Everyone loves to talk about government “modernization.” New offices, new roles, new slogans. But service delivery isn’t magic. It’s not even particularly glamorous. It’s hard, daily work carried out by people who know how systems actually function. If you’re serious about transformation, start here.

Rule 1: Services Exist to Be Delivered

The starting point is simple: government’s job is to deliver services. Not branding. Not demos. Not “digital experiences” in the abstract. Services. If you don’t accept that premise, the rest doesn’t matter.

Rule 2: People, Not Platforms

The hardest problems in government aren’t technical—they’re managerial, political, and cultural. You can’t debug your way past turf wars or engineer around chronic underinvestment. The frontline worker who’s kept a system alive for 10 years knows more about delivery than your user research does. Build with that knowledge, not around it.

Rule 3: Design as Policy

When you’re building government services, every interaction is policy implementation. The form someone fills out, the steps they must complete, the data they’re required to provide—those are political decisions. Design either reinforces existing power structures or challenges them. Be honest about which politics your design serves.

Rule 4: Maintenance Over Innovation

Most government services don’t need to be innovative. They need to be reliable. The transformative act is sustaining what exists and making it work better for the people who depend on it. Ask “how might we sustain this?” instead of “how might we disrupt this?”

Rule 5: Beyond the Demo

Transformation isn’t proven at launch. It’s proven when the pilot ends, when the team moves on, when the political priorities shift. Can it be maintained by people who weren’t in the room? Can it survive budget cuts and leadership changes? That’s the test.

Rule 6: Complexity Is the Work

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: government isn’t failing because the interfaces are ugly. It’s failing because services are tangled in stakeholders, turf wars, budget fights, and policy contradictions. That’s the real terrain of delivery. Ignore it, and your “transformation” won’t last six months.

Rule 7: Power Is Not Capability

Titles don’t deliver. People do. The systems that quietly keep running do so because of staff who’ve carried them through neglect. Real transformation happens when those people are resourced, trusted, and trained—not when a new director title is announced.

Rule 8: Modernization Isn’t Erasure

Before you replace anything, understand why it works the way it does. If you don’t know why a system is broken, you’ll rebuild the same problems in a different font. Repair first. Replace only when you know why it’s broken.

Rule 9: Success Without Successors Is Failure

If what you’ve built can’t be maintained or adapted without you, you haven’t transformed anything. You’ve created a dependency. Transformation means the next person can pick it up and keep going.

Rule 10: Transformation Is Mostly Invisible

Real change looks like fixing a data pipeline, reconciling workflows, building for edge cases, and reducing friction that never shows up in a press release. Services are infrastructure. When they succeed, they disappear into the background.

Closing

Yes, we need digital transformation. But it isn’t glamorous. It isn’t fast. And it isn’t about creating new titles. It’s about committing to the unglamorous work of making services reliable, resilient, and real. Everything else is just theater.