Case: Digital Governance Office

The Digital Governance Office is a small unit within the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (Costa Rican Electricity Institute, in English) originally founded by the President of Costa Rica in 2006 to facilitate digital governance development in the country. Soon after, the organization's capacity grew to implement projects, integrate actors, bring together different initiatives and elaborate digital governance strategy, demonstrating skills that other governmental teams and organizations did not have. This case presents examples showing that this capacity resulted from the presence of two of the five characteristics essential to high reliability organizations, commitment to resilience and sensitivity to operations. The case describes how this Office evolved, problems in implementing projects across the public sector, crises and the decision on which the future of the organization rested.