Human-Centricity in Digital Delivery: Enhancing Agile Governance

In this report, the author discusses how digital service teams bring “service designers” into government to transform service delivery. These designers use human-centered design approaches to help public sector organizations refine strategies, rethink the nature of services, and reflect the way that citizens want to use a public service.

The report focuses on how human centricity can help to transform digital service delivery in a way that improves government agility, with results that address principles, mindsets, techniques, and practices. The report makes recommendations to help governments to work together and with external partners to build competencies for redesigning public services in a way that benefits the users of those services. Key priority actions include:

• Start with small steps to experience what the increase in inclusion and participation feels like.
• Closely look at the types of problems to solve as part of the digital transformation of public services.
• Include managers both in the educational experience as well as in the actual doing.
• Collect data from users. • Review and check hypotheses based on user data.
• Act in the open if at all possible.
• Test prototypes with users.

This report builds on prior IBM Center reports focused on user experience, digital services, and agility written by Ines Mergel and other authors, including: Agile Government: The Role of Public Affairs Administration; Adopting Agile in State and Local Governments; The Road to Agile Government: Driving Change to Achieve Success; Agile Problem-Solving in Government: A Case Study of the Opportunity Project; Applying Design Thinking to Public Service Delivery; and Digital Services Teams: Challenges and Recommendations for Government. Mergel’s work also complements current research and action emanating from the Agile Government Center, on which our Center partners with the National Academy of Public Administration.