Chapter 6: Transforming the Public Sector

In Chapter 5, Transforming One Industry at a Time, we learned about the outcomes of industrial digital transformation in the chemical and semiconductor manufacturing sector. We saw how the supply chain is being transformed and how buildings and facilities are becoming smarter. Finally, we saw how industrial worker safety and productivity are being transformed. In this chapter, we will build on the introduction to public sector digital transformation in earlier chapters. We will learn how the public sector differs from the private sector and how those differences present additional challenges to digital transformation efforts. We will also review examples of digital transformation across the public sector, at the state, local, and federal level, as well as in education in the US and globally. Finally, we will learn about the challenges of scaling government transformation across organizations and around the globe. In a nutshell, we will learn...

Unique challenges of industrial digital transformation in the public sector

Digital transformation is not easy. There are many challenges faced by organizations that initiate a digital transformation effort. In Chapter 4, Industrial Digital Transformation, we discussed these challenges in some detail. While the public sector faces all the same digital transformation challenges as the private sector, the public sector faces an additional group of challenges. The laws and rules that govern the way that the government buys products and services, hires staff, and manages projects, along with the cultures that have evolved in the public sector, can slow or stop digital transformation efforts. In this section, we will discuss some of those challenges and how we can mitigate them to ensure the success of public sector digital transformation efforts. These challenges include the following:

• Access to new technology
• Government culture
• Hiring challenges – processes and...

Transforming the citizen experience

Now that we have discussed the challenges specific to government digital transformation, we will cover what the delivery of government services looks like and how government digital services are transforming that experience through a group of case studies. These case studies will describe government digital transformation across a wide range of domains and technologies. The responsibilities of governments are extremely broad and even though we will discuss a significant number of technologies in this section, we will not be able to exhaustively cover the uses of technology in the delivery of government services.

The role of government services

The government performs a tremendous number of services for the public. The federal government does everything from providing a standing army to protect the country from those who would wish us harm, to ensuring food safety to making sure the banking system works. While state and local governments don...

Transformation on a national and global scale

Often, organizations start a pilot to test out a transformative idea. One such pilot was done in Barcelona, Spain, where environmental sensors recorded the noise and the pollution levels in residents' homes. The data was encrypted and shared anonymously with the communities in Barcelona. This data helped influence city-level decisions. As part of this pilot, the technical issues related to gathering, storing, and controlling the stream of sensor information were resolved. This was under the Decentralized Citizen-Owned Data Ecosystems (DECODE) initiative (see https://decodeproject.eu/pilots). Do all grassroots-level transformative projects and pilots succeed and scale? In this section, we will learn how digital transformation initiatives can be scaled to national and global levels.

Airports as the first line of health defense

Air travel is a global industry with revenues exceeding $2.7 trillion. Will airports and aircraft become...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how digital transformation initiatives apply to the public sector globally. These initiatives primarily target the welfare of citizens and similar stakeholders, who could be temporary residents and tourists, in some cases. Unlike the commercial sector, these transformations are not primarily driven by profit motives but provide the opportunity for the private sector to provide transformative solutions and economically benefit from that. In the next chapter, we will learn more about public-private partnerships, in the context of the ecosystems for industrial digital transformation. We will also learn about the consortiums and the partner and channel ecosystems created to accelerate industrial digital transformation.

Questions

Here are some questions to test your understanding of the chapter:

1. What are some of the challenges that public sector organizations face when executing digital transformations and how are they different from the challenges faced by the private sector?
2. What is technical debt?
3. How is digital transformation changing the citizen experience?
4. What are some examples of how the government has used digital technologies to improve the citizen experience?
5. What are the building blocks for smart city transformations?
6. How can a local digital transformation initiative be scaled to a national level?