Government of the future

Governments of the future will need to adapt and continuously evolve to create value. They need to stay relevant by being responsive to rapidly changing conditions and citizens’ expectations. Citizens are demanding more visibility on the allocation of public resources and challenging governments to be more efficient and equitable through accountability and transparency.

What is needed today is a flatter, agile, streamlined and tech-enabled government.

One of the ways in which governments can become flatter is through citizen engagement, which means decreasing the distance between government and the people using social media, mobile devices and other tools, increasing participation through consultations, surveys and other communication modes and committing to open data that provide citizens and businesses with access to information. Members of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government devoted particular attention to the impact of new networks on democratic processes, focusing on citizen engagement. While this issue remains centrally important, the focus has broadened to encompass how the strategies, structures and practices of governments must change in the coming years, and how new information and communication technologies and networks can be leveraged to transform government capacity.

Agility and adaptability are also critical to effective and innovative governments. Successful governments can organize themselves to consolidate public and private resources quickly to address challenges. Governments must also be able to easily transform themselves when specific structures and processes are no longer needed.

This requires an agile workforce made up primarily of highly skilled knowledge workers with broad problem-solving capabilities and equipped with real time data and business intelligence – working in teams and networks, often with private sector partners. Adaptive governments that share services, labour and resources can deliver on their mission in more effective and innovative ways.

Consequently, governments of the future must be fully tech-enabled with a tech-savvy workforce. Policy, legal and regulatory frameworks and processes must be redesigned to align with the dynamics of the networked world. Information infrastructures must support new modes of collaboration, information and intensive governance. Even in the poorest regions, brilliant examples of service innovation have been driven using cheap mobile and wireless technologies.

Now there are tools and systems that allow citizens to examine government activities and expenditures. At the same time, citizen engagement allows governments to reach out and incorporate the perspectives and ideas of citizens in decision-making and policy-making. Still other governments are building networked relationships between the public and private sectors to solve challenging problems that cannot be addressed by either sector working alone.

An increasing number of countries are building transparency and accountability and driving public and private innovation by information and communication technologies, including social media. It is hoped that our government will also follow this forward-thinking path into the future.