Designing and building a unified digital government services platform
A Middle East government had a portfolio of digital and non-digital government services which were delivered in a fragmented way through multiple platforms. They included healthcare, education, business, culture and tourism, housing, transport, and law and order. The government wanted to unify all these services using a single platform to provide citizens with a seamless, fully integrated and digitised experience for all their needs and requests.
Client
A Middle East government body
Industry
Government and Public Services, Healthcare, Hospitality and Leisure, Education
Services
Strategy, Experience Consulting, Business Analysis, Technology Consulting, Techn
Region
Middle East
The client engaged PwC’s Middle East Digital Services team to design and build a series of high-impact digitalised services for the integrated platform, covering tourism, education, human resources, health, and community and citizen services. Despite a tight deadline, we met and in some cases exceeded all the goals that the client set us in time for the platform’s launch at the end of 2020.
Background to the project
The platform forms a key element of the government’s digital accelerator programme. It is a multi-agency collaboration by all government entities that harnesses the latest technologies and digital solutions to provide a seamless service experience in Arabic and English for the country’s citizens, as well as other residents and visitors.
The platform provides all users with direct access to a comprehensive range of high-quality and efficient digital government services through one single point of access at any time and place.
“Our customers needed to have services available digitally across all channels to minimise the number of visits to service centres.”
Our role
Our multidisciplinary team of about 160 people, drawn from PwC and Strategy&, drove the programme at every stage from strategy to execution. To develop a coherent and achievable plan of action, we worked with 52 different government entities, firstly to review their digital channels and capabilities, and then to develop customised digital services for the sectors assigned to us by the client.
For both the strategic and service delivery workstreams, we focused on meeting the client’s objectives for the platform. The government body wanted the platform to deliver a unified customer experience that provided seamless, convenient and personalised solutions and journeys between different government offices and departments. The platform had to be reachable by citizens anytime and anywhere, and also be proactive in understanding the user’s individual history and behaviour within the platform, in order to meet his or her needs more effectively.
The arrival of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 accelerated the process of bringing all government services onto the platform.
How we helped
Our team drew on PwC’s global expertise in digital technology and government services to deliver a world-class, unified customer platform. At the start of the programme, we played a critical role in setting the overall strategy for the platform, coordinating multiple government entities to work together as a single team, while keeping to an extremely challenging schedule.
We also designed and built more than 250 digital services across the sectors assigned to us by the client, after conducting rigorous due diligence on pre-existing digital capabilities. A typical example is a service that integrates data from multiple entities to reduce the amount of paperwork that a user is required to submit to the government’s social support authority and speeds up requests.
Impact and potential
Our key differentiator was our ability to engage from the outset with the client to define its strategy for the platform, and also contribute our expertise in designing, building and implementing world-class digital services. Together, PwC and Strategy& proposed a complete strategy-to-execution solution via a multi-disciplinary team of digital strategists, public sector experts, customer experience specialists, user experience (UX) designers and technical architects.
The link between our strategic vision and the practical implementation of the digital services meant that despite the platform’s technological complexity, we never lost sight of the client’s overarching objective – delivery of a better, easier relationship between government departments and citizens and residents. For example, all the administration involved in buying, renting or driving a car can now be accessed through the same portal, eliminating multiple engagements with different entities. Going forward, the platform has the potential to deliver the quality of a Netflix or Uber customer experience to government services.
It provides a showcase for PwC’s unique offering in a market crowded with systems integrators and platform builders. We enable private and public sector clients to transform their businesses and entities through smart digital solutions that are tailored to their current and future needs, delivered by a team that houses multiple disciplines under one roof – everything from change management to AI adoption. As one of the region’s most ambitious digital ventures, the platform incorporates all the features that are the hallmark of PwC digital services solutions: agility, resilience, flexibility, and above all, transparency and ease of use for the customer.
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