Closing the Digital Divide in Government: 5 Strategies for Digital Transformation

Change is seldom easy. Yet for government and public sector executives, the need to modernize has never been greater, as there is a growing digital divide between constituent expectations and what many governments can offer. As government and public sector agencies continue on their digital transformation journey, here are five strategies to adopt moving forward: 

1. Have a customer-centered design mindset when introducing new technology so that users will find new platforms and applications easy to use and will embrace them;
2. Begin treating data like a product to be shared enterprise-wide rather than continually duplicated in siloed departments;
3. Accelerate the use of a development, security, and operations—DevSecOps—approach to creating new software applications, embedding security into them from the outset;
4. Continue to modernize technology stacks to include SaaS platforms, advanced cloud, AI, and edge computing capabilities—as well as strong data management capabilities—and make it easy for end users to access the data insights they need for decision-making;
5. Embrace modularity and containerization to help with the challenge of modernizing large and complex legacy systems and applications. Modularity refers to dividing large software applications into smaller modules, while containerization refers to running those applications in an isolated environment.

Modernization is now more important than ever to bridge the digital divide and meet constituents’ rising expectations.

[Viral Chawda is a principal and head of government technology at KPMG U.S., and Andy Gottschalk is a partner for health and government solutions at KPMG U.S.]