Tag: AWS Institute

The AWS Institute invited Rikesh Shah, outgoing head of open innovation at Transport for London, to discuss how London’s transport authority uses data sharing principles to solve city-wide challenges like air quality and safety. Shah shares his experiences of working as head of open innovation at Transport for London (TfL), which adopted an innovative approach to working with private sector organizations to make journeys simper and faster, reducing both pollution and accident levels.

Today, the winners of the first Future of Government Awards were announced. The Future of Government Awards is a program recognizing the people and projects leading public sector digital transformation around the world. We received more than 150 nominations from 52 countries across three categories for this year’s awards. In this blog post, meet the winners and learn their stories.

Public sector organizations around the world share a common concern: how can they make sure their digital transformation maintains data security? The question comes up often when I meet with government leaders around the world in my role as a government transformation digital advisor at AWS. During my time in the UK Government’s Digital Service (GDS), and now in my work with government leaders, I’ve learned important lessons about transforming services securely in the cloud. Read on for some key takeaways.

A common driver of public sector transformation is the potential for efficiency. This is certainly one of the benefits of digitalization. However, I want to share a story that shows why we need to balance this focus on efficiency with an understanding of how people will use our services to achieve the best results for our efforts. I walk through how agencies can approach human-centered design to create better and more effective citizen services.

Nominations are now open for the Future of Government Awards, a new global awards program to recognize the people and projects leading the digital transformation of governments around the world. The Future of Government Awards program seeks to celebrate the hidden public sector heroes who work tirelessly to modernize their governments to improve citizen services. The awards champion innovative technology solutions that the public sector has created and shared—as well as the stories of government organizations that have successfully adapted and reused them. Nominate a public sector digital transformation hero today.

When I worked in the UK government, I led the Government Digital Transformation Service (GDS) Transformation Program, where we used an Agile approach to modernize a range of services, from social care benefits to prison visit booking. Now, I work with the AWS Institute executive education program to teach public sector leaders how to accelerate and expand their impact for citizens with digital transformation. In this blog post, I share my experience using the Agile approach to transform government services, and offer some best practices for organizations who want to adopt a bias for Agile action to deliver successful modernization faster and at scale.

In my time working for the UK government’s Digital Marketplace as the service manager, I saw first-hand the benefits of open source in government. Combined with transparent processes, using open source solutions helped streamline digital project execution, build trust with constituents and the global community, and save time and money. Now, as the senior manager of government services (GovServices) at AWS, and as a teacher for the AWS Institute Executive Education Program, I want to share best practices for government leaders looking to use open source solutions.

Governments are increasingly adopting digital ID systems to improve inclusion and accessibility to public services. Based on the experiences shared by governments and by AWS experts who have worked to implement digital ID around the world, six lessons emerge about how to create the right strategic mindset for digital ID creation and implementation.

As government services around the world become increasingly digitalized, digital ID systems — many running on the cloud — are a critical part of these digital transformations. In this post, we dive deep into how these digital ID systems are strategically designed around a common vision, and how the cloud can help.

As governments around the world digitize services, individuals are required not only to prove their identities, but to do so on digital channels. This is a challenge not only for people without legal ID, but also for individuals with ID documents that are hard to use digitally. Cloud-based digital ID systems can be a solution to this challenge. Plus, digital ID creates a robust scope of benefits — and cloud-based approaches to implementing these systems provide the speed, scale, and security needed for digital ID to succeed.