Over time, the provision of government services has been structured around the functions and services they provide, resulting in monolithic departments, each with a separate mandate around a particular function, rather than being structured for the convenience of the citizen who accesses the service, writes Varaidzo Mureriwa, Managing Director: Health & Public Sector at Accenture in Africa.The rise of digital through emerging technologies in the last 20 years, which has created opportunities for the human-centred provision of public service, is creating space for re-thinking how government services are provided.
Digital transformation employs technology to build new – or adapt current – business processes, culture, and consumer experiences, to meet changing business and market requirements. Digital transformation is enabling the redesign of organisations for the digital age. It can enable governments to be cost-effective, allowing them better mileage for every government Rand and making public service inclusive, accessible and more widely available – thus making government institutions “truly human”. Truly human governments break down silos, build up capabilities, and empower workforces to move from transactions, to relationships with citizens, ultimately resulting in better citizen experiences.
Three critical capabilities for a future-fit government department
So what does a genuinely human government look like from a technological perspective? At Accenture, we have developed the blueprint of a future fit, human government. The blueprint is comprehensive, but government departments need a logical starting point. The logical starting point for building out the blueprint are the following three capabilities:
- Citizen engagements that focus on life events
Evolving service delivery for citizens and businesses to enable great citizen-centred experiences that abstract the complexity of government away from citizens and focus on life events. Outcomes-focused service delivery is about meeting citizens where they are, with personalised, frictionless experiences that foster confidence in government. This entails an evolution from functional, sector-based services to personalised and smart services focused on the whole life of the citizen.
To achieve this, government departments must:
- Provide natural, end-to-end experiences that are intuitive and personalised. There’s significant room for improvement here. Our research shows that just 20% of SA citizens feel that their experiences with government are intuitive, personalised, proactive or human to a large extent.
- Adjust their processes to make it easier for citizens and businesses to interact with the government. Service design should be focused on ease of interaction with government. For instance, digital services should be focused around a life event, with citizens only needing to update government once on a life event, triggering updates across all of government in a proactive way.
- Give clearer guidance to citizens to help them understand what information is required. Government must leverage virtual tools to walk the citizen along the journey and minimise tossing citizens from one department to the next. This is another area where agencies can improve. In our research, more than half of citizens said that with confusing processes and no clear guidelines, it’s easy to make an error during interactions with government.
- Create better digital infrastructure across all parts of government and with private sector partners. This will enable greater sharing of data to minimise non-compliance and fraud. For instance, a cross-government digital ID could provide a centralised source of citizen data. This idea is popular and offers huge potential, with 72% of citizens either in favour or having neutral feelings about it.
- Embed security by design through cybersecurity
Leaders across the government need a line of sight into how security is performing across their departments. They should recognise when their security team’s actions are enabling government business objectives and when they are not. They should be able to discern the difference between security teams blocking progress and protecting the business from unseen threats.
Here are some considerations to shape a path forward:
- How well is the department strategy supported by your security strategy? It is essential for government leaders to take calculated risks in protecting their most critical assets. It is not enough to focus on addressing compliance requirements, and there is a need to Establish a departmental cyber protection strategy that is shaped to protect the most critical assets.
- Government leaders must know where their departments are most vulnerable. They need to conduct attack simulations to test cyber resilience and establish an incident response capability.
- Other interdepartmental functions need to incorporate security into their decision-making and operations. Cybersecurity must be well integrated into all departmental functions and Build cybersecurity into every facet of interdepartmental functions to improve cyber resilience.
- Departments must understand the risks of their service providers and third parties. They must understand and manage third-party risks to help reduce exposure to attacks.
- Government leaders must tap into their relationships and establish ICT communities’ networks to help prepare and educate themselves about cyber crises. They should use their contacts within the government who have experienced a serious incident to help educate and prepare for potential attacks.
- Government leaders must develop a relationship with law enforcement (State Security Agency, SAPS. etc.) to form a collaborative relationship now for sharing threat intelligence, rather than waiting for a crisis to happen
- Leverage the cloud for modernisation, agility and unbundling lock-ins with service providers
With the advent of digital, several new challenges and emerging technologies have created the imperative to utilise the cloud:
- Demand for modern services – There are expectations for personalised and tailored services by channel of choice. New ways of delivering public services would also enable better working experiences for public servants, like technology-enabled, remote working.
- Demand for flexibility – There is a growing need for public service organisations to respond to demand; the pandemic sharply highlights the ability to scale up and down capabilities based on immediate needs.
- Need to derive insight from data – Public service organisations face the challenge of extracting and gaining meaningful insights from an array of data sources in legacy applications and new volume-intensive sources such as video footage and social media.
- Growing cybersecurity threats – As cyberattacks increase in volume and sophistication, the public service needs to invest in more resilient and secure architectures and platforms. Otherwise, they risk service discontinuities or security breaches that could impair governments’ ability to operate.
- The complexity of decoupling from legacy technology and providers – Several governments have experienced “lock-in” from IT providers and are struggling to extract themselves from existing sourcing arrangements.
- Further cost pressures – Governments must maintain or improve citizens’ services, often with reduced capital expenditure. Cloud-based technology allows the government to provide faster, better benefits, making it cheaper and more accessible for those most in need to get the services such as WhatsApp-based service delivery in child welfare.
Moving to action – making the cloud work in public service
In response to the challenges they face, governments need to pursue four modernisation imperatives, each of which is supported and enabled by the cloud.
The winning formula is to Migrate, Accelerate, Grow & Innovate with an industry cloud focus:
- Migrating means ensuring a seamless hybrid, multi-cloud migration with speed, automation, and embedded security.
- Accelerating means having cloud-native architecture and applications, a solid data foundation, and digitalisation focused on product and platform.
- Growing and innovating means providing industry solutions and outcomes, leveraging data, artificial intelligence and insights, and innovation-led client reinvention.