Can the GovTech Compass help leaders deliver digital government that works for people — not just systems?

Many digital government leaders are asking a version of the same question: we know we need to move faster, but how do we make sure we are moving in the right direction?

It is a sign of how far the conversation has shifted. Over the past two decades, governments across regions, from Estonia to Rwanda and from Brazil to Singapore, have shown that public services can become faster, more accessible and more responsive when they are digitized at scale. The question now is less about whether to invest in GovTech and digital public infrastructure, and more about what kind of digital government is being built, for whom and at what cost.

This is harder terrain to navigate because if you look honestly at how many digital reforms unfold, the picture is mixed: digital identity systems that exclude the most vulnerable, AI-driven welfare decisions that entrench bias, data partnerships that hand over public value. Or even a so-called 'best practice' that works beautifully for the digitally fluent but creates new barriers for everyone else.

None of this is inevitable. It reflects choices about how digital transformation gets designed, governed and sustained. And as AI accelerates what governments can do with citizens' data and as fiscal pressure rewards visible delivery over the slower work of building trust, those choices are getting harder, not easier,

This is the crossroads and it is why the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on GovTech and Digital Public Infrastructure has just published The GovTech Compass: Ten Principles for Responsible Implementation of GovTech and DPI, which was drawn from leaders who have actually done it.

The GovTech Compass is not a checklist. It is, deliberately, a compass: a tool for navigating the trade-offs that matter, helping leaders orient decisions when the path is uncertain. It is structured around three themes that ultimately decide whether a digital reform creates meaningful public outcomes: legitimacy, trust and delivery.

One of the fastest ways to lose public confidence in a digital service is to design it without the people who will use it. And yet 'citizen-centred design' still often means a polished interface bolted onto a process that was built for institutional convenience, rather than the needs and realities of the people it is meant to serve.

Legitimacy starts earlier than that. It starts with whose journey shapes the design and whose gets excluded. It means including marginalized communities in research and prototyping before requirements are locked. It means ensuring services work on the devices and connections people actually have, in the languages they actually speak, with offline pathways that do not quietly decay after launch.

Rwanda's Irembo portal is a good example. It delivers more than 100 e-services, but its real innovation is the network of authorized intermediaries supporting citizens with limited connectivity or digital skills. Inclusion is not just interface design. It is who the system gets built with and who it reaches when it goes live.

Public trust in digital government does not come from declarations of trustworthiness. It comes from the systems people can question, audit and challenge and from data practices that put citizens' rights at the centre, not in the footnotes.

This means publishing how automated decisions get made and giving people meaningful ways to contest them. It means independent oversight of how citizen data is used, with consequences when it gets misused. And, it means recognizing that as AI takes on more anticipatory functions inside government (flagging cases, allocating benefits, classifying citizens before they have even asked for a service) the bar for accountability must rise, not relax.

Denmark's Agency for Digital Government shows what this can look like in practice with transparent governance of core public ICT systems. This is designed to give citizens evidence-based reasons to trust the state's digital infrastructure, rather than asking them to take it on faith.

Here is something not said often enough: not every problem needs a flashy new digital solution built from scratch. The best digital governments are often the most disciplined about restraint and leveraging what existing infrastructure can do before commissioning new platforms, killing duplicative systems before adding layers, asking outcome-based questions like, 'did this actually reduce steps for citizens?', rather than counting launches or press releases.

Delivery also means resilience. Charting the route carefully, piloting small, learning from failure and maintaining contingencies so essential services survive outages and transitions. It means course-correcting early, rather than doubling down on the wrong path. And, perhaps one of the most critical is leadership commitment that outlasts project cycles. Ukraine's recent decision to elevate digital reform to deputy prime ministerial level is one of the clearest signals of why this matters: lasting digital transformation needs sustained political sponsorship, not just technical talent.

The next decade of digital government will not be defined by who deploys AI fastest or launches the most apps. It will be defined by who builds the systems that people across the income, connectivity, and trust spectrums rely on, how they deliver meaningful value, and how they remain accountable as they scale.

That is the deeper shift. It requires governments to recalibrate incentives, partnerships and procurement towards public value, not vendor lock-in. It requires development banks and donors to embed these principles in funding criteria. And, it requires civil society, academia and citizens themselves to hold the system accountable from the outside in.

The GovTech Compass is one contribution to that harder work. If it helps leaders find their bearings, ask better questions and stay oriented when the pressure to move fast risks pulling them off course, it has done its job.

Digital government is at a crossroads. The encouraging news is that the path forward is already being walked and the leaders navigating it most thoughtfully are the ones who understand that public value, not technical sophistication, is the true north that matters most.