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I'm not. This is replacing one orthodoxy for another, and it lacks nuance. User centricity is not a north star for digital government.
Our job overall is to balance the rights and interests of individuals, communities, and the collective towards an overall greater good.
Our job overall is to balance the rights and interests of individuals, communities, and the collective towards an overall greater good.
Not everything we do is a "service." Sometimes personal interests are sacrificed for others. Maintaining the commons, for example, may require excluding humans from a region altogether. Are the flora and fauna then our "users?" No. Our wards, maybe, but not users.
Sometimes policy should very much be separate from delivery to maintain an ethical wall. Or simply to balance interests in programs that may have competing interests. For example, I can see a very good reason why trade policy and trade services are divorced.
Maybe interests in one industry have to be sacrificed for benefits of three others? You won't be able to get that macro view without an economic policy lens. Your multidisciplinary service team can't be everything.
#GCDigital as a metacommunity is fantastic, but I often observe a conflation of digital government and user-centred service and I feel that this a limited perspective of the functions of state.
We need to be more user centred IMO, but digital government is improving everything that we do, from researching cures to plant diseases, to providing social services, to fighting a war. It's the totality of that complexity, whether we like it or not.
