Digital Transformation at Scale

The good news is that a crisis is almost always an essential condition for digitally transforming a government, and there’s no shortage of them. The challenge is choosing the right crisis. There are two kinds that work. The better kind is something truly shocking, a failure that presents an irresistible political opportunity. These episodes are so appalling –cock-ups that hit the tabloids –that they cut through to the popular consciousness. Few voters will know or care about the intricacies of why a technology failure almost brought down a flagship policy, but they’ll remember that it did. Few people vote for visibly incompetent governments.