What is ‘Government as a Platform

In the digital age, governments are increasingly adopting innovative approaches to better serve their citizens.

One such concept that has gained traction is ‘Government as a Platform’.

This paradigm shift in governance focuses on leveraging technology and data to create a more efficient, transparent, and citizen-centric government.

What is ‘Government as a Platform’?

‘Government as a Platform’ refers to the idea of transforming government services and operations into modular, interoperable digital platforms. Instead of building standalone solutions for each service, governments create a common infrastructure that can be shared and reused across different departments and agencies.

Key Principles of ‘Government as a Platform’

• Interoperability: Platforms are designed to work seamlessly with existing systems and services.
• Modularity: Services are broken down into smaller components that can be easily integrated and updated.
• Openness: Data and services are made accessible to both government agencies and external partners.
• User-Centricity: Platforms prioritize the needs and experiences of citizens, making services more accessible and intuitive.

Benefits of ‘Government as a Platform’

By adopting the ‘Government as a Platform’ model, governments can achieve several benefits:

• Efficiency: Streamlining processes and reducing duplication of efforts.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Lowering development and maintenance costs through shared resources.
• Innovation: Encouraging the development of new services and solutions by leveraging existing platforms.
• Transparency: Improving accountability and visibility into government operations.
• Citizen Engagement: Enhancing the overall experience for citizens by providing seamless and integrated services.

Examples of ‘Government as a Platform’ Initiatives

Several countries have already embraced the ‘Government as a Platform’ approach in various ways:

• Estonia: Known for its e-governance initiatives, Estonia has built a digital platform that enables citizens to access a wide range of government services online.
• United Kingdom: The UK government has launched the Government Digital Service (GDS) to create a unified platform for delivering digital services to citizens.
• Singapore: Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative aims to transform the city-state into a digital government by integrating services and data across different agencies.

Overall, ‘Government as a Platform’ represents a fundamental shift in how governments operate and interact with their citizens. By embracing digital transformation and innovation, governments can create more responsive, efficient, and citizen-centric services for the modern age.

Government as a Platform is such a powerful approach because it’s designed systemically, to address a core issue of self-generated duplication.

Like all large enterprise organizations Governments are structured via rigidly delineated departments and agencies, and typically deploy their own dedicated IT that is directly driven by those structures, thus it self-creates it’s own root issue – ‘Silos’.

As this Harvard white paper describes:

“There is a lot of duplication in government. Generally, departments and agencies are vertically integrated, with each running its own version of a system (a public website, a payment gateway, a printing service, an address lookup, etc.) that’s similar but not identical to all the others. Platforms have been cited as a way to remove that duplication and break down organizational silos.

“Siloed approaches to transformation don’t work,” – Mike Bracken wrote in 2015. “Reinventing the wheel every single time we build a service has led to far too much duplication and waste. That’s not good enough.”

It’s therefore an ideal blueprint to consider when Governments find that the complexity and cost of their business systems is the primary inhibitor of their innovation and efficiency.

Common Platforms: Solving common problems once

The UK is a keynote pioneer of the GaaP approach. Their GDS blog provides a category for GaaP, with recent news being their milestones release, which gives a sense of the maturity depth it has now achieved, with active GaaP services like Pay and Notify, a Cloud PaaS and by cultivating the central standards efforts by publishing API specs and design standards.

As explained in this video the core philosophy every department buys into is an organization wide effort to build common solutions to common, repeated issues.

Gov.uk Pay

Gov.uk Pay is the flagship GaaP service. As described in the milestones release, it processed 7.1m payments in 2020.

They publish the Roadmap for the service, with a supporting spectrum of community adoption and co-development activities, such as case studies like GOV.UK Pay as a viable alternative e-payment provider, and recorded workshops such as GOV.UK Pay for Local Government Show & Tell 3.