What will future government delivery look like?

Imagine you, a public officer, asking a random citizen on the street about their experience of government services - what would you expect from their response? 

For SingHealth’s Group Director, Innovation and Transformation, Lee Chen Ee, feedback like these were proactive and drawn from accessible metrics like SingHealth’s HealthHub app ratings. 

As for the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (PCHRD)’s, Head of Omic Technologies for Health Program, Georgina Rae C. Cababa, her response would depend on the citizen’s geography, where citizens in more rural areas might say that services are slow and limited compared to their urbanised counterparts. 

Be it quantitative to qualitative, or rural to urban, the idea of what government service delivery should be like isn't always clear cut.  

Across diverse and evolving landscapes, the public sector faces an evergreen challenge for innovative solutions with changing citizen expectations.   

In a panel discussion at GovInsider’s recent Festival of Innovation (FOI), the participants explored the future of service delivery with a focus on emerging technologies to create a responsive and effective government. 

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Overcoming challenges in user-centricity 

Laos PDR’s Digital Government Centre’s Director General, Vannapha Phommathansy, highlighted how user-centricity stemmed from a good understanding of the citizen. 

She explained how the nation’s mountainous terrain and unaffordable telecom services posed challenges in providing citizens with access to digital government services. 

Moreover, the private sector’s hesitance to develop network infrastructure meant that the government had to become an internet service provider for some areas as well as to provide financing solutions for citizens such as installment payments. 

“When we think about digitalisation, it's not just about mapping from the physical to digital, but we have to think about how to minimise the steps and make sure it's faster and more efficient,” Phommathansy said. 

Nusantara Capital Authority’s Senior Advisor, Daniel Oscar Baskoro, echoed this sentiment adding that services should be built based on customer needs as opposed to top-down bureaucratic processes. 

This “human-centred methodology” informed Baskoro’s effort in devising technology products for Indonesia’s new capital city modelled under a smart forest city concept. 

This entailed understanding the citizens’ persona, needs and value proposition that fed into each stage of a product development. 

Improving public acceptance 

For PCHRD’s Cababa, delivering the most cutting-edge healthcare solutions needed citizen acceptance, especially given concerns around ethical implications and data privacy. 

She was referring to her department’s work in omics technology, a collection of methods used to analyse biological molecules on a large scale. 

The insights can help healthcare providers in the Philippines to best tailor treatments or medications to a specific individual based on their genetic makeup. 
 
“The best ways that we can address this is through implementing education and awareness campaigns not only to the general public, but also to our health care providers,” she said, adding that building trust between patients and the clinicians would help alleviate any chances of misunderstanding. 

SingHealth’s Lee also outlined trust as one of three principles for success when encouraging adoption of citizen-facing services. 

“We've got to make sure that the service delivery maintains and builds trust because once you lose that, it's very erosive and hard to build back,” she said. 

A holistic, end-to-end service journey and inclusivity were the other two principles, where each touchpoint a user has with a government service should provide a value and consideration. 

These touchpoints might range from the size of fonts on a screen, to the literacy and mobility of a citizen. 

“We're not [just] digitising a multi-step process but really thinking about using that opportunity to transform the workflow and cut out waste in the process, so we make a much more seamless flow for our citizens,” she added. 

Service delivery, a journey with citizens and countries 

Having heard from the diverse experiences of the panellists, Qualtrics’ Head of Public Sector, Daniel Wright, who moderated the session, underscored that government initiatives often aren't perfect on the first go, but required rounds of testing, learning, and experimenting. 

Agreeing with this notion, Lee said that this “journey taken with the citizens” was a process of iteration that needed to be tried and refined over time. 

The panellists then tackled a question posed by the audience on emerging technologies, particularly how public sector agencies can collaborate more effectively to create a shared artificial intelligence (AI) hub for developing use cases. 

With an eye on AI agents in the smart city of Nusantara, Baskoro underscored the importance of frameworks in AI deployment. Additionally, sandboxes served as important mechanisms to generate feedback and mitigate risk from the technology. 

Lee offered a transnational perspective where public sectors across a region could cooperate and share successful AI use cases to uplift the entire region. 

Phommathansy echoed the importance of cross-border cooperation as Laos PDR was still in an early stage of developing its national AI strategy, having experienced the bias and limitations of AI models due to its limited access of the Lao language. 

Wright concluded the panel highlighting that irrespective of how fast digital elements and tools are moving, listening and understanding citizens needs will remain a constant.  
 
“Technology will still need to be connected to those deep human moments to be able to continue to listen about what it is they need for that particular moment... citizens are the ones that should be driving the agenda,” he said. 

You can watch the full panel discussion on-demand here.