Digital Government Excellence

EPILOGUEHow to Lead a Government to Digital Excellence

You have now met with twenty remarkable digital government leaders in this book: reading about their achievements and the working methods and learnings that went into making their success happen.

They share plenty of tricks and good practices to copy from or use for inspiration. Having been in a digital government leader's shoes myself, I can confirm that each chapter is rich in detail about what works and what is needed to do similar work in any government or organization.

As such, synthesizing or summarizing any of these stories feels like I am committing an injustice to the individuals and their insights. Surely the details of practices will inevitably get lost. Regardless, I will attempt to generalize the overarching themes and most-common aspects that keep reappearing through the twenty leaders' journeys in leading a government to digital excellence.

The following pages will read a lot like the classic ABC of management or general leadership, public sector management, and reform wisdom. Or digital transformation best practices. This is to be expected, because digital government leadership is first and foremost leadership in its core, and only then about the digital and government specifics—the specific contexts in which the leadership wisdom and best practices have to be applied. But at the start and end of the day, digital government leadership is about—well, leadership.

Several insights can be considered trivial ...