White House, Whitehall, Singapore - how public bodies copy Silicon Valley startups

Public servants or hipsters? Governments around the world are overhauling their digital services using startup principles

At first glance, the rigid bureaucracy of government and the agile approach to innovation at tech startups might appear wholly incompatible.

Where government is large and slow, startups are lean and work in sprints. Where governments resist failure, tech firms embrace it as a way of moving on. Where government avoids disruption at all costs, most tech startups actively pursue it as the end game. And that’s before considering the litany of poorly run government IT projects.

Yet, despite the differences, these two worlds are coming together. Rapidly changing technology and changing user demands and expectations are forcing governments to transform their digital services to keep pace. Most governments now share the same mission: to improve radically the user experience of interacting with government.

To do this, a growing number of governments are setting up their own digital agencies. The aim? To apply principles used by tech startups to overhaul public services.

One of the early adopters of this model was the UK government, which in 2011 launched the Government Digital Service (GDS), developed Gov.uk, a platform for all government websites and launched an online marketplace for government suppliers.

After that strong start, progress has slowed more recently, with the departure of senior GDS staff, but the GDS model is being copied by several other governments. In August 2014 the United States Digital Service was created as a startup in the White House and in July 2015, the Australian government launched the Digital Transformation Office (DTO). Most recently, the Singapore government unveiled its own agency, GovTech, in October.

GovTech is different from its peers in several respects. First, it is big. Where the likes of Australia’s DTO have a headcount of around 70, GovTech has 1,800 people on the payroll. Second, it is centralised. Singapore has a single layer of government that is broken into 90 units and GovTech, born of the merger of two departments, is embedded into all of them, running all tech projects.

Jacqueline Poh, chief executive of GovTech, says that despite its scale and structure, the agency has integrated the lean and agile working practices so typical of tech start ups. To this end, teams of software engineers, data scientists, designers and user experience experts work in digital accelerators, where collaborative working is encouraged to speed up innovation, usually with people sharing workspace.

GovTech has a larger remit than other government agencies. As well as transforming the delivery of digital public services by using technologies such as analytics and artificial intelligence, it has been tasked with developing capabilities in other areas. So the team is working on apps extracting information from data government infrastructure, geospatial technology, cybersecurity and smart sensors, which pick up signals from the physical world.

Poh says GovTech is looking at applied technologies like these to see how to use them for improving healthcare or urban areas, as part of the Singapore government’s Smart Nation initiative. Launched in 2014, Smart Nation encourages people, businesses and government to work together to use technological advancements to improve everyday life.

GovTech is now working on the development of a trade platform to simplify data exchanges between businesses, their partners and government. It is also considering piloting an extension of its MyInfo system, which enables citizens to share personal data with the state, to the banking industry next year.

Paul Shelter, chief executive of Australia’s DTO, says government agencies around the world are increasingly collaborating over innovation. “We look closely at what our colleagues are doing in the UK, in the US, in Singapore, in Estonia, in New Zealand, and other countries as well [including Korea], and we see what works,” he says. “We are seeing people from countries all around the world working in very similar ways, and, increasingly, sharing each other’s code.”

Bill Dutton, professor of media and information policy at Michigan State University, believes digital service transformation requires the top-down management support an agency model provides. But it can’t simply be imposed: “A central agency has to believe in and trust innovation at the edges of the bureaucracy, rather than top-down innovation. This is very difficult to achieve in practice.”

This was highlighted by a report titled Making a success of digital government, published in October by UK thinktank the Institute for Government. It found that the launch of the UK’s GDS created “a lot of conflict and resistance to change, some failure and some success” – the conflict being a result of the traditional way projects were implemented.

Poh acknowledges these cultural challenges. “Our motto is: act small, think big and do now. There is a tendency in government to do the exact opposite.”

But she is confident there is the political will to support delivery. In fact, that she suggests this agency model could become a digital disrupter, changing the way industries or organisers do business.Poh thinks adding robotics or augmented reality, which uses technology to enhance someone’s perception of reality, to some of the government’s services, “ would actually give us a disruptive edge”.

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