Government services, reimagined

Governments across Canada—federal, provincial, and municipal—face a pivotal period of change—and opportunity. 

Geopolitical tensions and policy changes are redefining trade relationships, reshaping Canada’s economic foundations, and driving investment into new industries, infrastructure, and public priorities. Powerful megatrends—from climate change and demographic shifts to rapid technological disruption—are transforming how citizens live, work, and interact with government. Governments are increasingly acting as catalysts, supporting industry collaboration and fostering the conditions essential for economic growth, innovation, and citizen well-being.

Against this backdrop, private sector advances in digital, agile, and customer-centric service delivery are raising citizen expectations, particularly around accessibility, responsiveness, and service quality. When these expectations aren’t met, the impact goes beyond service performance, eroding confidence in government and public trust.

Governments are under growing pressure to strengthen trust by improving service delivery, even as they contend with tightening budgets, aging technology solutions, and significant workforce constraints. They’re increasingly viewing technologies like AI as powerful enablers of productivity, modernization, and value creation. Yet adoption remains cautious. 

Many governments have seen complex, multi‑year transformation programs struggle to deliver measurable outcomes, including promised benefits for citizens, businesses, and public servants. In many cases, legacy approaches to modernization—designed primarily to reduce risk—have made it harder to adapt quickly and demonstrate value early, raising questions about how and when digital transformation delivers value for money.

Building future-ready government services must start now.

Digital modernization isn’t optional—it’s long overdue. Over the past ten years, Canada’s ranking on the United Nations E-Government Development Index, a biennial measure of e-government performance across the UN’s 193 member states, has fallen five consecutive times—from 11th in 2014 to 47th in 2024. Among countries in the Group of Seven, Canada currently ranks sixth. 

To remain relevant, Canada needs to catch up. And we need to do it fast.

While some governments, and individual government departments, within Canada have made progress on digital modernization, others have found their efforts hindered by policies, procurement processes, and government directions.

Governments need to act decisively to break down these barriers and accelerate their transformation efforts. But acting decisively doesn’t mean doing more of the same.

Incremental changes won’t be enough to lay the foundation Canada needs to foster citizen trust, provide government services that can agilely support people and businesses as their needs change, and drive long‑term productivity and economic growth. Governments need to do more—starting with fundamentally rethinking how government services are designed, delivered, and enabled.

By keeping measurable citizen and user value front and centre, laying the right foundations for success, and equipping the public sector workforce so they can adapt more confidently to new ways of working, governments can deliver resilient, future-ready services that build trust, strengthen confidence, and create better outcomes for Canadians. 

Transforming government operations into citizen value

Today’s world is defined by disruption—geopolitical, economic, social, technological—and government must be ready to respond. 

That’s where digital modernization comes in. But given growing fiscal pressures, governments need to demonstrate measurable value from their transformation activities—and they need to do it quickly so they can stay resilient, support citizens and businesses through current and future disruptions, and catalyze Canada’s long-term productivity and growth.

Below, we highlight four actions to help you reimagine government operations to deliver meaningful—and measurable—outcomes for Canadians.

Create a holistic digital and AI transformation strategy to drive change at scale

Many governments have no shortage of transformation initiatives. Too often, however, these efforts are launched independently, compete for the same resources, and deliver mixed results.

If you haven’t already developed one, a holistic digital and AI transformation strategy—one that puts citizen needs at the centre—provides the clarity you need to foster collaboration, create strategic alignment, and drive integration across operating units, departments, or, ideally, across government. This helps make sure your modernization activities reinforce one another, rather than create barriers for one another. Identifying common technologies and capabilities within a shared government-wide strategy also helps embed the interoperability needed to create seamless citizen and user experiences.

An effective strategy starts with a clear view of what initiatives are already underway, what must change—and why—and where the greatest value can be achieved. This lets you prioritize and sequence activities based on impact, readiness to scale, and critical interdependencies to reduce the risk of unexpected roadblocks.

Critically, your strategy should clearly articulate your desired outcomes, the value you aim to create, and trusted metrics that can be tracked over time—not only to guide delivery, but also to demonstrate value for money and inform decisions about what initiatives to scale, adjust, or reconsider.

Whether you’re developing a digital and AI transformation strategy for your own organization or for use across government, one thing is clear: a transformation strategy works best when leaders develop it collaboratively and actively champion it. That’s what creates shared ownership, sustained momentum, and alignment around common goals and desired outcomes.

Anchor digital transformation around citizen and user value

At their core, governments exist to deliver trusted, reliable services to citizens. That’s why large-scale public sector digital transformation efforts need to be citizen-centric and focused on creating value and improving outcomes.

This starts by understanding the people you serve. Engaging consistently and meaningfully with citizens, businesses, internal users, and service delivery teams helps you build a clear picture of the services they expect and the problems that need to be solved—such as service delays, accessibility gaps, or the amount of manual effort.

Recognizing sticking points for citizens who currently interact digitally with government is also important. This includes, for example, identifying the points in an end-to-end process where a citizen might ask, “Why can’t I just do this an easier way?” or “Why isn’t information I’ve given the government previously here?”  

Together, these insights can help you prioritize transformation activities based on what the biggest challenges are and where you can create the most value.

From there, you can build solutions with user needs in mind. Co-creation and iterative design principles are particularly effective at this stage; by involving users directly, you can better design prototypes, test and validate solutions, and make refinements before scaling solutions more broadly.

Measurement also plays a critical—if often overlooked—role in driving sustained citizen and user value. By identifying clear operational, performance, and outcome-based metrics, you can track progress and benefits realization, course correct as needed, and stay focused on what matters most. Just as importantly, measurement gives you the evidence to demonstrate value and impact—helping you build trust and momentum for what comes next.

Reimagine government services—and use AI to drive high-impact quick wins

Digital modernization—and the use of AI in government—isn’t about implementing new technologies for their own sake. It’s about solving real problems and delivering better outcomes—whether that’s faster, more efficient services, improved quality and reliability, or more productive operational teams.

That’s why it’s so important to focus your modernization journey on the problems you’re trying to solve and the outcomes you want to achieve. For example, it can be overwhelming to look at a mountain of technical debt and decide where to focus first. But if you start by evaluating your services and operations end-to-end, you can pinpoint the biggest pressure points and identify where value is created—and where it isn’t.

This insight—across both your front- and back-office operations—gives you a practical starting point for reimagining service delivery and support processes, and for selecting the solutions and tools that will drive the greatest impact. 

Delivering high-quality, citizen-centric digital government services at scale also requires a shift away from isolated point solutions and toward agile platforms, interoperable systems, and shared, well-secured data governance regimes. While these kinds of transformation programs are often complex and take years to complete—particularly given where most governments start—AI provides an opportunity to deliver value faster.  

When designed and deployed responsibly—with strong governance, transparency, and trust built in—AI can help you accelerate your modernization and digital transformation efforts by addressing targeted business problems in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. You can then use these high-impact quick wins to demonstrate the value of transformation investments and build momentum for longer-term change initiatives.

Build trust with your workforce to enable public sector transformation

Your people can be your greatest allies during a major transformation—but only if you provide the support they need to embrace new ways of thinking, working, and engaging with innovative technologies—like AI. To do this, you need to build trust with your people and empower them to thrive in an era of reinvention and AI.

But trust isn’t easily earned. Our 2025 Global Hopes and Fears Survey shows that only 41% of Canadian government and public sector workers moderately or strongly trust their organization’s top management.

Building trust starts with clear, consistent communication. This means explaining why change matters, what’s changing, and how changes will create real value—especially for the citizens you serve. By providing clarity, you can ease uncertainty, spark curiosity, and foster trust and buy-in with your workforce.

You can reinforce trust through action—by encouraging experimentation within clear guardrails, treating setbacks as learning opportunities, recognizing and rewarding successes or changed behaviours, and sharing achievements across your organization or across government so others can build on what works.

Workforce planning and workforce readiness activities help you strengthen trust further. Workforce planning helps you identify the core capabilities you need today, how these capabilities need to evolve so your organization is future-ready, and where targeted recruitment, third‑party specialists, or outsourcing make sense to fill identified gaps. Workforce readiness focuses on upskilling—on equipping your people with the capabilities and confidence they need to adapt to new ways of working. Depending on the specific needs of your workforce, upskilling can range from immersive training and targeted coaching to dedicated spaces where your people can safely test new tools without fear of failure.

By fostering a culture of experimentation, you do more than encourage adoption. You create an environment where people feel safe to share ideas—providing a continuous source of homegrown innovation.

A new world. A new opportunity to reimagine government services

Governments today are operating in a world vastly different from the one they were designed for. What’s worked in the past is no longer enough to keep pace with rising citizen expectations. The gap between public expectations and the delivery of government services continues to widen—and with it, the risk to public trust.

To keep up with changing demands, enhance operational resilience, and boost productivity and economic growth, governments need to reimagine both service delivery and the operations underpinning them. This level of modernization—spanning operating models, processes, technologies, and the skills of the public sector workforce—is intricate, particularly in an era of fiscal constraint.

Complexity doesn’t have to lead to paralysis. By making value creation your north star, you can give your digital transformation actions clarity and purpose—from crafting a government-wide strategy that drives change at scale to anchoring transformation in citizen value, using AI to unlock high-impact quick wins, and engaging your people as allies in your change journey.

The future won’t pause for you to catch up. Act today.