Ode to the civil servant who understands that digitization is not a gadget

In systems set up for governable vagueness, sobriety quickly feels like radicalism. Then you get the friendly variant of opposition. The managerial frown. The neat procrastination. The subtle softening. Or: interesting, but let's explore first.

Imagine if Pim van Meer were a civil servant.
That idea alone is probably enough for some people to run their coffee into their keyboards. Pim, employed by the government. Pim, in a ministry, between policy papers, reconciliation meetings and people who say this is what we'll take with us when in reality nothing at all is moving yet.

It almost sounds like satire.
And yet it fascinates me.

Perhaps precisely because I increasingly encounter people in and around government who essentially do exactly the same work as I do. Only on more difficult terrain. With more subtle opposition. With a greater managerial reflex not to move too hard in particular. And with less applause, while the need is at least as great.

Arjan Spruijt is such a person to me.

And let me make it nasty for him right away: I'm not putting him in the spotlight because he is an exception. I am putting him in the spotlight because he is the most visible member of a group that has long understood, but is far from always appreciated for it by its own environment.

That's the group this column is about.
The civil servants and semi-officials who understand that digitization is not a gadget. Not a hobby. Not an extra layer over policy. But simply a way to make decisions better, fairer and more testable. People who understand that a digital twin, a standard, a source registration or a transparent information chain are not exciting, but rather give peace of mind.

And that is precisely what makes them suspect.

Because they make visible something that many systems prefer to move around:
That governance has been foggy for years,
that goals are formulated too vaguely,
that information comes too late, too fragmented or too non-committal,
and that the biggest delay is often not in technology, but in administrative reflexes.

I recognize this painfully well.

I do my work in a world where by now the pain is often directly felt. There, projects run aground, square meters disappear, ambitions clash with feasibility, and everyone knows deep down: Pim's story may be abrasive, but not acting is more abrasive. In that world I get ticks, sometimes appreciation, sometimes both at the same time. But practice has already decided that the problem really exists.

In government and the semi-public world, things are often different.
There you have to tell the same story in an environment surrounded by more people who think: is this really necessary? Where the resistance is not always frontal, but rather polite. The friendly version of opposition. The managerial frown. The neat procrastination. The subtle softening. The classic: interesting, but let's do some reconnaissance first, do a pilot, or....

Frankly, that sometimes seems even more tiring than open struggle.

Because that is precisely where people like Arjan are walking around. People who come in not with smoke bombs and big egos, but with something much more disruptive: logic. They say that source data matters. That standards help. That transparency is not dangerous but necessary. That you have to make goals objectively testable if you ever want to steer better. And that digitization only gets value when it lands in the primary process and in the boardroom.

That's not futurism.
That's sobriety.
But in systems set up for governable vagueness, sobriety quickly feels like radicalism.

Maybe that's also why I feel so akin to that group.
Not because we all have the same role.
But because we are essentially trying to do the same thing: defend something normal in an environment that cannot go along with the change needed.

And let me be honest: Arjan and I also happen to have roughly the same style. That doesn't help at all. If you both push content and don't necessarily choose the soft route in terms of tone, you will clash more. But perhaps that is precisely why I find him so interesting. Not as a hero on a pedestal, but as a leader of the flag bearers.

Just as in my world I may be the most verbal among those trying to push logic, data and testability at developers and area developers, for me he is a visible flag bearer on the public side. Not the only one. Maybe not even the smartest. But someone from whom it's easy to see what kind of work this actually is: persevere, repeat, explain, collect, explain again.

And meanwhile knowing that you are not working on a toy, but on the basis of decent governance.

Filing moment

We don't have too little vision in the Netherlands.
We have too little appreciation for the people who try to turn vision into explainable reality.

So no, this column is not just about Arjan Spruijt.
He is simply the most visible of a group that has long understood what needs to be done, but is still too often looked at for it in its own environment as if it is causing unrest.

While these people usually only do one thing: make visible what has not been logically set up for a long time.

So don't just imagine that Pim was a civil servant.
Above all, imagine how many of those Pimmen have long been inside - and how much faster we would be if we finally took them seriously.