Building a Digital Culture in Government

The future of government is about shifting how governments do business and serve constituents. In this Q&A, Danielle Hinz, executive government advisor for Amazon Web Services (AWS), discusses how government leaders can transition organizational culture to support digital transformation.

At the end of the day, the purpose of government is to enhance quality of life for their community, and
part of that means making it easier for constituents to receive government services. To transform government in this way requires a long-term mindset and understanding that shifting the organization’s culture is necessary alongside changing technology. Transformation is about people, process, and technology, all three of which comprise culture and drive digital transformation.

Why does culture matter in technology adoption?

Culture is what people do, what they believe, and how they behave over time. Culture and digital transformation go hand in hand. You cannot digitally transform unless you’re already changing and transforming your culture. Otherwise, you risk implementing technology no one wants, no one understands, and that won’t be sustained.

COVID accelerated government digital transformation. Some governments are now saying they’re going back to business as usual. But if governments want to continue that innovation, they’re going to have to create a space for it.

How does government culture impede efforts to advance digital transformation?

Things are moving fast, and in government things usually don’t move that quickly. Governments tend to be very risk averse and so change is hard. Leadership support is necessary for transformation to be successful and they must commit the resources that facilitate change. The employees must understand why the transformation is happening so that changes can be incorporated into operational processes and sustained over time. Additionally, there are so many different agencies in government — transportation, public works, public safety, health and human services, and more — and each has their own mission along with what could be thousands of employees. That’s a lot of people with different priorities to get on the same page.

Where should government leaders start?

You need to focus on building the culture that will enable the transformation you want. The first thing to do is to listen — to your constituents, to your customers, and to your employees. What is working well? And, how do you make it better? You can’t transform if you don’t know what needs to be changed and what doesn’t need to be changed.

What are best practices for advancing culture within an organization?

One is making sure leaders are aligned and understand why this is important — not just the CIO, elected officials, and senior staff, but all the managers too.

The second is communication. That’s a challenge for a lot of governments trying to make cultural changes — they need to be notifying all employees what’s going on, including the people working in refuse collection, the people laying the asphalt, the people at parks and rec, etc. Everybody needs to get the message, and that message must be aligned from the top. But with so many people involved, there’s a lot of ways that message could change. Having mechanisms like open forums, newsletters, and email communications are important to ensure consistent messaging. The last thing is involving everybody in the culture of decision-making. Senior staff cannot push culture down as things that must be done to people who may not understand the ‘why’. When they don’t understand why decisions are being made, how can they buy in? And that buy in ensures the changes are operationalized over time and that the investment in transformation works.

How do you support staff as part of this cultural change?

If you’re trying to create a digital culture, how do you do that without providing the resources and services for people to buy in? Do they need classes? Do they need mentorships? What technology are they comfortable with?

It’s also about making it okay for people to share their ideas and making it feasible to implement those ideas. For culture to change, people must see transformation happening. If they see that someone had an idea and it got implemented, or that their manager asked what they thought about something before it was implemented, that’s a change in a culture. That’s making innovation part of everybody’s DNA.