The only way to avoid getting disrupted is to constantly reinvent yourself

Digitalization has ushered in significant changes in the way people live and interact with each other, their
environment, and now expect public services to be provided to them in the same way. Governments too
are rallying their concentrated efforts to not be left behind in the growing digital governance wave across
the world. But it’s only prioritization amidst this digital reality and hype that can help organizations to gain
the best outcomes.
For the government agency client in point providing social services (child care, disability, unemployment
benefits), opportunities exist in multitudes – from digital discovery and delivery of services, to improved
efficiency of service utilization. Several disruptive business models, too, remain unearthed – using data to
identify value added services, and using AI to reduce fraud and formulate custom policies amongst others.
But the key questions around figuring the challenges, and prioritizing the focus areas still remain. This
report answers these important questions, and uses the Gartner’s Levels of Digital Government Maturity
and Priority Matrix for Digital Government Technology as a framework to tackle the aforementioned
themes.

Key Challenges

Even in the wave of digitalization, child care, disability, and unemployment benefits will continue being
requested, coordinated and delivered. However, what will change are the methods that are used to fulfil
these processes. Digital platforms, cloud, data and analytics, and AI will improve the efficiency, value
proposition and scale of delivery for these government services.
Economic uncertainty (compounded by potential changes in trade policy and geopolitical instability),
higher debt, and rising citizen expectations, demand innovative delivery of constituent-facing services.
Therefore, the ROI to support investment in these technologies must be measured in more-effective
outcomes. Changing demographics within the government workforce are also creating rising expectations
for more creative use of technology and better tools for employees to perform their jobs more efficiently.

Government service agencies face a number of challenges, including but not limiting to
 Emerging from an IT operations and service delivery role to take on a more strategic role
 Guiding and enabling their governments to invest strategically in innovation and modernization
 Optimizing (and possibly even transform) government missions and operations
(Source: Gartner, Link)
The key challenges of digitalization and adoption can be summed up among three areas: business,
technical and ecosystem considerations. The table below sums up the kind of challenges under each
sphere.
Key Area Challenges
Business Considerations Use cases; time to market; agility; legal and regulatory concerns; finance
strategies including TCO and CapEx vs. OpEx tradeoffs; billing models;
demand profile; scale of service; business continuity and disaster recovery;
and geographic location of both users and data centers
Technical Considerations Scalability; performance to meet workload demands and SLAs for
application developers and end users, including specialized compute
requirements and large datasets; existing applications’ cloud-readiness
and compatibility; security; integration; and licensing
Ecosystem Considerations Evaluation of cloud service providers and service models, including
Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), or Infrastructure
as a service (IaaS)
Source: Intel Cloud Computing Report Link
Digital technologies can enable, optimize or transform the existing status quo. But to figure what should
we do first, we need to identify the stage of digital adoption in the existing organization. Only once we
know where we are can we figure out our possible avenues and how to get to where we want to be. Once
the agency has figured which stage is it in, we can move to the respective recommendations.

Figure 1, Source: Gartner Link

Recommendations

After identifying the stage of maturity of the organization, we can move to the respective technologies.
But first the approach should be tied to six business objectives. (Source: Gartner Link)
 Improve revenue management
 Improve operating margin
 Improve public sector workforce
 Improve constituent experience
 Increase asset utilization
 Improve organizational performance

Figure 2, Source: Gartner Link

Next, the technology approach to delivering new digital services and adapting to the changing technology
landscape needs to enable the government to be more agile, respond to changing needs and regulation
more rapidly and move towards a model that can better support innovation.
As suggested earlier, digital technologies can enable, optimize or transform the existing status quo.
Depending on where the organization identifies itself as per the maturity matrix (Figure 1), and its business
goals (Figure 2), we can map the suitable technologies as per its stages of adoption:

Maturity Level Type Phase Suitable Technology Focus First

01 Initial E-Government Customer Experience
Enable
02 Developing Open Interoperability
03 Defined Data Centric Optimize Data Analytics
04 Managed Fully Digital Cloud (Everything as a service)
Transform
05 Optimizing Smart AI/ML
Table 1
The first stage should be enabling phase of providing good customer experience through digital discovery
and delivery of services, and creating seamless operations through interoperability. The second focus
should be on optimizing the processes using data analytics and benchmarking practices. The third phase
is transforming the entire digital governance by first going fully on cloud services and using a digital
governance platform approach. The final step in the transform phase is to become ever more smart by
using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Other Priorities

Once the actionable recommendations towards technologies abovementioned are taken, the agency
should be on lookout for next frontier of digital technologies, as earmarked by Priority Matrix for Digital
Government Technology.

Figure 3, Source: Gartner, Link

Some of these include but not limiting to:

IoT
IoT can be leveraged in benefits delivery by monitoring last-mile touch-points and eliminating fraud.
Blockchain
Blockchain could assist in decentralization of data and conditional benefit allowances. Conditional
allowances can be configured into blockchain hyperledgers, assisting direct delivery of benefits.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence’s uses in government continue to grow, being led by use case for fraud detection,
conversational interfaces and virtual personal assistants for end users.
Cybersecurity
Ensuring cybersecurity and privacy concerns is a must to avoid erosion of public trust and misuse of
data.

Digital Transformation and Technology Adoption

If the agency adopts a digital government technology platform approach, it will reduce the duplicated
efforts to deliver common functionality across multiple services and sub-functions of the agency.

Even in case of a single service delivery, some cases may span two or more of the categories and require
higher levels of service, integration and evidence handling. For example, tightly coordinating the activities
of multidisciplinary teams representing childcare benefits, employment programs etc. can bring a holistic
approach to serving case participants better and improving outcomes.

In such cases enterprise-scale case management solutions continue to extend their functionality,
particularly those offered as platform-based frameworks deployed in the cloud.

There are several potential starting points for the platform approach:
 Continuing to facilitate cross-agency case management
 Investigating automation and intelligence-enabled opportunities through the use of machine
learning, cognitive expert advisors or robotic process automation
 Exploring — cautiously — adoption of an enterprise platform where a single (usually large) vendor
has a broad range of functionality and capabilities encompassed largely in a single digital
government technology platform product
 Improving the citizen and constituent experience by using a combination of voice of the
customer, conversational user interfaces, customer engagement hub and social for CRM: social
feedback management
However, as much as the platform and data storage should be centralised for using AI/ML and other data
analytics technologies centrally, the functions and platform for each service on the platform should be
modular and decentralised so that each individual service can add modules and components locally.
Summing up, the agency should first focus on most impactful and business goals oriented technologies,
while keeping on lookout for keeping itself future-ready with frontier technologies to come. At the same
time, adopting a nationally central platform and data approach, combined with locally decentralised and
modular functions and operations will go a long way in ensuring the agency reaches its goals and
overreaches its digital aspirations.