Building citizen engagement and trust through government digital strategy

By Holly Scott

For years now, organizations including Deloitte have found that perceptions of government customer experience are a strong predictor of citizen trust in government. As more and more citizens expect government digital interactions to deliver fast, intuitive and personalized services, it’s more critical than ever that state governments and agencies find ways to meet those expectations. 

From my perspective, the path to success is through a comprehensive digital experience (DX) strategy, that shapes how services can be delivered to citizens in a way that also strengthens trust in state government.

First, let’s start with a definition and analogy that could help frame this up. DX is the full architecture behind how citizens and agencies interact daily in a digital world. That architecture spans much more than most people assume and includes user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, front and back-end engineering, content strategy, video and even an organization's broader digital product strategy.

At Deloitte, my colleagues and I often compare DX to how a big apartment complex is planned: 

• DX is the property developer who envisions the entire apartment structure, understanding what the full residential experience should look like, no matter what unit they live in or how they arrive at the complex. 
• UX is the architect who makes sure the flow and structure of the residences are sound and usable. 
• UI is the interior designer who brings each apartment to life with design and personality. 

In our world, then, a comprehensive DX strategy creates a seamless, engaging and consistent experience across all digital channels for end users. 

Stuck in Silos

One key challenge to overcome in creating an optimal DX for state government is the siloing effect that’s taken place for decades. It does, after all, make a lot of sense that state agencies operate this way, because they each have their own budgets, staffs and specific objectives.

However, this often leads to fragmented DX, where users might encounter a modern, polished site from one agency and a clunky, disconnected experience from another. The other issue? Citizens don’t care about a state government org chart. They see one state government that they need to interact with intuitively and simply, so a clunky experience with any single application impacts how an entire state government is perceived. 

There are other benefits to state government adopting a unified DX approach beyond increased trust. Finding opportunities to collaborate and build solutions across agencies creates economies of scale and connects citizens to multiple services. 

Returning to our analogy: the property developer, in conjunction with the architect and interior designer, would be smart to establish some efficient and repeatable design elements to use throughout the complex.  

Ohio Sets the DX Stage with InnovateOhio 

Once again, our friends and colleagues at the State of Ohio are nationwide leaders in modernizing government, thanks to significant expansion and investment in the InnovateOhio Platform (IOP), Ohio's shared, centralized digital infrastructure and cross-agency technology foundation. Every state agency uses the platform while more and more embrace Contentful, its new content management system (CMS), daily. And the state’s single-sign-on solution, OHID, already connects 8 million Ohioans with some 2,600 apps. 

While website updates, CMS upgrades and single-sign-on integration don’t make up the whole of DX, Ohio’s fundamental shift set the stage for the continued expansion of integrated DX to hundreds of other agencies, websites and apps across the state’s online ecosystem to enable connected, personalized end-to-end services to Ohioans. 

DX in Practice

DX is not a website redesign, a new CMS or beautiful UI. Instead, great DX in practice means a citizen goes to a government site, finds what they need and completes the interaction with as little friction as possible. Today, there are steps we can take that make the interaction not just painless; we can even make it pleasant:

• Embrace a foundation: IOP in Ohio was a DX vision from the beginning, and a promise that Ohio can better serve constituents while reducing government spend. Governments should invest in a strategy, vision and technology to create a similar foundation. 
• Meet real constituent needs: Design to the end user, not just for a site that looks pretty. From surveys to focus groups, make sure you understand how constituents use your sites and services, and know what their friction points are. Then design DX accordingly.
• Inter-agency collaboration: Find ways to duplicate tools and DX integrations across agencies, moving from isolated agency experiences to easy resident connections between services, a reduction in tech and development costs, and citizen-centered delivery. 

This is very much the beginning, so as you start or continue the government DX journey, ask yourself: “Are we designing one kitchen, one apartment, one floor at a time, or should we adopt the developer’s point of view and consider the entire resident experience?”

Holly Scott is a Managing Director at Deloitte Digital.