Are We Improving the Service or Just Optimising Its Parts?

At DigiGov 2026 in London, HCLSoftware hosted a panel discussion. This post shares what we took away from our conversations with public sector leaders.

When did you last have to explain your situation to a public service more than once?

Maybe you had to repeat information that you had just submitted online. Perhaps one organisation referred you to another, but the second had no record of your conversation. Or maybe you completed one process successfully only to discover that it led to another new process.

This friction occurs because the organisations involved don’t always see or manage the journey as one service. Each team may perform competently within its own responsibilities, but the complete journey still fails to resolve the citizen’s need. However, a joined-up service offers a different experience, where the citizen only provides information once and can move between organisations or channels without losing context or restarting the journey.

This challenge is significant. In fact, the UK government’s State of Digital Government Review found that managing a long-term condition or disability can involve more than 40 services across nine organisations. It also estimated that the average person spends around a week and a half each year dealing with government administration. (UK Gov State of Digital Government Review)

Fragmentation is rarely an explicit design choice. It’s what happens when every part of a service is managed separately.

When Every Team Performs Well but the Overall Journey Does Not

Public sector organisations need operational measures. The problem isn’t that teams track calls answered, applications processed or cases closed. It’s that these measure individual steps, not whether the citizen ultimately got what they needed. One team can close a case and immediately pass it to another as an unresolved referral. Both teams may be working as intended, but the citizen is still waiting and unsure of the next step.

This disconnect is reinforced by the division of performance, funding, risk and accountability along institutional lines. An organisation may be asked to invest in a change while the financial or operational benefit appears elsewhere. A team may also lack the authority to address a problem once it crosses into another organisation’s remit.

The National Audit Office identifies shared objectives, defined responsibilities, coordinated governance, compatible data, and joint monitoring as important conditions for effective cross-government working. It also notes that costs and benefits may be distributed unevenly across participating organisations, reducing the incentive for any one organisation to invest. (National Audit Office)

The question, then, is whether organisations measure the citizen’s complete journey or only the performance of each step. Treating that journey as a whole does not require every organisational boundary to disappear. It requires organisations to manage those boundaries so citizens don’t have to.

Joined Up Does Not Mean Removing Every Boundary

Not every boundary is a service-design failure. Some boundaries serve an important purpose. They protect statutory accountability, privacy, security, professional independence, and the citizen’s ability to understand or challenge a decision. Other boundaries simply reflect inherited structures and create friction without adding protection.

The objective is to distinguish between the two:

• Preserve boundaries that protect rights, manage risk, or maintain clear decision-making authority.
• Reduce boundaries that cause repeated information requests, conflicting instructions, lost case status, or unowned handoffs.
• Standardise repeated mechanics, such as identity, notifications, document handling, case status, and audit records.
• Keep consequential policy and eligibility decisions visible and accountable.

Other regulated sectors face similar tensions. Financial services, healthcare, insurance, and utilities must connect complex journeys while managing consent, vulnerability, risk, and auditability. Public services can borrow those mechanisms, but not necessarily the entire operating model. Citizens are not ordinary customers and often cannot choose whether to use a service.

The goal is therefore not boundaryless government. It is a joined-up experience in which citizens receive consistent information and retain clear visibility of their progress, even when responsibility moves between organisations. Necessary boundaries remain, but the organisations involved manage them rather than passing that work back to the citizen.

What Happens When We Automate a Fragmented Journey

Experience design defines what a joined-up journey should achieve from the citizen’s perspective. Orchestration connects the systems, decisions, teams, and channels needed to deliver it behind the screen. But neither can be separated from the operating model beneath them. If objectives, measures, and accountability remain fragmented, technology can carry that fragmentation forward.

Organisations often introduce automation to remove delays, reduce manual work, and increase efficiency. Those benefits are real, but speed is not the same as resolution:

• A better interface can make one transaction easier while leaving the wider journey disconnected.
• Orchestration can accelerate handoffs without changing what each team is expected to optimise.
• An agent can act across systems while inheriting conflicting rules, incomplete information, and unclear authority.

Imagine that someone contacts a public service for financial support. The first team is measured on how quickly it closes enquiries, so it automatically refers the case and marks its work complete. The receiving organisation can’t progress the application because the first organisation didn’t collect all the required information. The citizen then contacts both organisations or starts again. The first team’s performance improves, but the overall journey does not.

Technology does not arrive with an understanding of the citizen’s outcome. It executes the objectives, permissions, and measures that organisations give it. Joined-up service design must therefore extend behind the screen.

Redesign Accountability Before Adding Capability

That means making five things clear before deciding what technology to introduce:

• Define the citizen outcome. What must be true for the person’s underlying need to be resolved?
• Map the complete journey. Include every organisation, decision, system, channel, and exception.
• Agree shared measures. Retain local operational measures, but add measures spanning the complete journey, including citizen experience.
• Assign accountability. Establish who can intervene when performance across the journey breaks down.
• Apply orchestration and automation. Use technology to connect work against the agreed outcome.

Only then can an organisation assess whether a proposed investment will improve the whole journey or simply optimise one part of it.

A Practical Test Before Your Next Technology Investment

Before approving the next orchestration or AI investment, ask which citizen outcome it will improve and whether anyone is currently accountable for measuring that outcome end to end. Apply that test to one high-friction or high-consequence journey, establish a baseline, and determine whether the proposed technology will reduce the burden on the citizen rather than simply accelerate an existing handoff.

Your objective is not to promise a completely joined-up public sector. It is to demonstrate what joined-up means in practice: citizens don’t have to restart when responsibility changes, they can see the status of their case, and they know what to expect next. If an intervention improves one team’s metrics but leaves the citizen managing the handoffs, we are optimising the parts, not improving the service.

The next time someone has to explain their situation twice, the cause may not be an integration failure. It’s possible that every organisation involved delivered exactly what it was measured to deliver. Joined-up public services will require better technology, but they begin with a harder change: making someone responsible for the outcome citizens actually came to achieve.

To explore the technology side of joined-up public services, read more about how HCL Mosaic supports government services.

About the Authors

Jennifer Duffy leads Innovation and Platform Delivery at HCLSoftware, bringing 16 years of senior leadership experience across enterprise software and digital delivery. Previously IT Director for Boots Digital, she now helps public and private sector organisations modernise services, adopt AI responsibly and connect technology strategy with frontline delivery. A BCS Fellow, she champions secure, people-centred transformation that delivers practical value.

Shannon Domkowski is part of the Innovation and Platform Delivery team at HCLSoftware. She brings 10 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, including five as a consultant securing and managing grant funding, before bringing her advisory experience into technology and helping industry leaders develop and share their perspectives. As a value owner, Shannon now helps public and private sector organisations define their challenges, design practical solutions and ensure their software investments deliver measurable value, preparing them to modernise services and adopt AI responsibly.