
A New Approach to Strategy for Government Agencies
Public agencies must go beyond strategy as planning, choose their strategic approaches based on their environment, and use strategy to bridge policy and implementation.
Public sector organizations face pressure to deliver more for their citizens, from seamless digital services to new policies to address complex societal challenges. BCG’s public sector consultants help the public sector meet—and surpass—these expectations.
Providing better outcomes for citizens means being responsive, agile, and capable of creatively solving complex problems. Yet many public sector organizations remain hierarchical, bureaucratic, and built for a bygone era. To perform on all fronts—providing basic constituent services, solving pressing societal challenges, and responding to crises—governments must transform how they’re organized and how they operate.
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BCG’s public sector consultants support governments around the world by bringing together our insights and capabilities from the private sector and decades of experience supporting public sector clients. We’ve completed more than 1,000 projects in the public sector over the past five years. We also founded, and continue to support, the independent Center for Public Impact which tracks how our work and the work of our government clients delivers positive impact to citizens.
A large government agency needed to change its business processes to become more efficient. Over the course of eight months, BCG designed and implemented a new operating model for several of the agency’s business lines and BCG coached the organization’s senior leaders to drive change. The transformation achieved a 15% increase in productivity.
Given continued economic growth and the need to be adaptive and agile, a government treasury agency in Asia sought to transform its organization and operations. Using a BCG framework for change, the agency created a fiscal policy office to enforce discipline across the government, increased process efficiency, and streamlined overlaps across functions.
Public agencies must go beyond strategy as planning, choose their strategic approaches based on their environment, and use strategy to bridge policy and implementation.
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