What governments around the world are doing to improve service delivery

Guest:	Bill Eggers
Title:	Executive director, Deloitte Center for Governmental Insights
Summary:	Government's delivery challenge is hardly new. Recent research demonstrates that citizen trust in government is directly related to how well government actually does what it says it will do. One new report outlines nine trends driving government capacity to deliver on big things.

The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton provides expert insights on current events in the federal community. Read more interviews to keep up with daily news and analysis that affect the federal workforce. Reach out to Terry and the Federal Drive producers with feedback and story ideas at FederalDrive@federalnewsnetwork.com.

Interview transcript:

Bill Eggers We look all over the world every year, all sorts of sensing mechanisms to look at what are some of the biggest trends we’re seeing in governments worldwide. And a lot of times it’s technology-oriented. Of course, AI has been a big focus, improving service delivery. But what we found this year was so many governments — especially after  the elections of 2024, where over 75% of the population around the world actually voted at a national level — so many governments focusing on this notion of increasing and advancing their capacity to deliver on their mission, to deliver better services and to deliver on big priorities.

Terry Gerton Your report offers a number of strategies first, tools and strategies for solving these kinds of challenges. Can you summarize those recommendations for us?

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Bill Eggers What the 2025 report identifies is nine different trends where governments are addressing delivery challenges. And we divide the trends into cross-cutting trends, and ones which are more domain-focused. And I’ll just quickly run through what those are: delivering on lower-cost, higher-value government, where you’re transforming the economics of fulfilling government’s mission to achieve more lasting and sustainable cost reduction. We looked at delivering on reducing red tape, and that’s not just around reducing red tape for businesses, but also for simplifying citizens’ access to services and reducing some of the red tape inside government to free government officials up. And then we looked at delivering on public service modernization. Been an issue for years, but what we’re seeing is that governments are redesigning tools, using digital tools and new technologies to really enhance customer experience and build trust and really speed up those interactions. And then we looked at a number of domain-specific ones, where we looked at things like delivering on future-ready infrastructure, on time and on budget, which is such a big issue in the United States and all over the world right now. We looked at delivering on better quality of life — how do you retool policy interventions to improve access to services and affordability, which is a such a issue right now, both in the U.S. and Canada and the UK, Australia and many other countries. We looked at delivering on energy resilience; how do you adopt a holistic approach to manage energy demand? And then we looked at deliver on jobs of the future. There’s so much talk about what kind of skills do we need in the era of AI, and also as we build out this infrastructure and how do you align workforce development with that? And then lastly, space is such a huge issue right now. So, we looked at how you deliver on space development growth, where you’re supporting new markets and fostering collaboration in the space industry.

Terry Gerton You mentioned a whole lot of things right there. We’re going to go back and dig into just a couple of them. And one that comes up in almost every conversation and you’ve mentioned it already is artificial intelligence. It seems to be both a blessing and a curse as governments are trying to really deliver, as you say, on their promise of services. How do you see AI as one of those cross-cutting trends?

Bill Eggers Well, Terry, over the last decade, our center has published over 60 studies on AI and government, and it included the first-ever, and I think that’s still the only task analysis, looking at all 19,000 different tasks done by the federal government and looking at where do people spend their time today, and how can you free people up to spend more time on higher value tasks? And we found that essentially, federal employees spend about 4.6 billion hours doing a whole variety of tasks. And you could free up about 1.4 billion of those hours through gen AI, automation, agentic, and so on. And so we’re really focused on the notion of, how do you then scale AI up so you can deliver on this challenge of both balancing tight budgets with increasing citizen expectations and also delivering trustworthy AI? And one of the things we found is you need the right technology platforms. You need a lot of training, partnerships with industry, the private sector, academia, to facilitate widespread implementation of AI at scale across the organization — so you don’t just end up in pilotitis, where you’re spending a lot of time doing just smaller pilots. And what we found was increasingly governments are really focused on that element of scaling. So we focused on the scaling piece this year.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Bill Eggers. He’s the executive director of Deloitte Center for Government Insights. All right, that’s AI. Let’s take another one. You said red tape. Everybody hates red tape, so what exactly are governments doing to try to simplify participation in programs while still staying compliant? Because that’s where a lot of the red tape comes in.

Bill Eggers I think you need to look at it in three different ways, focusing on different interactions with stakeholders. So first, what we’re all familiar with is government to business, where you’re trying to simplify digitized regulatory processes to make it easier for businesses to operate. In Alberta, Canada, they’ve reduced administrative burdens across industries, saving over $2.75 billion through streamlined approvals and less paperwork. And they actually have a whole ministry of reducing red tape in Alberta. And then there’s the government-to-government piece. And that’s really where you’re trying to cut internal bureaucracy by automating routine tasks, listening to frontline workers, improving efficiency. And Singapore, they have AI tools like Pair Chat and something called Pair Noms, which help public employees save time on administrative work and boost productivity. And then lastly, of course, there’s the government-to-citizen element, where you’re making services more accessible by integrating data, proactively delivering benefits, massively speeding up the process and simplifying it. So Estonia has automated benefit applications, reducing manual paperwork, delivering payments within seconds after a child’s birth, and you can get your taxes done in Estonia right now for in, about, under 10 minutes.

Terry Gerton Well, that’s something we can aspire to. Let’s take another example, infrastructure. You mentioned it. We hear said here in America, we can’t build things anymore, but infrastructure is so essential to really moving everything into a modern delivery model. What did you find with infrastructure?

Bill Eggers There’s been a lot written about this and a lot going on in terms of infrastructure, where too many projects suffered delays and cost overruns due to planning gaps, labor shortages, funding constraints, fragmented coordination, and a whole variety of other issue areas that have been very well-reported. And so we looked at, what are governments doing now to deliver future-ready infrastructure on time and within budget? We identified five different but interlinked pathways to get there. One is embedding resilience into infrastructure-planning to mitigate risks from extreme weather. They’re also working to simplify complex, very fragmented systems that often delay infrastructure projects and add cost, oftentimes through one-stop shops around permitting. They’re are also prioritizing stakeholder engagement, consensus-building to fully understand everyone’s incentives and being more proactive. They’re de-risking a lot of the strategies, including policy incentive, blended finance and financial guarantees to really bring the private sector in to invest a lot more in infrastructure and reduce uncertainties and lower costs. And lastly, a really big issue, Terry, is addressing the infrastructure skills shortages. We’ve got massive skills shortages in the millions of people around in terms of actually being able to build this infrastructure. So we have a lot of targeted up-skilling, re-skilling initiatives, different incentives structures.

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Terry Gerton So we could dig into the other nine, but we don’t have time. I want to ask you, you’ve looked around the world at these. Are there some countries that do it better across the board? And what do they do differently that the rest of us can learn from?

Bill Eggers It really does depend on the individual area that we’re focusing on. So, some very surprising things with India and their Aadhaar digital identity system, where 1.5 billion people in the country now have a digital identity. And they’ve been able to go from having hundreds of millions of people in a country who are unbanked to using digital identity in a technology stack called the India Stack, and a portal and other things to increase financial inclusion in a way that prior, they thought it was going to take 46 years. And instead they were able to do it in six years through what I think is the most impactful digital government technologies project in human history so far. So that’s a great example. We also see, of course, some of the smaller countries like Estonia and Singapore, which have always been very well-known at the very cutting edge of both digital government and now moving into AI. But you see in various areas, really interesting other things. In Victoria, Australia, they treat infrastructure as an integrated system, making residents co-owners and planning and establishing comprehensive engagement processes. In Finland right now, they actually use AI to connect people to job-match them according to what their skills are and what the jobs are right now. And we’re seeing more and more countries do that. So I’m really excited about this focus on delivery. If you remember, big focus on delivery all the way back in the ’90s, early 2000s in the UK, they had delivery units. Then many other countries adopted that. We had reinventing government. And then we had, of course, the president’s management agenda, which was launched in 2000, and then it waned a little bit. And now this focus on delivery, execution, state capacity, and getting things done is really important.

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