoniously turned away), and potentially wait all day.

The new system, however, introduces a prerequisite: applicants must upload their passport photos online. Back in the day, passport photos were conveniently taken at the immigration office. Now, the process harks back to an even older system when you had to find and visit a photo studio. Surprisingly, even professional photographers are struggling to meet the stringent requirements – photos can be efficiently rejected by the system within three days, often without a clear explanation.

One photo studio even displayed a sign saying, “Even done properly doesn’t guarantee 100 per cent success” and “We did our best, it’s a dumb immigration website.” Common reasons for rejection include incorrect dimensions, inappropriate background, unsuitable clothing, and – seriously – improper facial expressions.

These are arguably nothing like the facial expressions I’m making when waiting for football’s VAR system to make its decisions. VAR was introduced to improve fairness in football. Who doesn’t want between five and 30 video cameras helping on-field officials make their decisions?

Intriguingly, the one area where the final say is taken out of the referee’s hands is offsides because they are seen as simple “yes” or “no” calls. These decisions are so straightforward that the average time taken by a VAR system is 70 seconds, yet some games are delayed up to five minutes, all in the pursuit of a simple yes or no.

The question then arises: How do we move forward? Because it’s not just a technology issue but also a human one.

In football, the tools used for offside decisions remain heavily reliant on human judgment of where to line up on-screen lines on the correctly chosen freeze frame. Similarly, passport photo rejections boil down to human discretion of what is an awkwardly framed photo or face.

The current mitigations for these issues are to come up with an alternative human solution. For VAR, the solution has been to try and get assistant referees to work faster, although finding the balance between accuracy and speed has been an issue. For the Immigration Department, the solution is partly to allow certain groups of people (including my senior citizen mother) to come to the immigration department and apply for a passport there.

As an economist and a Madristista, I believe these are temporary solutions until technology advances further. In football, the World Cup already saw the introduction of semi-automated offside technology. For passport photos, AI capabilities could not only assess photo quality but also make necessary adjustments. Our smartphones can already seamlessly remove unwanted objects from photos; surely, a “passport” button isn’t far off.

You may be jabbing a finger at me right now. Won’t more technology introduce more problems? However, the advancements we’ve had over the last few years were improvements over what we had before and I think going back to an old system – be it long queues or wrong decisions – would be a backward step.

For, in the same way that there is no perfect single destination to visit for tourists keen to explore the world, the journey to digitalisation doesn’t have a final endpoint. All we can do is keep taking steps onward when we can, even if we may occasionally stumble along the way.

The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.