Category: AWS Institute

A common driver of public sector transformation is the potential for efficiency. This is certainly one of the benefits of digitalization. However, I want to share a story that shows why we need to balance this focus on efficiency with an understanding of how people will use our services to achieve the best results for our efforts. I walk through how agencies can approach human-centered design to create better and more effective citizen services.

When I worked in the UK government, I led the Government Digital Transformation Service (GDS) Transformation Program, where we used an Agile approach to modernize a range of services, from social care benefits to prison visit booking. Now, I work with the AWS Institute executive education program to teach public sector leaders how to accelerate and expand their impact for citizens with digital transformation. In this blog post, I share my experience using the Agile approach to transform government services, and offer some best practices for organizations who want to adopt a bias for Agile action to deliver successful modernization faster and at scale.

In my time working for the UK government’s Digital Marketplace as the service manager, I saw first-hand the benefits of open source in government. Combined with transparent processes, using open source solutions helped streamline digital project execution, build trust with constituents and the global community, and save time and money. Now, as the senior manager of government services (GovServices) at AWS, and as a teacher for the AWS Institute Executive Education Program, I want to share best practices for government leaders looking to use open source solutions.

As government services around the world become increasingly digitalized, digital ID systems — many running on the cloud — are a critical part of these digital transformations. In this post, we dive deep into how these digital ID systems are strategically designed around a common vision, and how the cloud can help.

As governments around the world digitize services, individuals are required not only to prove their identities, but to do so on digital channels. This is a challenge not only for people without legal ID, but also for individuals with ID documents that are hard to use digitally. Cloud-based digital ID systems can be a solution to this challenge. Plus, digital ID creates a robust scope of benefits — and cloud-based approaches to implementing these systems provide the speed, scale, and security needed for digital ID to succeed.

A recent report by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute, reveals that moving enterprise and public sector IT workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud can reduce energy consumption and associated carbon emissions by nearly 80%, and is five times more energy efficient than the typical on-premises Asia Pacific (APAC) data center.

Accreditation programs and the organizational models that support them are priority considerations for public sector managers who are modernizing their IT. But managers often consider risk and compliance issues too late in the planning stage. Here are some key principles that can prevent accreditation-related issues from becoming a roadblock to cloud adoption.

Governments have similar problems and are not in competition, so using technology that others have developed and made freely available via open source to transform essential services makes sense. To make open source solutions easier to find for governments, AWS recently created an online repository: Open Government Solutions.

China will launch its digital currency February 2022, and the UK and Eurozone have joined the movement for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), but it is the smaller, emerging economies that are leading the charge and have much to gain, experts have predicted. In a recent Global Government Forum and AWS Institute panel discussion, financial technology (FinTech) specialists noted it is the Bahamas and Cambodia who are the CBDC pioneers. The Bank for International Settlements said 86% of central banks are experimenting with CBDCs and 10% are close to implementing them, while banks representing 20% of the global population will launch a digital currency within three years.

Research exploring how humans work with machines to solve problems in fields ranging from space to sustainability has established the potential to create far-reaching change in children’s education. The test-bed project is part of a wider program set up by Oxford University with support from AWS. Researchers have been as surprised by how quickly they have reached results as they are pleased with the outcomes. One of the test-beds, the Oxford X-Reality Hub Ed Tech project, set out to investigate how virtual reality (VR) could transform the classroom experience and close the gap between disadvantaged groups of pupils who statistically do less well than their peers.