Efficiency in Action: Revolutionizing Government Service Delivery
On behalf of the IBM Center for The Business of Government, we are pleased to present Efficiency in Action: Revolutionizing Government Service Delivery, by Dr. Alan R. Shark, associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
This report addresses how the government can best implement two statutes—the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act of 2025 and the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act of 2018. These laws have raised expectations for accessible, measurable, user-centered services. The report explains how agencies can meet those expectations in practice within existing resources.
Dr. Shark brings depth and a practical orientation to the topic. Drawing on an expert roundtable that the IBM Center convened with leaders and practitioners from government, industry, and public administration, he reframes service modernization as more than a technology challenge. Lasting progress depends on governance, ownership, measurement, talent, and design. Technology, including
artificial intelligence, adds value when agencies apply it to clearly defined and well-governed problems, while sound service design and effective leadership remain essential.
The report provides the legislative and policy context for service delivery reform, including the role of the President’s Management Agenda, OMB circulars, and statutes built for a paper-based, agency-by-agency government. The author also examines how service delivery can best meet public needs, identifies the major barriers to effective modernization, and explores how agencies can define success through outcomes and user experience rather than outputs and compliance.
Dr. Shark treats clear ownership of the end-to-end user journey as the precondition for improvement. When ownership of the full experience is unclear, people fall into the space between programs.
The report also focuses on measurable outcomes. Measures such as completion rates, wait times, burden reduction, and satisfaction give leaders a basis for managing service quality rather than simply counting activity.
In addition, the report sets out seven strategic findings and a set of action priorities for modernizing under constraints. These include defining problems from the user’s perspective before selecting solutions, designing reforms that survive leadership turnover, and shifting from project-centric to product-centric delivery, expanding shared services, and adopting “sunset to invest” approaches that retire duplicative legacy systems. The report also draws lessons from commercial practice, while cautioning that government must meet higher standards of accessibility,fairness, transparency, and public accountability.
This report represents the latest contribution to the IBM Center’s body of work on customer experience and service delivery. Recent reports 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, which Mark Lerner and Reilly Martin of Technologists for the Public Good authored. Dr. Shark’s report complements and deepens this work by addressing the management and governance conditions that determine whether service improvements take root and endure.
We hope this report will offer value to a broad audience, including senior executives leading service delivery and modernization efforts, service delivery officials, customer experience leaders, budget and procurement officials who shape what modernization can achieve, and members of Congress and their staff considering the legal foundations for cross-agency service. Dr. Shark has brought clarity to a topic central to strengthening public trust.