[INFOGRAPHIC] The Government as a Digital Platform

As we have seen in previous posts, new digital technologies are radicalizing the way we work, live and changing the way we interact with each other. Governments are tapping into these opportunities to change they way they interact with their citizens.
Many high-performing governments have launched such initiatives enabling them to provide speed, mobility and convenience. By adopting a citizen-centric viewpoint, they are transforming large and complex bureaucracies to become digitally accessible public services. Recent research by Accenture estimated that a 1% increase in digitalization leads to:

+0.5% increase in GDP level (Economical Benefit)
+0.13 point increase in human development index (HDI) (Societal Benefit)
+13.67 increase in global innovation index (Public Services Benefit)

While societal and economical benefits are clear, adoption rates have been quite slow in developing countries. Only a handful of countries like the UK, Australia, Finland, South Korea and Singapore have reached high levels in the e-government development index (>0.88), while the world average is 0.49. In 2016 however, the number of countries participating in such initiatives has slowly been increasing, while we still don’t talk about a fully digital society we can see that certain mechanisms have been put in place by most countries. These services include: form creations, submitting income taxes, registering a business, paying taxes and utilities. Governments are even taking advantage of mobile, offering more and more services through this platform (welfare, healthcare, finance, education); the number of countries using these e-services has more than doubled since 2014.

Governments are slowly transforming themselves into a platform enabling citizen conversation, participation and engagement. In 2016, 152 countries were found to be using social media, a 29% increase since 2014. The winner of political social media? Former President Barack Obama. His usage of social media included Podcasts, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, amassing a total of 80.1M followers.