Getting to Agile at Scale in the Public Sector
The public sector is adopting agile but not yet at scale.
Miguel Carrasco
Managing Director & Senior Partner
Sydney
BCG, through our Center for Digital Government, unlocks the potential for greater effectiveness, impact, and public value. We partner with leaders in government and society to tackle their most important challenges and capture their greatest opportunities.
A crucial step for most governments is implementing a digital transformation, but it is a complex endeavor. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and blockchain hold promise, but simply embracing them isn’t enough. Achieving comprehensive change requires rethinking how leaders govern and necessitates the reconsidering of a government’s organizational structures, capabilities, processes, and culture.
BCG’s deep expertise in data science and artificial intelligence, agile, human-centered design, IT architecture, and digital product and service innovation enables governments to meet their challenges head-on. We help government agencies work in new ways, use data to optimize policy development and service delivery, build end-to-end digital journeys for citizens, and design strategies to create bionic governments of the future.
BCG’s Center for Digital Government is a multidisciplinary team of more than 120 digital government consulting experts. We are passionate about working with public sector organizations to create and deliver value for citizens.
To unlock governments’ potential, we bring to bear our extensive capabilities in working with people and organizations, transforming operations, and using data and technology. Our unmatched public-sector expertise—in areas such as education, health, disability, defense, employment and welfare, taxation and finance, and infrastructure—enables governments to deliver innovative solutions.
Collaboration, partnership, co-design, and enablement are hallmarks of our approach that also values working closely with clients in integrated teams. We are vendor agnostic, which enables us to bring an independent perspective and a strong commitment to finding the right solution that maximizes value creation for the government, its citizens, and its employees.
We work with governments to identify opportunities and develop prioritized plans of action to accelerate their digital transformation. Our approach is holistic and equips governments to deliver the maximum value for citizens. It includes building business and technology capabilities, organizing government around citizens’ needs, and deploying new and emerging technologies. We also bring deep expertise in developing employee capabilities; reimagining project funding, governance, and assurance; and transitioning to new ways of working.
We work with governments to seamlessly design, deliver, and deploy working digital products and services—at speed and at scale. Key to our approach is designing digital services based on customer journeys and around life events using human-centered design and ethnographic research. By doing so, we reduce the complexity of interacting with government and deliver intuitive products and services that better meet citizens’ needs and expectations.
We work with governments to increase their efficiency by building world-class IT services. Digitizing systems and processes enables governments to more effectively serve citizens. Transitioning to digital and data platforms with modular cloud-based architectures allows governments to treat data as an asset decoupled from legacy systems. The result is increased flexibility, improved scalability, a higher return on investment, and IT systems that will be able to meet the demands of the future.
We work with governments to become more nimble and focused on creating value for citizens. Transitioning to agile-at-scale operating models, adopting agile practices, and empowering multidisciplinary teams is key. We also help governments build resilience, speed the delivery of new and improved services, and be more innovative. Critical to that effort is taking a strategic approach to workforce planning that includes building digital skills and capabilities, strengthening the digital and innovation culture, and attracting and retaining top digital talent.
Value-Based Policies and Services
We work with governments to harness data so they can create more-informed policies, improve efficiency and effectiveness, and proactively deliver services that are tailored to citizens’ needs. We help governments build data and analytics capabilities; understand, test, and scale use cases; and ethically deploy new and emerging technologies. Advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation are just a few of the technologies that create value from data.
We work with governments to safeguard national information by managing cybersecurity risks and buttressing capabilities, enabling them to serve as responsible custodians of citizens’ data. We help evaluate the cybersecurity risk profile, assess the security posture, and design and deliver a holistic cybersecurity program.
BCG’s Digital Government Citizen Survey is one of the most comprehensive digital government surveys. In our most recent study, we surveyed 24,500 people across 36 countries about their usage of digital government services, their satisfaction with the quality of those services, and how those services have impacted their overall trust and confidence in government. The data was collected as part of BCG’s biennial citizen-satisfaction survey, which was first conducted in 2014.
Our research shows that the landscape for digital government is promising but challenging. Although citizens are using and relying on digital services for government more than ever, governments are still struggling to get digital right. Globally, citizens’ satisfaction with these services remained flat.
However, our study reveals that some countries are more successfully implementing public sector digitization than others. Learn about the trends across countries by using the interactive dashboard below.
Our multidisciplinary team from across our specialized businesses brings unmatched depth and breadth of technology, data and public policy expertise.
Our strategic partnership with Public Digital and our alliances with technical and delivery specialists such as Faethm, Contino, and Salesforce also enable us to bring a holistic end-to-end delivery perspective that ensures strategy is linked all the way through to implementation.
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