Exploring Emerging Trends in Government Technology

All right, TGIF everyone! Welcome back to In Case You Missed It, our weekly roundup of what's hot in GovTech. Today we're going to be talking about emerging technologies, emerging trends within this wider space of government technology, and so we brought back a repeat guest, Bill Eggers, the Executive Director of Deloitte Center for Government Insights, to talk a little bit about the latest trends and things you need to pay attention to in 2024. We were having so much fun in kind of the green room leading up to this. We decided, you know, all right, we're gonna have to go live. We're gonna have the conversation out here. So, Bill, thanks so much for carving some time out to join us again.

Oh, it's so great to be with you as always.

So for those that missed you on our last episode that we had you on where you were talking about your Bridge Builders book, I'd love for you to maybe just shed a little insight on some of your previous work and, you know, do a quick brief introduction.

Sure. Well, I have been working in the government reform space for over 3 and a half decades at this point now, both at Deloitte, at think tanks in Texas, running the eTexas Commission and Texas Performance Review. And I've written a whole bunch of books on government reform, including several on government technology, one called Government 2.0, which came out during the dot-com era, and a follow-on book, Delivering on Digital, which looked at the digital government transformation era. And my latest book, as you mentioned, is Bridge Builders from HBR.

That's great. To continue along that pattern of your writing and your team's work, Deloitte released its latest Government Trends Report in 2024, which we'll provide a link to in the show notes and as well disseminate that to our audience. As much as possible, because I know there's a lot of meat in that report, but maybe you can kind of walk us through the major 8 trends that you cover in that report and then how that's contributing to this 10x government of the future.

Sure. Well, first, just a little bit of context. Worldwide right now, governments have pretty low levels of trust, historic levels of trust, and often perceived by citizens as too slow-moving or risk-averse. And yet amidst this pervasive pessimism, we did a global scan of government trends and it offers reason, I think, for profound hope. We identified more than 200 cases worldwide that offer proof of radical transformation where government agencies have achieved really quantum leaps Delivering upwards of 10x improvements across areas ranging from operational efficiency to customer experience to mission outcomes. And so, and these are not just theoretical, these are real cases and examples of government achieving this sort of 10x-level advances.

So one of the things that you like to use is one of my favorite words, exponential. And I'd love to kind of dig into that because as we think about public sector growth and the ability to keep up with change, often, you know, we are on kind of a linear process of innovating and kind of incrementally getting a little bit better. But as you talk about 10x kind of in the report and dig into, you know, those trends, tell me a little bit about why exponential and why that's now achievable for public sector agencies that may think that that's that was out of reach in the past?

Well, I think first of all, look at the era that we're in. If you look at previous technological revolutions between when the technologies were introduced, whether it's the steam engine or electricity, and then when we were able to see real sort of transformations in business and government and society from them, it was many decades, oftentimes upwards of 50 years or more. And yet with digital and mobile and so on, that was collapsed. That was more of like a 20 to 30 year sort of cycle. And I think with AI, we will see that happening even more quickly. We are seeing AI on the exponential curve right now over the last few years. And while it will take time to figure out how to incorporate it into all of our operations at the same time, this level of sheer speed and technological acceleration means that governments are going to have to be able to move faster, be much more agile, and so on. And in the report, we did see some just remarkable examples of that agility and getting to the results that would have been hard to even mention ahead of time. One of the ones we talk about is India's Aadhaar, which is their 12-digit unique digital identifier. Through Aadhaar and a whole variety of services that came out of that, they were able to get up to 80% of the population or more going from, uh, that was unbanked, getting them banked. And that transformation would have taken, they predicted, over 50 years. And instead that happened in just 6 years through these digital platforms. So I think it really shows the power of being able to do this and also the increases in speed. that governments are capable of doing.

You know, the report covered 8 trends. We'll go through just a couple of them, but the first one was this notion of government moving at warp speed. You've kind of talked about this quickening that we're seeing happen in the public sector right now, but I think you'd agree it's not just about speed, it's knowing about where you're going, right, and having that destination in mind and being set on, you know, what is that objective that you're trying to achieve. What's the role in government moving at warp speed and the impact that technology can have in achieving that?

Well, I think what you're talking about is the policymaking process and decision-making process, which traditionally had been— we had really been doing this in a waterfall fashion, if you look at it. And what that resulted in was a lot of mismatches between actually policymaking and execution and also long lag times. And what we're seeing now is this notion of agile regulation and policymaking. And one example of that that we noted in the report is looking at the UK Department of Work and Pensions. It's responsible for all the nation's welfare, pension, childcare policy. and it uses a policy simulation model to understand the costs of policy options, the impact of policy changes on claimants' income and poverty, and it integrates a whole range of policy data, administrative data, tax rules, and so on. And that— the findings from it really proved instrumental in helping department leaders to move to a universal credit system, replacing 6 existing benefit programs. The model considered projected economic and demographic shifts. It looked at a variety of other factors, and it was used to make tweaks in the universal credit to lower the taper rate— that is, the rate at which benefits are reduced as earnings rise. So they were able to use these new tools to have much more agile policymaking, which also resulted in them being able to make tweaks throughout the process as they learned more. So that's a great example of applying this kind of warp speed notion to the policymaking and policy I love that example.

And there's, you know, so much that we can glean from international agencies because we're all confronting the same problem. Another trend that was really standout in the report was around government's role in scaling equity. And I think, you know, this is something that is really unique to the public sector because, you know, government can't shift resources away from underperforming areas. So I'd love for you to maybe talk a little bit about where technology intersects this need to scale equity and kind of how you are seeing that happen.

Well, it's a, it's a really exciting area, and, and that, that is one again where we did highlight India's Aadhaar initiative, uh, where they were able to dramatically increase equity, uh, through, uh, digital platforms. They've empowered marginalized communities, promoted financial inclusion, uh, they were able to spearhead the universal spread of bank accounts where they witnessed a staggering 500 million new accounts opened under the scheme, uh, and again raising the banked portion of population 80%. But when you think about it, um, anytime you have a lot of friction in a government process around benefits or around even starting a business or other areas, uh, that can lead to inequities. And by actually reducing a lot of this friction, increasing customer-to-customer experience and reducing and increasing speed in these, that can play— go a long way in actually increasing equity. One of the great examples of this is right there in California. We're working with Code for America. Sable is able to dramatically take these— the essentially food stamp applications and radically reduce the size of getting through that, you know, from what, 50 pages to maybe 2 pages. And that's going to allow more people to get those benefits and to reduce that friction in the system. So I think digital government can play a really, really important role in scaling equity and increasing equity.

When you look at that warp speed concept and moving fast, like you said, what is the role of everyone's favorite technology now, AI and generative AI, as you look at the trends in the report? And kind of the, you know, at least from my opinion, you know, 17 or so years of being in this space, it feels like the consideration and adoption of generative AI is much faster than what we've seen. It went from shiny object to real use cases really, really fast. But what are you seeing out there?

Yeah, first of all, I think within gen AI, we are seeing a lot of pilots and a lot of examples all throughout government. moving very quickly. The next stage is really going to be about scaling this throughout the enterprise, whether it's GenAI, AI in general. What we need to be thinking about is embedded and ubiquitous. And what does it mean when we have AI embedded all throughout an organization? And what that's gonna require is actually re-architecting how that work gets done in many respects. We don't wanna just put lipstick on a bulldog on outdated processes. We've got a lot of examples There are a number of examples in the report of using AI to increase speed. One of them is within our National Institute of General Medical Sciences within NIH, where they're able to read— use AI to read, analyze, and allocate grant applications to different review groups, reducing the review time from 2 to 3 weeks to less than a day. And so many of these sort of systems where you can automate then and you're able to use a lot of rules, you can radically, radically reduce that time involved. We also have another example from the Danish Energy Agency where they're able to process wind farm permits in just over 10 days compared to other European nation systems, which require right now months to do the same. So whether it's in regulation, whether it's around benefits, whether it's around grant applications, all of those things where you can radically reduce that time involved, and that's going to increase productivity in the overall economy because you're reducing friction in the system.

So one of the things we were talking about, you know, before we came on to the live show, uh, was around just some of those foundational elements that need to be in place too. And, you know, I think we were riffing on the fact that there's a lot of focus on the front end and making that really seamless and transactional, and then on, you know, the back end of government, you know, taking some of those old legacy technologies. But then there's a lot of other things, you know, that are in there that have to be dealt with. And so I'd love your take on just, you know, what are some of those foundational things that we should be looking at confronting instead of, you know, putting lipstick on the bulldog, as you said? What are, what are some of those hard tech challenges yet to be solved?

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Joe, got very garbled.

Oh, sorry about that.

In terms of the sound, would you mind repeating?

Yeah, so what are some of the harder foundational tech challenges that you think also need to be solved? Things like identity, what are some of those other dynamics that you think, you know, should be part of the conversation, not just AI?

Oh, absolutely. So first of all, when it comes to some of the best practices in digital government we're seeing around the world, we're calling that digital public infrastructure. Think about the infrastructure we have now, roads and bridges and EV stations and so on. What do we need in the digital era? We need digital public infrastructure. infrastructure platforms, uh, which can really help take government improvements to a whole new level. And by that we mean things like, uh, payment systems, uh, you need data sharing systems within that, you need identity systems and verifications. Uh, one of the examples, uh, that we write about in the report is Ukraine's Diia app, uh, which really has revolutionized access to 100+ government services for over 19 million users. It offers digital passports, driver's licenses, newborn registration, tax filing, banking transactions, all on the same platform. And that is really the future, I think, of digital government. So that's a really key element to bring in. I also say, you know, we continue to have to move a lot of data and things out of these kind of very giant mainframe legacy systems. And there's a lot of new technologies and new tools to be able to do that more quickly and efficiently. So that is obviously a really important part of the technology platform. And then when you look at cybersecurity, what GenAI is essentially enabling for hackers is to exponentially increase the amount of attacks that they have both on government and the private sector. So we're gonna have to continue to upgrade our abilities there using AI within the cybersecurity realm.

You know, you'd expect us to be pretty tech-heavy, and we've accomplished that so far on this episode. But your report looked at process, it looked at policy, it looked at people. Much like your Bridge Builders book, you also looked at partnerships and how we break down some of those silos that, that tend to creep into the public sector. When you looked at those, those 2024 trends, what changes, if any, are you seeing in the public sector workforce in terms of new ways of operating, new ways of delivering services?

Well, from a workforce standpoint, I, I think there's a number of really, really interesting trends, uh, that are happening around the world, which we've been writing extensively about. Uh, one of them is the movement towards, um, skills, uh, and away from diff— different just degrees. Uh, a variety of states now have moved towards skill-based hiring. including Pennsylvania and Maryland and other states within the IT area. We're seeing pooled hiring, we're seeing a lot of rotational workforce programs, we're seeing attracting workers through internships as another one. We're also seeing what I'd call more the open talent economy, which is looking at your workforce, not just of the people who are working for you, but also the contractors, the other partners, and looking at it in a much more comprehensive way to see what skills do you have now and where you need to either build additional skills or where you can borrow those skills or essentially buy that skills from working with outside partners in that. So the— and I would also say just within the workforce area, it's going to be incredibly interesting to watch in the future what we're going to be able to do in terms of making sure sure our public sector workforces have access to best-in-class tools. As I've been speaking around the country, it comes up time and time again when I look at a lot of what's being offered by GenAI is people saying, look, we are working with technology tools that are 3 to 5 years out of date. And so think about equipping people on the front lines, whether social welfare workers, police officers, and others with all the best tools using GenAI and other technologies so that they can improve and speed their work and radically free themselves up to do much more human-centered work. We estimated actually just through automation tools that are available today, we could free up about 1.3 billion hours of federal employees' time to do— go from lower impact to higher impact work. So I think that's a really important area to look at and a really exciting one.

So 2 of the trends that were mentioned in the report were around nurturing ecosystems to supercharge innovation and crossing boundaries to transform mission effectiveness. And these kind of tie directly into the bridge-building strategy that you discuss in your book. And I'd love for you to, you know, maybe talk a little bit about the idea of government relationships with private sector businesses and, and how the emerging kind of purpose-driven landscape might help facilitate those partnerships.

Yeah, I think a great example of this crossing boundaries to transform mission effectiveness is in the energy transformation space right now. We're seeing a historic transition to low carbon, to a low carbon future, historic investments from the federal dollars into cities, states, and regions to actually make this happen. We're talking about over $2 trillion overall in terms of infrastructure and so on, and about half a billion just within the climate adaptation and energy transition area. Right there in California, you've got California's regions rising together where they've divided the state up into over a dozen different regions and different regions are focusing on different Parts of that energy transition involving the private sector, involving academia, involving nonprofit organizations, economic development organizations, and bringing them all together to focus on that— what they can do really well in those different areas, such as in the Inland Empire, which is sometimes being called Lithium Valley right now, with lithium being an incredibly important element, of course, of EVs and so on. And again, it's the sectors working together in a very concerted way to drive innovation in this space. And I think you can go through all sorts of other areas, whether it's homelessness, which we talked about before, obviously climate adaptation, and just in general, societal innovation. Government is a really important important role to play as a catalyst here, and figuring out how to best catalyze and spur innovation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which we're in the middle of right now, is a— it was a really key function of government today.

You know, you're right in terms of government's important role, and there's a debate depending on who you talk to about when and where and how government should get involved in things, or if at all. And I think you look at some of these things, these wonderful examples that you've shared, you see government going down this path of having more data available to them to better spot those areas that may need their intervention or if there's a big problem to be solved. And although your report didn't maybe dive into this, do you anticipate a move towards more results-based of a government framework in terms of when and how government will step into some of these? Larger societal problems?

Well, we certainly have seen a really big movement towards evidence-based policy, towards results-based government. I actually serve on the advisory board for What Works Cities, which is an initiative where over 100 cities in the Americas are now involved in that, where— and they actually can get certification according to how well that they've done moving towards a results-based, what works sort of model. At the federal level, A number of years ago, they passed the Evidence-Based Policy Act. And, you know, the other thing is we have these incredible new tools to be able to look at this, such as digital twins, which can be used around all manner of looking at whether it's disasters or airspace or even how do you best align between physical offices and online services. And we've also got policy simulation tools, a lot of other tools today that simply weren't possible, we didn't have access to a number of years ago, that I think are going to be really, really important in that space.

So, you know, as you look to, you know, the public servants that are in place today, you know, what advice do you have for them when it comes to how to interpret these trends and how to use them? Any kind of words of encouragement or starting points you want to give them?

Well, I think first of all, to not be scared about these changes that are happening. It's a lot of change, but we've done a whole series of Government Jobs of the Future, which are online right now, which actually look at jobs from social welfare workers to emergency response workers to nurses and so on. And we look at equipped with all of these current tools that are available now and will be available in the future, how they're going to enable them to really turbocharge how they do their jobs. Now, one of the things that's important in this is to really understand where developments are going from a technology standpoint, from a business operations, and so on. So the Virginia Department of Transportation, as they were looking at the future, the first thing that they did was they said, we needed to now understand what the future of transportation is going to be looking out 10 years. And then we need to understand what kind of new skills do we need? Where do we need to retrain people? What's a new pipeline of universities that we need to be involved in? And going through that sort of process is really, really important today for almost every government agency. And then the second thing is you need to then zoom in and look at all of these processes, whether it's around regulation or benefits or policymaking, and how do we re-architect how that work gets done to both maximize efficiency, effectiveness, and the human experience of people engaging with government. So I'm really excited about all of these changes, and we're going to need a whole cadre of bridge builders in the public sector to make this a reality.

So we'll drop the link to the reports, like I mentioned, in the show notes and your book as well, you know, kind of I know you've already caught people on that earlier episode, but where do individuals go to keep up to speed on those great reports that you've just talked about?

On our website, our Center for Government Insights website, all the reports are up there freely available to the public, and I'd love to hear from people. And they can also follow me on LinkedIn where I post all of our different studies, books, and videos that we do.

That's great, Bill. We appreciate you taking time out of your day to share the findings of the report, and we love having you on the show. And can't wait to see what, uh, what you're up to next.

Thanks so much. Have a great one.

Yeah, great to see you, Bill.