What Is GovTech And How It Is Determining The Future Of Governments

The World Bank describes GovTech as “a whole-of-government approach to public sector modernization that promotes simple, accessible, and efficient government.”

In their vision, GovTech aims to promote the use of technology to transform the public sector, improve service delivery to citizens and businesses, and increase efficiency, transparency, and accountability, being a key pillar of the Digital Economy.

But, what does all that mean in a graspable way? When I talk about governments, I usually mention something that we, as citizens, take for granted most of the time. And that is, that governments are the biggest decision makers in the world, the largest purchasers in the world, and the investors with the deepest pockets in the world. Biggest, largest, deepest. In the whole world.

From the moment you come into this world, every major life event will be impacted and sometimes even determined by governments’ decisions and policies. From what type of education you receive, to who can have access to healthcare, who can get the right to a nationality and an ID (and thus the dignity of being considered a “person”), and even who can you marry and raise a family with. 

With such a significant say in people’s lives, it is essential that public institutions operate at a very high standard. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, and we estimate that in 80% of the world governments do not run the public sector as efficiently as they could, considering the resources that they have at hand. Basic services that we rely on on a daily basis — good sanitation systems, healthcare, food, and clean water — can’t be accessed in a reliable, timely, and affordable manner.

In a large part of the world, these public services either don’t work, don’t work all the time, or don’t reach everybody.

As societies living in the age of abundance and information, we can not afford to put all the money and delegate all the power to obtain such suboptimal results. Furthermore, having the ability to capture and analyze millions of data points coming out of governments’ performance, it is detrimental to our communities to see the data indicating the changes that could be implemented to obtain different results, and still having our government leadership deciding to dismiss these hard facts.

Governments’ main job is to run the public sector, and we need them to do this well.

Here’s where GovTech comes into play. It emerges as a new, broad, and rapidly developing field, pursuing the mission of making the public sector more innovative, agile, and results-oriented.

Every GovTech project, startup, or solution is aiming to re-imagine, reconfigure or re-arrange resources to deliver superior public services in a better and more timely fashion. 

To become high-performing entities, governments can leverage exponentially advanced technologies that are meticulously designed and developed for them to optimize and streamline their processes, so they can have the outcomes that our societies ask for, pay for, and deserve.

At Glass, we are particularly interested in the people operating behind every government agency. We believe that people are the cornerstone of lasting change, and unveiled a need that most public innovators and government champions have to access tools that move their initiatives in the right direction, fast. These people have no time to waste, deal with too much inertia from the status quo, and need a simple way to make better decisions. 

We know when we’re talking with one of these champions because they all express this silver lining: The urgent need to serve their people.

Startups are naturally aligned to understand this sense of urgency better than any other organization in the world, and are perfectly positioned to assist governments in their digital transformation initiatives. Startups are also familiarized with innovation and agility, can adapt more easily and quickly than traditional players, and aren’t afraid to continuously test and try (and fail) until they nail something, giving governments a mechanism to learn faster and scale proven solutions in a more dynamic way. 

We need to leapfrog poor governance.

We need to pair the moonshot of leapfrogging poor governance with powerful short-term solutions that can be implemented today, working at the intersection of government systems and technology platforms that help public sector agencies see what they are doing wrong and self-correct in real time.

Glass was founded to transform governments into more agile and data-driven organizations, since we believe that the future of government systems depends on how successful they are at becoming high-performing entities. 

We have witnessed that some of the key barriers for them to operate optimally include the complexity and variety of the many functions and processes that they manage, and are on a mission to help simplify every single governmental operation that they execute.

When it comes to good governance, money matters.

One of the most powerful ways that governments make decisions today is by allocating public funds behind the initiatives and projects that they want to see happening in the world. This is called “Public Procurement” and is a $12 trillion dollar global industry.

Governments spend between 15% to 25% of their countries’ GDPs on public expenditures, and still, have outdated, complex, fragmented, and slow procurement procedures that require manual implementation by a highly specialized workforce. 

Through these lengthy processes, governments are meant to bring policy from paper to reality and to react in real time to everything that could not be planned in advance.

Since we cannot change what we cannot see or measure, at Glass we began building simplified government portals, automated processes, and at-a-glance dashboards that let government people see better, so they can do better.

We believe that Glass will play a critical role in the future of governments, through our vision of creating category-defining products that establish a fresh blueprint for the nascent GovTech industry.

Our software ecosystem, designed to provide an outstanding and delightful user experience to government decision makers, can unlock public innovators to find more ways to better serve society. And yes, in our vision of the future, great governance is within reach, in this decade, for all of us.

What do you think can make our governments better serve our societies? Share with me, I’d love to hear from you!

Onwards,
Paola