Government 5.0: The Future of Public Services

Almost fifteen years ago, in 2006, when design thinking was only emerging as a trend, one of the initial projects developed was “The Wallet”. Workshop participants learned the practical aspects of design thinking by imagining new ways to carry cards, cash, and ID.

If you tried to run this exercise in 2020, you would confuse a lot of participants. Many of us do not carry cards or cash anymore. The world has moved on. Unless you live in U.S., where it is considered rude not to hand out one-dollar bills to everyone in a service role, you don’t need cash or even plastic cards. You can pay for lunch, bus tickets, and even wallets, by waving your phone or your watch, in front of a terminal.

Cash and cards are gone. But there is still one wallet inhabitant left to deal with: IDs. Unless you live in one of very few jurisdictions around the world, you still need to carry your plastic (or paper) license when driving a car. You still need to carry a physical document to cross a border, buy alcohol, or enter a nightclub.

The wallet exercise is a litmus test of government innovation. The world outside the public sector has moved on and fully digitalized. Innovation inertia in public sector is the reason why we still need wallets.

The good news, though, is that many governments around the world become aware of this growing digital divide. The conversation about innovation and the future of public services is shifting from exploring opportunities (the ‘nice-to-haves’) to ensuring the public sector is not left behind in the twentieth century, unable to serve its twenty-first century citizens.

The five stages of evolution

One of the challenges of digital transformation in the public sector is a lack of clear benchmarks and reference points. While there are many technology maturity models, there are no accepted frameworks for assessing the maturity of public sector services in the digital age.

Since 2015, our team at the QUT Centre for the Digital Economy has worked with local, state and federal governments in Australia, helping the public sector reimagine, design, and deploy their services. We have jointly designed, re-designed, and deployed services that impact the lives of millions of Australians. Through the application of academic research, design mindset, and practical implementation, we have been able to understand and distinctly describe five levels of maturity of public services, resulting in the “Government 5.0” framework. Our framework helps understand the possible paths that government services can take. It also reflects the typical evolution trends in public services.

1.0 Emergence

In Government 1.0, new individual services are offered. This often follows a particular social need, triggered by social, business, or digital trends. For instance, in early 2019, the Reserve Bank of India launched an ombudsman service for digital payments (Bhakta, 2019), a move in response to a dramatic growth in cashless transactions in India, due to the introduction of Unified Payments Interface. In this stage of the evolution, public service providers recognize the uniqueness of the services they can offer and start to focus on providing consistent access to them.

While selective, these individual services pave a way for new value propositions in the public sector. Service design teams play an important role in deploying such new services, focusing on ensuring proper access, through various channels, and quality of experience for service users.

2.0 Industrialising

In Government 2.0, the focus shifts toward creating an ecosystem of partners to allow for scaling the volume and variety of services. Scaling the volume allows the public sector to reach higher numbers of service users, cost effectively. This may require partnering with other organizations to jointly deliver the services or developing efficient internal service delivery models (Deloitte, 2015). The Digital Brisbane 2.0 strategy provides examples of a government scaling their service delivery, not only via partnerships services but also in the roles as an advocate, facilitator, and funder, as well as the traditional roles of regulator or provider (Brisbane Marketing, 2017). While services in Government 1.0 may not be used by some citizen groups, Government 2.0’s attention to equitability compels providers to design additional varieties of a service to make it available to other potentially under-served groups.

Effective scaling of services, both in volume and variety, requires a focus on the value chain, as well as continued focus on service experience. Service designers remain critical in this stage to ensure scaling the variety, and operating officers join them in enabling volume scaling.

3.0 Automation

As the volume and variety of service delivery reach satisfactory levels, the focus shifts toward the efficiency of the delivery. The operating model becomes the focus, and efficiency gains are sought, allowing for a more efficient allocation of public funds (Australian Productivity Commission and New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2019). The ability to deliver services at a “reasonable” cost becomes the KPI in this stage of evolution. Government 3.0 focuses on the automation of its activities — seeking productivity gains, improving efficiency and throughput, and cutting cost and waste (Australian Productivity Commission and New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2019). This might lead to a reduction in the delivery of some services developed in Government 2.0, due to purely economic considerations.

Ensuring the efficiency of service delivery is the goal of operating officers, and Government 3.0 is driven by the ambition to create a very efficient, lean, public service delivery operation. The cost of service (the lower, the better) and the efficiency (the higher, the better) become the strategic differentiators in this third stage of evolution.