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Orchestrating an ecosystem towards public service delivery

Public service delivery carries a simple promise at its heart: every person should be able to access the government services they are entitled to, without confusion, delay or repeated follow-ups. 

Turning that promise into reality is harder than it may appear. 

Each state has its own way of working, each city has its own pressures, and every department operates with different tools, processes and levels of capacity. For the citizen, this plays out in everyday frustrations – a complaint about a broken streetlight that disappears into the system, water that flows from the tap on some days and not others with no way of knowing why, a property tax payment that requires three visits to complete. 

At eGov, for nearly two decades, we have worked to keep this promise of easy, accessible public service delivery by asking a deceptively simple question: 

Why should it be so hard for someone to get a service they are entitled to?

In our early days, we worked deep in the trenches with different city and state governments, building a new interface for each of their unique needs. While we saw islands of success, it became clear that building and deploying tailor-made solutions state by state would not address  the scale of the problem – 28 states, 8 union territories.

So, we wondered: What if eGov could create digital building blocks that enable the ecosystem to solve? 

With this, the idea of DIGIT was conceived. An open, interoperable, free-to-use infrastructure, DIGIT comprises building blocks that can be leveraged by every stakeholder in effective governance – administrators, employees, commercial players, policymakers, innovators and even citizens – to build solutions and programmes that serve them best. 

Over time, as DIGIT was used across states and cities, a host of possibilities opened up. Governments moved from commissioning isolated systems to owning shared digital foundations, eGov’s partners and local teams began building and improving solutions – not only solving contextual problems but also contributing blocks that others could use and build upon.

As different actors solved using shared capabilities, we noticed progress was strong when people shared a picture of what better services could look like. It grew faster when digital foundations could be reused. It held steady when institutions took ownership. And things changed for good when partners and local actors brought in their strengths. 

True transformation isn’t just about building technology but reimagining the way people, institutions and infrastructure relate to one another. 

Building an infrastructure (DIGIT) was the first step towards solving for easy, accessible and transparent public service delivery. We needed to approach it as an interconnected, interdependent system where all actors had different roles to play across different contexts. In other words, we needed to let go of control and reframe our role as a force multiplier or orchestrator for the ecosystem. 

Orchestrating the system

For years, our DNA was to solve problems directly. We wrote the code, ran the projects, and stayed close to every implementation. So, the first challenge we faced while orchestrating was letting go of that habit. Orchestrating meant trusting partners, government teams and local institutions to take the lead. It also meant accepting that progress would sometimes look different from what we imagined.

Having let go of the wheel, we worked on bringing  together the perspectives of actors across society towards transforming public service delivery. But, aligning these actors – across civil society, governments and markets required patience. Citizens wanted simplicity – file a complaint, get a response, know what happened. Government teams wanted clarity and tools that worked. Market players wanted confidence to invest and innovate. 

We began with simple steps. We spent time with senior government leaders to reimagine digital transformation – not as a software procurement exercise, but towards building public goods. We started inviting partners who were once competitors to work alongside. We kept DIGIT’s license permissive, so that innovation could thrive. With citizens, we focused on making the interface invisible, what would change if we designed services around life events rather than department structures? Along the way, we learnt that offering technology building blocks isn’t enough. Solvers need capability and institutions confidence. This led us to create eGov Academy as well as invest in playbooks, templates and common tools – allowing anyone to access and actually use what they needed without us being the bottleneck. 

When recounted like this, our journey sounds easy and straightforward. However, it came with many twists and turns, many doubts and uncertainties. I remember a point, early in this shift, when we had let go of a large implementation but the partner stepping in wasn’t yet ready. Progress stalled. Internal voices said, “We should just do it ourselves.” That temptation never fully goes away. 

What kept us honest was returning to the math: there was no version of eGov doing it alone that matched the scale of the problem. 

Finding the local nucleus

Soon, our role turned into setting  the shared foundation, where others could perform their own versions of transformation. We found that transformation is always local, relying on its nucleus – its local centre of energy, capability and ownership – that sustains momentum long after eGov steps aside. 

In the Indian state of Odisha, for example, that nucleus became SUJOG, a state-led mission integrating sanitation, citizen feedback, and financial management. What began as an urban rollout evolved into a locally built, state-owned digital platform. Similarly, in Andhra Pradesh, PuraSeva, a citizen services interface, started with grievance redressal and expanded into a unified urban services system that had property tax, trade licenses, registrations built by the state’s own team.

In Mozambique, the Ministry of Health used an integrated health product built on DIGIT to build SALAMA, their national platform for public health campaigns – managed by local partners, and owned by the Ministry. And in Djibouti, a small partner, Manelix Partners, became the local nucleus, working closely with the local government to create their first digital transformation solution. 

Today, new nuclei are forming, in climate-vulnerable communities, in public health campaigns across East Africa, in justice delivery reform within Indian states. Each of these is at a different stage, but following the same pattern: local ownership, shared foundations, growing confidence.

The promise of an exponential change journey

As these local nuclei took shape across India and globally, our idea of solving at scale began to change. For years, we had spoken about scale as numbers: cities covered, modules deployed and programmes launched. What we started to see, however, was something different. Irreversible change at scale was about how deeply the ideas took root in places that chose to make them their own.

One city became hundreds, but not because we moved faster. It happened because others began to build. States led their own transformation programmes. Partners stitched together solutions. Local developers extended the building blocks. Governments in new countries saw examples from India and adapted them to their own realities. One thing led to another.

This taught us something important. 

True orchestration does not mean coordinating every step. It means creating the space for many actors to act with confidence. It means designing for emergence, not control. It means trusting that once the core principles are in place, new ideas will arise that we could never have planned for – creating new possibilities that compound and cascade. 

Looking back, the journey from doing to orchestrating was not about stepping away. It was about stepping aside so others could come forward. It was about building the field, not owning the field. It was about believing that the world changes faster when many hands carry the work, each in their own way.

When I think of the transformations unfolding today, I am reminded of a question we asked ourselves in the early days. Why should it be so hard for someone to get a simple service? We began by trying to solve that question directly. Today, we try to create the conditions for many others to solve it, each bringing their own context, their own strengths and their own imagination.

And that, to me, is the real promise of this journey. We are not only building systems or platforms. We are creating the possibility of a world where public service delivery becomes more humane, more accessible and more responsive.

Who would have thought that such a journey would begin with small experiments in a few Indian cities and grow into a global effort shaped by partners, governments and local teams around the world. But that is the quiet power of being a force multiplier for the ecosystem. Once people believe they can build, the future opens in ways none of us could have predicted.

eGov Foundation is a Collaborator at C4EC. They support Journey Partners in reimagining and designing for exponential change with knowledge, connections and building blocks.