Time To Throw Out That Government Transformation Playbook
- By Winston Thomas
- February 15, 2023

Ask any government IT leader before the pandemic, and they will say government transformation is different.
Although the same strategies and technologies are used, they argue that the considerations and scrutiny vary. You have to consider privacy, data sovereignty, citizen experience, and national defense in a way private entities don’t.
These concerns also slow down government transformations and make them complex. Although many eventually transformed their existing monolithic software into digital ones, the projects were department or ministry focused. Ministry-wide transformation moved at a snail’s pace.
COVID-19 just showed how wrong they were.
Flipping out orthodoxies
In a report by the Deloitte Center for Government Insights, authors William Eggers, Pankaj Kishani, and Shruthi Krishnamoorthy argued that governments need to adopt a new operating model.
“The response to the pandemic is highlighting many of the government’s orthodoxies. Examining and flipping these could lead to significant improvements,” they wrote.
They highlighted 10 ways governments can flip established practices. They range from AI-driven recruiting and performing backoffice work remotely to government anticipating government needs and making regulations more agile and adaptive.
The challenge is that many government projects cannot adopt a quick fail-and-learn approach that private companies can. They have legislators and citizen representatives to answer to, and they are using public funds.
Then, of course, the way budgeting and procurement are different. Governments also work on exceptional use cases. Akin to a conglomerate with various businesses (sometimes competing for the same resources and cannibalizing the same user base), it is challenging to scale a PoC from one department or ministry to another. What worked for an engineering department may not be suitable for the police force.
Yet, COVID-19 showed that governments could be more agile and urgent in digital transformation in a health crisis. So, it got the Deloitte researchers thinking that government transformation can also accelerate in other areas.
“Governments should strive to transform their operations not only in health care but in areas like service delivery, workforce, regulation, and procurement,” they wrote.
Understanding the how
One way to see how this can be done is by looking at what worked in government transformation. A recent McKinsey survey conducted in late 2022 shed some light.
The report showed that relatively few government transformation efforts achieve breakthroughs. Only 22% delivered their goals on time, similar to the 20% in 2021. The success rate is only 30%, which McKinsey found as “substantially less effective than in the private sector.”
The reasons? Failed transformation projects did not address the government employees’ concerns. For example, many were unsure of what the future holds for them in terms of hybrid work. Labor shortages are another concern, while the mismatch between jobs and workers created immense dissatisfaction and lured many to join the Great Resignation.
This is seeing valuable talent leave the government sector. The survey, for example, noted that 35% of Australian public sector employees are “somewhat likely” to quit their jobs in the next 3-6 months.
New starting points
McKinsey report authors Roland Dillon, Elizabeth Murray, Scott Blackburn, and Neil Christie felt governments should start with the government employees themselves instead of solely focusing on department goals or citizen engagement.
They argued that engaging employees is more critical than ever. And today’s public servants are also looking for “renewed purpose and meaning, better career-development opportunities, and more inspiration and care from their leaders.” So, projects should also be measured by government employee satisfaction and uptake instead of public satisfaction metrics.
Another starting point is real-time data. According to McKinsey, the most successful transformations were “much more likely to use real-time data” and “deploy cutting-edge digital tools.”
The authors cited Noureddine Boutayeb, Morocco’s former minister of interior, in the report saying, “Speed matters more than ever. We no longer talk about changes that take years; we talk about months or even less.”
We all know that leadership matters in transformation success. A committed and empowered leader is vital for any large-scale transformation effort.
Yet, the McKinsey report threw up another surprising trait for leading successful government transformations: compassion. And it is not as difficult as one might think.
For example, the McKinsey survey found that successful government transformations were 1.9 times more likely to have allocated enough people to get the job done.
Equally important is crystal-clear purpose and priorities. Again, the survey suggested an additional dimension: translating purpose into “individual meaning.” Transformation projects that align individual incentives to purpose doubled the chances of success.
“Besides just resources, for people to keep showing up to work, you have to provide purpose: allowing folks to feel that they can make that impact and take control of that, is critical,” said Sarah Webber, COO of the state of Arizona in the U.S. in a McKinsey interview.
A different future awaits governments
There are other factors the study highlighted for transformation success: Omnidirectional and multi-channel communications, the deployment of new tools to listen to employees and deploying digital tools in innovative ways. In another McKinsey article, the company discussed how the German federal government digitized public services in a novel way.
“The transformation team created a digitization-laboratory demonstration that allowed citizens, journalists, and public servants to experience the new approach. It also invited ministers to take part in user tests of digital prototypes,” it said.
Already, in the area of security, governments are relooking at traditional approaches. As highlighted in this CDOTrends article, forgoing public cloud transformation for the sake of data sovereignty might make you vulnerable to coordinated hacking attacks on critical systems and data.
With uncertainty on the economy and geopolitical fronts, US-China clashes, global disasters and worsening climate, governments need to change how they transform. As COVID-19 has shown, the public has lost its appetite for siloed and monolithic thinking.
Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends and DigitalWorkforceTrends. He’s a singularity believer, a blockchain enthusiast, and believes we already live in a metaverse. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Deagreez
Winston Thomas
Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends. He likes to piece together the weird and wondering tech puzzle for readers and identify groundbreaking business models led by tech while waiting for the singularity.