Making government services more people-centric is not a new aspiration, but with fast advances in technology and rising societal expectations, public sector senior leaders are re-imagining how to deliver on that promise.
Since the inception of e-government in the early 2000s (later also known as smart government and digital government), making services available through digital channels became a critical instrument to improve citizen and business experience, as well as to attract investors and tourists, and collaborate with across government entities. These initiatives yielded results in terms of operational efficiency, convenience for and engagement with constituents.
Notwithstanding the progress, siloed processes and systems, forcing people and businesses to experience time-consuming bureaucratic services, and inequality of access to e-government services are still open issues.
Public sector leaders that aim to usher in the next generation of the people-centric services should understand people’s and businesses’ needs and circumstances through intelligent use of data, simplifying and joining up services across programs, partnering with the private sector, making digital services more inclusive, and enabling trusted interactions to make the bureaucracy truly “invisible”.
Reimagining Service Delivery, Operating and Trust Models
Making government bureaucracy invisible means embracing technology-powered innovation to drive proactive operations that will deliver seamless services for empowered people and businesses:
- Service delivery model. The next generation of invisible services will be seamless. Constituents (citizens, businesses, investors, tourists, etc.) will not realize that public services are being delivered. They will not be asked to interact with the government to know what services they are entitled to or be interrupted in their daily routine because they receive a request to provide data to prove changes in circumstances.
- Operating model. The next generation of invisible operations will be proactive. Without intruding into people’s and businesses’ daily lives, the government will know enough to understand the events that impact constituents and changes in circumstances. Governments will proactively register constituents for programs that they are entitled to and automatically deliver services.
- Trust model. The next generation of invisible bureaucracy will shift from enforcement to empowerment. Instead of enforcing compliance after the fact, the government will make compliance easy for constituents through automated, proactive services, and simplified regulations. Government will invest in digital trust through proactive, transparent personalized notifications, and tools to see how personal data is being used across departments.