Fault line 3: Overlapping mandates

A citizen seeking a social benefit does not experience government as a set of different ministries, departments and agencies. They experience a journey of applying, verifying, waiting, appealing, receiving that cuts across multiple institutional boundaries. But accountability structures in government are typically organized around ministerial mandates rather than user needs or journeys. A municipal case worker may determine a person’s eligibility for social services as directed by rules from the Social Protection Agency. The identity verification of the person sits with a National Identification Authority under the Ministry of Home Affairs. The process of payment is authorized and completed somewhere else entirely. Where no single actor owns the end-to-end experience, it becomes difficult for any single actor to identify and address the points where that experience breaks down, and thus to design good digital services. 

Where mandates overlap, coordination tends to be effortful rather than automatic. Each ministry operates within its own planning cycle, its own political context and its own set of institutional priorities. These structures were not designed to be obstructive, they reflect a long-established logic of accountability by function. But they create real challenges for the delivery of services that cross those functions. The response is rarely a reorganization of government, which is seldom politically or financially viable, but the creation of cross-cutting mechanisms: shared outcome metrics, joint budget lines for cross-ministry services, Policy and Service Labs, mission-driven institutions, and service owners whose remit genuinely spans institutional boundaries. This is less a technical challenge than a governance design challenge, and it rarely resolves without deliberate convening across lines that do not naturally connect. 

Fault line 4: Data as territory 

Ask a citizen to apply for a social benefit in most countries and they will likely be asked to prove their identity, their address, their income and their family situation, information the government may already hold, scattered across ministries operating under different mandates. Each ministry collects data for its own purposes, stores it in its own systems, and manages it under its own rules. There are genuine boundaries for what can be shared with whom, and access to data raise real questions of accountability and privacy. But there is also a subtler dynamic at play as data confers relevance within the state, and the institutional incentive to protect it may sometimes outweigh the incentive to share it. Why bother with the work and risk to share data in your systems to another part of government if no one can force you to it? The result is that integrated services often fail at the most fundamental point: the exchange of information between institutions. 

The interoperability tools exist. What is often missing is the governance settlement underneath: an agreement, backed by law and supported by institutional design, about what data can shared, to whom and under what conditions, and a shared understanding that data held by the state is ultimately held in trust for citizens, not as the property of the agency that collected it. Countries that have made meaningful progress here, Estonia with X-Road, Singapore with its data empowerment frameworks, did so not primarily through technical innovation but through a deliberate political decision to treat data as shared public infrastructure. Without that settlement, interoperability remains aspirational, and the gap is most visible to citizens who find themselves re-submitting the same information to different parts of the same government.