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A citizen in a country I had been working with told me, during a user research session, that she would never use the government's digital portal to submit her land registration documents. She had tried it once. The system had lost her data three times. Each time, she had to re-enter information that had taken her two hours to compile. She had gone back to the physical office, where at least her documents were handled by a person who could be held accountable.
This citizen had drawn a rational conclusion from her experience. The digital system had demonstrated that it was less reliable than the analog alternative. Her distrust was not irrational. It was earned.
When governments launch digital services that fail — that are unavailable when citizens need them, that lose data, that produce errors that take weeks to resolve, that provide no useful feedback when something goes wrong — they are teaching citizens not to trust digital government services. Every failure is a lesson. The cumulative lesson, across years of government IT failures in every country I have worked in, is that digital government is not ready.
This trust deficit is one of the most significant barriers to government digital transformation. The citizens who most need government services — the elderly, the low-income, the rural — are the ones who have the least tolerance for system failures and the least ability to navigate around them. When they encounter a failed government portal, they do not switch to a backup channel. They give up. The service they needed was not delivered. The government's promise of digital service delivery is revealed as hollow.
The Gap Between the Promise and the Reality
The political rhetoric around government digital transformation consistently overpromises. Governments announce that citizens will be able to access all services online. That waiting times will be eliminated. That corruption will be reduced because transactions will be digital and transparent. That the citizen experience with government will be transformed.
The reality, in most countries, is a fragmented set of digital services of highly variable quality, surrounded by analog alternatives that remain necessary for citizens who cannot access or trust the digital channel. The promise of a fully digital government has not been delivered. The citizens who hear new announcements of digital transformation have been promised this before and received something less.
Earning trust requires delivering on the promise. Not partially delivering it, not delivering it for the citizens who have good connectivity and high digital literacy, but fully delivering it for all citizens, including the ones who have the most difficult circumstances.
This is a higher standard than most government digital transformation programs set for themselves. The programs measure success against the citizens who successfully use the digital channel, not against the citizens who attempted to use it and failed. The failure rate — the percentage of citizens who start a digital transaction and do not complete it — is the truest measure of whether a digital government service is working. Most programs do not measure it.
What Restoring Trust Requires
The governments that have rebuilt citizen trust in digital services share a common characteristic: they have delivered reliable service for a sustained period. Not a perfect service — no system is perfect — but a reliable service that citizens can depend on, that recovers quickly when it fails, and that demonstrates through its performance that the government has invested in quality.
The specific practices that restore trust are not complicated. They are simply consistently not implemented.