The building blocks of monumental government service delivery

But today, things are different. He takes out his phone, sends the question “How to obtain a land deed?” to a government bot on WhatsApp, and a few minutes later receives an automated answer back in his own Gujarati language. He then uses the Umang app on his phone to make all the necessary transactions with the different government agencies. By the time the sun has set fully below the horizon, he has a digitally verifiable land deed on his phone and is one step closer to that new tractor he needs.

This story may be fictional, but the services described are real. Digital technologies are allowing governments across the globe to meet constituent needs in fundamentally new ways. And it is not just Umang in India—there is the Diia app in Ukraine, Singapore’s wide-ranging LifeSG programs, and even state-level apps like Service NSW in Australia, and many more. Together, we call this class of tools citizen experience platforms (CXPs) because they represent new areas and new ways of constituents receiving services. Whether they take the form of a single app, an online portal, or mix of channels, these tools share a common goal: to deliver services to constituents more quickly, more easily, and more efficiently than ever before. Ukraine’s Diia app alone allows more than 19 million users access to over 100 government services, ranging from receiving the world’s first-ever digital passport, to registering the birth of a child, to filing taxes—all from a smartphone app.¹

But these apps, portals, and online services could be just the tip of the digital iceberg. Beneath it is a large digital infrastructure that makes this new generation of service delivery work. For example, to receive a digital passport takes more than just an app. It takes identity verification, data management, and the ability to transact with a government agency. The set of digital tools that allow those actions to take place is called digital public infrastructure or DPI. Whether created by government, industry, or non-profits, DPI comprises open, interoperable tools that serve as the foundations for higher-level services.

Together, DPI and the service delivery apps it enables are the future. Not only do they represent a dramatic shift in digital infrastructure that powers government services, but also a shift in the philosophy around services. Accessing government service should be delightfully easy. For the first time, governments have the ability to follow Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s lead and put “the state in a smartphone.”²

With these new tools, select governments are already creating 10x improvements in the scale, quality, and efficiency of service delivery. But the shift in mindset away from siloed websites and toward DPI and common, service-specific apps can be difficult for many government agencies. However, the public is already beginning to demand this level of service, and governments that can deliver it are being rewarded with fewer costs, greater resilience, and better public trust.³ The future of government service delivery could already be on your phone.

Citizen experience platforms meet citizens needs faster and more efficiently than ever before

Government services are at an inflection point.⁴ Citizen experience (CX) is routinely poor, which consequently is damaging the public’s trust in government.⁵ In one survey, while 70% of federal managers thought that their CX was at par with that of the private sector, the public disagreed, rating the federal CX 12 points lower than industry leaders.⁶ To do better, it may require more than slicker webpages and more apps. People don’t merely want faster government service delivery—they want their needs met. But meeting those needs at the speed and scale of the modern world appears to demand a new model of service delivery.

Constituents want services that are: All in one place

CXPs offer: A single experience regardless of where the services originate

CXPs can help deliver a unified, single experience, even when the sensitive nature of data means that individual agencies need to retain control over their own data. Singapore’s LifeSG is one example of how CXPs can combine services from across government to help meet constituent needs. When someone loses a job, for example, they don’t only need unemployment assistance, but a bundle of services. LifeSG combines assistance from a suite of resources ranging from educational opportunities to job-search help and interview tips.⁷ And digital service delivery isn’t only for tech-savvy users either. By delivering more services more quickly, digital delivery can free up resources for citizen segments who prefer in-person or phone interactions.

Constituents want services that are: Quick and easy

CXPs offer: Unified outcomes

CXPs are built not only to make tasks faster, but also to make sure that the app is helping constituents achieve their goals better. For example, issuing a building permit on a phone is inconsequential if applying for that permit is still an onerous, time-consuming process. As Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with Deloitte, “Our goal with the Diia app was not to digitize existing bureaucracies; it was to create new services.”⁸

Constituents want services that are: Able to meet their evolving needs

CXPs offer: Extreme scalability

CXPs have shown the ability to grow quickly in terms of both number of users and number of services. The rapid changes facing Ukraine from 2020 to 2022 are one example. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Ukraine’s Diia was able to use its document-verification services to launch COVID-19 vaccination certificates. When the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2022, Diia streamlined payments for internally displaced persons. When homes had to be rebuilt after being damaged in the war, Diia launched the eRecovery service for easy, seamless fund disbursement to homeowners.⁹ The speed of meeting new needs for citizens would not have been possible without the CXP provided by Diia and the DPI enabling it.

DPI makes the CXP work

The remarkable improvements in service quality and efficiency that CXPs deliver are not magic. They rest on the hard work done to create the underlying tools that allow CXPs to work—namely the DPI.

But DPI is not simply another technology for government to buy. It isn’t one single technology but categories of what can help with better service delivery. Think of DPI as being akin to categories of ingredients. When baking a cake—for example—you need flour, leavening agents, sweeteners, fats, and water. However, within these categories, you have the flexibility to choose between options such as all-purpose or whole wheat for flour, yeast or baking soda for leavening, or egg whites for binding, among others. Taking a cue from this example, DPI represents a mindset shift regarding how government finds the right technology: moving from buying a series of specific solutions to putting in place flexible building blocks that can be combined into whatever solution is needed in the future.

Four broad categories of DPI are needed to make a CXP work efficiently (figure 1).

Digital identity: Digital identity is one key that can unlock a new era of service delivery. Being able to prove who you are—using an authorized, secure identity—enables constituents to receive government services without having to tediously log in to different government websites. More than 160 countries have launched digital identity programs.¹⁰ India’s digital identity program, dubbed Aadhaar, kickstarted the largest digital identity project in the world with the Indian government issuing over 1.3 billion digital IDs. Over 1,700 state and federal government programs rely on Aadhaar to deliver government benefits and services.¹¹ By asking constituents to link their bank accounts to Aadhaar, the Indian government was able to transfer US$3.9 billion to 318 million beneficiaries during COVID-19.¹²

In Ukraine, the Diia app enables Ukrainians to provide identity and store documents like driver’s licenses and passports. Diia users can access a wide range of services including getting a passport, receiving financial assistance for displacement, or applying for compensation for property damage caused by war.¹³

Data exchange: Data-exchange systems enable seamless, secure, and consent-based data-sharing among governments, individuals, and businesses. Data exchange is important to resilience of service delivery and can be pivotal in times of crises when speed of delivery is paramount.

Further, data exchange also plays a pivotal role in implementing the once-only principle. It enables governments to share data among multiple agencies in a way that alleviates the need for individuals and businesses to provide the same data repeatedly. Such DPI can also allow private players access to data to offer a range of financial, health care, and educational services to individuals. When it comes to sharing personal data, DPI can help secure informed consent and establish personal data protection and trusted data-sharing mechanisms.

Estonia’s data-exchange platform, X-tee, facilitates over 2.2 billion data-sharing transactions per year and is being used by 52,000 organizations to deliver over 3,000 services.¹⁴ X-tee is built on decentralized databases that are maintained by respective ministries but can communicate securely via internet-based queries facilitated through X-tee. Decentralization helps eliminate capturing of duplicate data, reduces single points of failure, and allows the flexibility to add new databases.¹⁵ The centralized logging of all transactions, on the other hand, helps protect privacy by allowing users to view where, when, and by whom their data was accessed.¹⁶ Altogether, the system has significantly reduced the time taken to exchange data and in turn has accelerated government services. For example, filing tax returns barely takes three to five minutes, and opening a new business takes three hours compared to five business days before the use of X-tee.¹⁷

But X-tee is not the only player in this space. Other states have reached similar outcomes from different starting points. Ukraine’s Trembita pairs the concepts of X-tee with uniquely Ukrainian cryptography to further protect against cyberattacks for a nation at war.¹⁸ And India makes use of application programming interfaces or APIs and open architecture to share data across different ministries.

Common digital services: Common digital services allow individuals and businesses to transact with various government agencies securely and conveniently. For agencies, common digital services can help speed up development as they would no longer need to create their own unique solutions for payment-processing or certificate verification. Payment-processing is an illustrative example of these common services within a CXP. Typically, these payment systems allow the collection and disbursement of payments 24/7, which provides recipients with immediate access to funds they receive.

India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI), Brazil’s Pix, Europe’s TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS), and Türkiye’s The Instant and Continuous Transfer of Funds System (FAST) are some of the examples of interoperable DPI payment systems. These common payments systems are reaching such scales that they are transforming their countries. Brazil’s Pix reached more than 140 million consumers and 13 million businesses and has become so entrenched in the financial sector that it is being used more often than credit and debit cards combined.¹⁹ Incorporating those users into the digital economy can have a big impact. In India, for example, the total value of UPI transactions done between fiscals 2022 and 2023 was nearly 50% of the country’s nominal gross domestic product.²⁰

User experience: While it is often relatively straightforward to deliver good customer service in single, in-person interactions, replicating this level of service at the scale of an entire country and across a wide spectrum of service delivery options, ranging from in-person office visits to call centers, website, and mobile apps, can present challenges. Complicating the situation for governments is the fact that they must serve all citizens, regardless of age, disability, or whether they have a smartphone. Furthermore, citizens’ preference for how they engage with government can vary widely by age, whether they are located in an urban or rural setting, and even what level of government they are interacting with. For instance, citizens are more likely to want to interact with their local government in-person compared with national or state governments.²¹

The right UX principles and design within a CXP can help ensure that constituents have the same experience regardless of device or channel.²² “If you have government single-sign-on, and you have the same design toolbox, then users don’t really care if the browser window says, Police and Border Guard in the URL, or whether it says Estonian State Portal. As long as the information is coherent, the designs are coherent, and users don’t have to log in again,” says Luukas Ilves, Estonia’s undersecretary for digital transformation, in an interview with Deloitte.²³

In fact, creating the right UX infrastructure can help speed up adoption of digital tools for government agencies themselves. Rather than having to create their own apps and ensure they meet all the right design and security standards, agencies can simply use the existing UX infrastructure to meet their users’ needs as well.

Open DPI can even give further benefits to society

The pairing of CXPs and DPI can be a powerful one, but its benefits extend beyond the delivery of services to constituents on their phones. Further benefits include:

Improved trust in government. By meeting the needs of constituents where they are, the potential benefits of CXPs can be massive. The streamlined interactions offered by a CXP not only reduces the “time tax” on constituents but can also help rebuild fractured trust in government.²⁴ Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, highlights increased trust as one of the major outcomes of the Diia app: “By simplifying people’s lives and killing paper bureaucracy to a few clicks on a smartphone, we managed to gain the trust of citizens.”²⁵

Inclusive economic growth. CXPs can also offer benefits beyond government. By making the infrastructure of CXPs available to other users, governments can also foster and accelerate commercial activity. In Ukraine, the Diia app is used by more than 10,000 partners, including several banks that use it to verify their customers’ identities online. And just as governments making GPS available to commercial industry spawned significant economic growth, the use of government-provided digital identity is already yielding commercial benefit. In India, leveraging government-provided digital identity has enabled banks and other financial institutions to reduce the cost of onboarding a new customer from US$23 to US$0.1—a remarkable 230x improvement.

Pramod Varma, former chief architect of Aadhaar and several other DPIs in India, in an interview with Deloitte, said that DPI is crucial to the inclusive economic grow of a country: “DPI is like a playground consisting of a set of technological underpinnings supported by policies and regulations that encourage market innovation, which allows digitally inclusive economy to thrive.”²⁶

Cost efficiency for government. Open DPI means that government can benefit from others’ solutions as well. Government organizations may not need to create their own solutions to every problem. If an open and interoperable solution already exists in the private sector, why not use it, and save the public time and money? The way banks in India benefited from the Indian government’s investment in digital identity, the Canadian government benefited from bank’s investment in authenticating identity—Interac allows Canadians to use their verified bank credentials to securely log on to government services.²⁷

One of the drivers behind centralization of digital services into a CXP is cost efficiency. In Estonia, according to Undersecretary Ilves, “The rise of a common UX platform has come from realization that the cost to meet the expectations of today’s users for a sophisticated and intuitive experience has increased,” to the point where it may not be feasible for many different agencies to take on that challenge alone.²⁸

New pathways of public service delivery. By making DPI available to all, government leaders can create ways for commercial and non-profit organizations to also deliver services to constituents (figure 2). The result is more services tailored to more people meeting more needs faster than ever before. Take India’s Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) as an example. DIKSHA is an open education tech platform developed by EkStep Foundation for the Indian government. The platform allows students, teachers, and administrators to share resources such as textbooks and course materials among themselves and offers solutions such as professional development for teachers.²⁹ More than just an online portal for schools, DIKSHA has allowed peer-to-peer sharing among 200 million students and 7 million teachers accessing content created by over 11,000 contributors.³⁰

DPI can even help provide services across international borders. When Ukrainians displaced by the war fled into neighboring Poland, they quickly needed credentials that could allow them to travel but return to Poland. The governments of Poland and Ukraine worked together to create the Diia.pl app.³¹ Like the Diia app, Diia.pl housed a verified digital identity certificate that allowed displaced Ukrainians freedom of movement and the right to return to Poland.

DPI: A road map, not technology

When it comes to DPI, not every country is at the same stage of development. The core strength of DPI lies in its flexibility. Creating a CXP requires specific elements from each DPI category, and what those elements rely on can be customized to the unique circumstances of time and place.

Take identity as an example. Since 2010, India has had a unique digital identity in the form Aadhaar, which means it could use that as a foundation for creating CXPs such as the Umang app. However, when Ukraine created its Diia app, it did not have an existing digital identity system to rely on, and hence it used the app itself to issue digital credentials like passports and driver’s licenses. Estonia started with a physical identity card that included a private key stored on a physical “smart chip–based” identity card.³² Later, as mobile apps grew in popularity, the country added Smart ID, which can be accessed through smartphones.³³ So no matter where each of these countries started their digital identity journey; they were able to find unique solutions to address their unique needs thanks to the flexible nature of DPI. The same holds true for other categories of DPI (figure 3).

Governance

However, this flexibility comes at a cost. It takes consistent attention to ensure its effectiveness.

Encouraging the sharing of data across departments or adopting solutions that were made elsewhere requires time and attention from leaders. Digital transformation starts with understanding the incentives of each department and explaining to them in those terms how adoption could benefit them and the public. Abhishek Singh, the president and chief executive officer of India’s National e-Governance Division, found this education process to be key in adoption of India’s Umang app: “When we try to ensure that the services of different departments are made available on one platform—that requires a lot of effort that requires explaining to them.”

This level of engagement with government departments and the public is typically sustainable only when senior leaders make it a priority. Minister Fedorov found that consistent political will from the top was important in Ukraine’s adoption of the Diia app: “It all started with President Zelenskyy’s vision of ‘a state in a smartphone,’ which led to creation of the Ministry of Digital Transformation in Ukraine.”³⁴ To manage and coordinate digital transformation projects like Diia, Ukraine has created an organizational structure where every central agency and state has a chief digital transformation officer.

These educational efforts and ministerial infrastructure cost real dollars. In many cases, the technological and organizational infrastructure needs to be in place before an app can be turned on and citizens can realize its benefits. This means that leaders should pay special attention to funding. First, they should articulate to the public a vision for the digital future that justifies the up-front costs. Second, they should recognize the power of funding as a tool for shaping collaboration within government. Shared funding models have proven successful in many different countries at encouraging data-sharing and improving the outcomes of projects that cross organizational boundaries.³⁵

Getting started

Doing something so new as CXPs and DPI can be difficult and daunting, especially for those governments with more mature—and often more complex—service delivery processes. Ironically, that may be why those leading the charge on this generation of services are governments either under immense pressure from war or those looking to leapfrog over a generation of technology. But as growing public demand forces other countries to look to similar solutions to raise delivery quality and improve trust, the future of service delivery is increasingly digital.

To help make that future a reality, leaders should consider:

Technology: Start with winning use cases

• Technology doesn’t have to solve every problem at once. By focusing on a few, high-value use cases at the start, government leaders can attract new users, prove that the technologies work, and improve chances of adoption. In fact, if the problem to be solved doesn’t have an existing solution that can minimize switching costs for both the public and government and help encourage adoption even more. Pramod Varma, in an interview with Deloitte, describes how India successfully used this approach to build its digital services as “+1 thinking.” “If you want to encourage adoption, think about adding one function or capability to what already exists. This will not only make it easier to adopt, but also create opportunities for further innovation down the road.”³⁶

Policy: Get buy-in from senior leaders to eliminate roadblocks

• Technology is important, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. Technology solutions without policy changes can create rapid access to slow bureaucracies. Similarly, the technology itself needs stable funding and governance over time. Both of these issues require attention of senior leaders and commitment from the very top to spend political capital to make changes. CXPs and DPI should not be pitched to leaders as just more investments in digital, but rather they should be tied to senior leaders’ visions of the future. Designing for key victories to be achievable in short, two-year to three-year time frames can also help win buy-in from political leaders in rapid election cycles.

Solution: Live in the ecosystem

• Finally, the beauty of DPI and CXPs is that government doesn’t need to solve every problem. It does not need to create every technology or deliver every service. But to make this work, agencies and individual leaders need to live in that ecosystem. They should be aware of the unmet needs of their constituents, the technologies being developed in industry, and what academic and non-profit partners are available to help.

CXPs and DPI represent a significant shift in approach to technology for many governments, but they also represent a future with cheaper, faster, and more effective services for the public.