A new age of government service delivery

New technology combined with old ways of doing business don’t always produce good results. To truly take advantage of today’s new technologies, government should incorporate new thinking about how it delivers services to citizens.

Government: Good at efficiency, poor at novelty

Creating new processes or interdepartmental relationships may seem simple when weighed against the great potential benefits they can bring to citizens, but such changes cut against the grain of innovation in government. Any organization can become set in one way of doing business, and it often takes a significant jolt to shock it into adopting new business models. In commercial industry, where innovation is focused on creating new and improved products, an innovative new product can be that spark. This is exactly what happened in commercial industry with the emergence of cloud. The ability of cloud to quickly scale up and down allowed software companies to adopt new pay-per-use business models for which their clients don’t have to purchase copies or licenses.

But government does not tend to innovate that way (figure 2). Rather than innovating around its core product—the citizen service—government’s innovations tend to refine the efficiency of current models (for more on our research methodology comparing government and commercial innovation, see “Appendix: Methodology”). The result is that one of the key motivators of adopting new service delivery models—delivering them differently through new business models—is lacking. Government is, therefore, more likely to try and graft new technologies onto old methods, leading to the rocket mail problem. Improving only the process that delivers services can lead governments to deliver the wrong service with exquisite efficiency.

Source: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/public-sector/new-technology-new-model-public-service-delivery.html