The government will recruit a 400-member cohort of senior state officials known as the Public-Impact Champions Network (PIC-Net) to drive digital transformation across the public sector, the Sunday Times reports, citing a circular from the Presidential Secretariat.
The champions will be drawn from 95 government offices including ministries, state-owned enterprises and provincial councils. According to the directive issued by Presidential Secretary N.S. Kumanayake, PIC-Net will act as the central force implementing the Digital Economy Blueprint approved by Cabinet, and will be co-coordinated by GovTech Sri Lanka and the Ministry of Digital Economy.
Each participating institution must appoint a four-person team — a Digital Champion, an Experience Champion, a Process Champion and a Transformation Champion. Together they are tasked with promoting service-delivery improvements, technology adoption, process efficiency and organisational change “through an integrated, coordinated institutional approach”, the circular says.
Department heads have been asked to nominate 16 to 20 candidates each for the selection pool that will fill the four roles. Those chosen will go through structured capacity-development programmes, workshops and mentorship covering digital transformation, service re-engineering, process improvement and change management.
The PIC-Net design is the first significant cross-government staffing intervention since the National Cyber Security and Resilience Authority Bill was tabled and follows the Cabinet-level Ministry of Digital Economy push to embed digitalisation officers inside line institutions, rather than concentrate skills only in central agencies. Officials have not disclosed a launch date or budget envelope for the network.
