Efficiency in Action: Insights on Better Service for the Public from Government Modernization

A new report from the IBM Center for The Business of Government, Efficiency in Action: Revolutionizing Government Service Delivery, by Dr. Alan R. Shark of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, draws on an expert roundtable, the report to note that that government service improvement depend on more than technology – they stem from governance, clear ownership, measurement, talent, and design.

Raising the Bar for Service Delivery

Two laws frame the report: the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act of 2025 and the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience (IDEA) Act of 2018. Together they set expectations that public-facing services be accessible, measurable, user-centered, and continuously improved. The 2025 act creates a Federal Government Service Delivery Lead at OMB and requires agencies to name service delivery officials, but it authorizes no new funding. Modernization therefore depends on better prioritization, coordination, and use of existing tools.

Why Modernization Stalls

Participants identified barriers that compound one another, including:

• Fragmented ownership. No single entity owns cross-agency end-to-end customer journeys. For example, disaster survivors fall into the gap between FEMA’s 18-month emergency housing program and HUD’s lengthy grant process.
• Legacy systems and technical debt. At many agencies, dozens of disconnected systems impact service delivery, with no shared record across them.
• Solutions before problems. Agencies often buy a platform or AI tool before defining the service problem, and procurement and budget officials join too late to ensure that contracts have incentives to address that problem.
• Rigid budgets and statutes. Annual appropriations, data-sharing limits, and rules built for a paper-based government slow complex delivery work that can cross agency boundaries.

Measuring What Matters

The report calls for judging success by outcomes and user experience rather than outputs and compliance. The Social Security Administration (SSA) shows the power of a clear metric. Pending cases hit a record 1.26 million in June 2024; by centralizing medical disability reviews, SSA cut the backlog more than 33 percent, to 831,000 cases by February 2026. Over the same period, more than 100 million Americans created my Social Security accounts. Other useful measures include completion rates, wait times, error rates, accessibility, satisfaction, and burden reduction.

The report also summarizes multiple strategic findings with implications for measuring progress:

1. Effective service delivery requires clear ownership across organizational boundaries.
2. Government should define problems from the user’s perspective before selecting solutions.
3. Modernization should connect to measurable outcomes, not only to activities or compliance.
4. Durable modernization survives leadership turnover and bridge political and institutional time.
5. Effective strategies for talent, incentives, and procurement can drive successful modernization.
6. Shared services and interoperable platforms can create outsized value under constrained resources.
7. Responsible innovation requires tolerance for small-scale risk and continuous learning.
8. AI has promise to improve performance around call centers, workflow support, search, and document handling; however, adding AI to a broken workflow can accelerate confusion. AI adds value when applied to well-defined, bounded problems, which are addressed by sound service design and effective leadership.

Key Recommendations

The report frames multiple actions that government can take to improve service delivery:

• Establish end-to-end accountability. Empower leaders who can coordinate the complete service journey, within and across agencies.
• Define the problem from the user’s perspective. Use research and journey mapping before selecting technologies.
• Measure service outcomes. Track completion, wait times, errors, accessibility, satisfaction, and burden, not simply activity.
• Build reforms that can endure. Institutionalize improvements so they survive leadership transitions.
• Strengthen delivery capacity. Develop product, design, engineering, procurement, and middle-management skills.
• Expand shared services. Reuse common capabilities such as payments, identity, and e-signatures, and retire duplicative systems through “sunset to invest.”
• Support responsible experimentation. Use pilots and rapid learning; apply AI where it demonstrably improves service.

Better Service, Greater Trust

The report informs senior executives, service delivery and customer experience leaders, budget and procurement officials, and Congress, and is the third in a trio of reports focus on customer service that addresses human needs and life events that cross agency boundaries; other reports in this series include Making Government Work for People: Putting Life Experiences at the Center of Policy and Service Delivery, developed in collaboration with the Federation of American Scientists and New America; and The Prerequisite: Human-Centered Design as Infrastructure for Government Service Delivery.  Dr. Shark concludes that modernization can lead to better service, but only if measured by how people can receive what they need from government more easily, more clearly, and with less burden.