Government e-services: Performing or just Surviving?

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Government e-services: Performing or just Surviving?

Digital government is now seen as the pathway to enabling national agendas, achieving economic diversification, and fostering a more sustainable future globally. Although governments worldwide are at different stages of digital government maturity, all of them should pivot towards prioritizing citizen-centricity and designing services around key events in citizens’ lives in the coming years. This shift would facilitate more efficient business models, elevate citizen satisfaction levels, and yield various economic benefits.

Effective implementation of e-services provides Governments and Citizens with the opportunity to:

  • Gain access to and receive faster responses from Government services in both urban and rural areas.
  • Provide services at lower operating costs.
  • Enhance transparency on services and related processes to improve service turnaround time.
  • Facilitate talent transformation to improve service levels.

 

Government entities worldwide have made significant investments in digitizing citizen services through various technology transformation approaches, including low-code, no-code, bespoke development, BPM, and CRM. These services have been expanded to apps, bots, service centers, and digital contact channels, meeting the needs of both public and private sector collaboration. Data generated from these integrations is utilized to develop analytics and AI models for governance and decision-making.

However, each choice presents its own set of pros and cons. Implementations may face challenges such as:

  • Appealing UX coupled with weak processes leading to frustrating response times.
  • Misalignment between Business and IT due to a lack of business process visualization.
  • Cumbersome, slow, and expensive change management.
  • Weak documentation for technology support and talent development.
  • System performance degradation as it scales.
  • Failures in data migrations.

 

To achieve true digital adoption, the core technology framework must align seamlessly with user journeys and processes, necessitating careful consideration of critical expectations such as:

For Citizen or Business

For Government Operations

  • Unified user journey, digital channels, and user experience

  • Quicker response times to services

  • Transparency on application status

  • Access to data and documents

  • Proactive services

  • Re-engineering complex processes for automation and integration

  • User experience of employees

  • Data migration

  • Reports & Dashboards

  • Business Activity Monitoring

All digital platforms and tools have their advantages and disadvantages. Good low-code platforms may have limitations on managing complex processes, global rules, and automation. Good BPM tools can manage complexity but may not match low-code platforms in user experience. Both may lack document management capabilities. Ideally, one may want to purchase all of them with an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and integrate them. However, this can be complex and expensive.

Considering these factors, the ideal approach may involve having a loosely coupled architecture and opting for a headless BPM approach. For the organization to evolve citizen service levels, the business must lead, and IT must act as a partner for continuous improvement. This requires both parties to communicate effectively through visualization to execution of their processes. Core system capabilities needed include:

  1. Business process modeling, simulation, and documentation
  2. Business process management and global rules management
  3. Document management
  4. Limitless user experience potential for citizens and businesses
  5. User experience for employees
  6. Business activity monitoring
  7. Availability of APIs
  8. Service level KPIs and SLA reporting
 

Once this core foundation is strong, it can extend to any digital channel, analytics, and ecosystem integration. Engaging a partner with extensive experience in e-services programs, business process re-engineering, user experience design, platform implementation, development & integration, data migration, testing, and support capabilities, along with robust program governance, then becomes imperative for success.