Does Unified Experiences in Public Service Delivery mean Building Seamless Services or Creating Digital Monopolies?
Above: Aliasgher Janmohammed from Open Cities Lab, Madam Mary Kerema from Kenya's Ministry of ICT, David Lemayian from Tenery Research (Moderator), Sreeram Ananthasayanam from Deloitte India Consulting, and CIPIT researcher Josephine Kaaniru during the "Designing Unified Experiences of Public Service Delivery" panel at eGov Dialogues 2025.
Picture this: A citizen needs to register a new business. In the traditional model, they navigate a bureaucratic maze—visiting the registrar of companies, the tax authority, the local government office, and perhaps half a dozen other agencies. Each has its own forms, its own systems, its own timelines. The citizen becomes a human API, shuttling information between disconnected government silos.
The promise of unified government experiences is to collapse this maze into a single, seamless journey. One portal, one identity, one streamlined process. It's a vision that governments worldwide are racing to realize, from Estonia's pioneering e-governance system to India's ambitious digital public infrastructure.
But hidden within this noble goal lies a paradox that emerged as a central tension during a recent panel at eGov Dialogues 2025 in Nairobi: How do you build truly unified experiences without creating digital monopolies that stifle innovation and lock governments into rigid, expensive systems?