Does the government want to become easier for citizens and businesses to deal with?
What if the government sees digitization mainly as a way to lower costs and improve efficiency? Then the focus should be on services that are heavily used or those that account for the most spending
Services
The United Kingdom kicked off its digital transformation program by digitizing 25 basic services, such as registering to vote and transferring car registrations.
Norway’s tax administration provides citizens with tax returns that have been filled out for them, and more than 70 percent of citizens submit those returns
Singapore integrated its digital sign-on system to give each resident a “Singpass ID” for obtaining services from more than 60 agencies. In the United Kingdom, the websites of all 24 ministerial departments and 331 other agencies and public bodies have been merged into a single website, gov.uk.
In Sweden, parents receive regular digital reminders about upcoming health check-ups and vaccinations for their children
Processes
Just as governments should digitize their highest volume services first, they should also digitize their most labor-intensive and expensive back-end processes before others.
Sweden’s social-insurance agency began its digitization program with five products that accounted for 60 percent of all manual processing work and more than 80 percent of the agency’s call-center volume.
Singapore has fully digitized its process for registering a company, shortening the time required to just 15 minutes in most cases and automatically issuing notices of incorporation to corporate secretaries so business owners don’t have to look them up.
By contrast, when Denmark attempted to do the same, it found that companies couldn’t be automatically classified for tax purposes because national tax laws were too vague. Updating the laws with more precise definitions of tax categories made it possible to classify businesses using an algorithm. Now, more than 98 percent of the tasks involved in registering new companies take place in seconds, with no human intervention. This experience highlights the need for governments to streamline inefficient or hard-to-automate processes before digitizing them
Once governments have digitized routine processes, they can extend their efforts to more complex ones, including those of finance, human resources, and other functions that rely heavily on people. They can also design new functions and processes to be digital from the beginning.
Decisions
Australia’s tax office analyzed the tax returns of more than one million small and midsize enterprises to develop industry-specific financial benchmarks. It now uses those benchmarks to identify firms that may have underreported their income and notifies them of possible discrepancies.
Germany’s labor agency homed in on youth unemployment. It created a job platform that analyzes candidates’ profiles, makes personalized job recommendations, and refers suitable candidates to prospective employers. The site attracted 18 million unique visitors a day (compared to 8 million for the leading private sector competitor) with 1.5 million job offers.
Data sharing
The UK tax authority uses a tool called Connect to link more than one billion data items from 30 sources, including government land and vehicle registers, social-media sites, and trade associations. Since its launch in 2008, Connect has enabled the authority to identify possible instances of tax evasion and claim an additional £3 billion in tax revenue.
The open application program interfaces (APIs) of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Sweden’s transport administration Trafikverket let third parties feed transit-system data into their services.
The government of Estonia has a platform, called X-Road, that enables secure data exchanges among the state’s information systems. Some companies, such as healthcare providers, can even use X-Road to connect their IT systems with the government’s.
The government of Denmark administers a master data program that pulls information from multiple registers onto a single platform, open for public access, to which state agencies, municipalities, and private companies can connect their systems
