The Necessity of Competency, Character, and Trust in Digital Government

One of the biggest imperatives for any digital government is trust. Ensuring that citizens trust the services they are using is one of the most significant challenges for any government. Trust is the combination of caring, character, and competency(*1), often within the context of a shared purpose, such as serving society and maintaining the safety of citizens. I suggest that caring and articulating a shared purpose are best evidenced by elected ministers, governors, and other officials via their policies and actions. Therefore, if we focus on character and competency, it is logical to argue that any e-government system must be fair, transparent, performant, and provide an excellent citizen experience.

Gaining citizen trust and building systems that are trusted requires more than just an excellent system that citizens enjoy using. It requires a system that has integrity, that is secure and does not expose citizens to potential harm.
Data is one of the biggest fuels for a digital government, however, its potential to eradicate trust is equally powerful. If a citizen’s data is lost, corrupted, or compromised by a third party, the individual citizen will lose trust. If a significant amount of data is lost, corrupted, or compromised by a third party, then both the individual citizens and many others who hear the tale will lose trust in the systems, companies, and governmental departments that were entrusted with their data.
For example, take the well-publicized 2022 Australian data breach from the telecommunications giant Optus. This exposed the personal data of 11 million citizens(*2) and has seen individual accounts breached for both public sector and private sector citizen services. Whilst this example is a poor example of a trusted service, there are lessons being learned and additional measures being put into place to mitigate future risks, which are worth exploring.
One of these measures is the Australian Identity Matching Service(*3), operated by the Department of Home Affairs, providing a rapid algorithmic identity verification service to government departments and private organizations. This service helps to protect citizens and businesses from fraudulent identities and can also help to remediate the after-effects of a breach. In the Optus data breach example, the Identity Matching Service was used to remove compromised credentials(*4) from the validation service, preventing them from being used for any future fraudulent attempt to gain access to citizen services.