Digital government strategies rarely fail at the policy level

Digital government transformation strategies are usually well written. Ambitious service digitisation targets, cross-agency data-sharing commitments, AI-enabled citizen services. The strategy document is rarely the problem.

The problem shows up eighteen months in, when two departments try to share a dataset and discover they define ‘resident’ or ‘active case’ differently, or when a promised single citizen view turns out to require reconciling twelve systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

This is a data maturity problem, not a technology problem, and it is almost never measured before the strategy is written. Most departments can describe their digital transformation roadmap. Few can say, honestly, whether their data foundation can support it.

Measuring that foundation before committing to the roadmap is half a day of discomfort that saves eighteen months of rework.