Indeed. Often, meaningful progress on Digital Government can be hampered by short-term political imperatives. Even in countries where the public service is supp

Indeed. Often, meaningful progress on Digital Government can be hampered by short-term political imperatives. Even in countries where the public service is supposedly 'politically neutral' (e.g. Australia). You're right to worry about this being viewed as a 'rockstar' solvable problem: the problems are systemic and often have little to do with the merits of a given technical solution. I did a stint at Australia's version of the UK GDS (www.dto.gov.au) and it was a supremely frustrating experience. Inter-agency politics, poor management and, frankly, a severe lack of technical competency at all levels were apparent. I was fortunately working in a team of (highly) technical competent people, who were had experience dealing with the the government bureaucracy. By about day two we were all bringing in our laptops and wireless internet dongles because the systems we were provisioned were utterly useless (Windows 7, no local admin, filtered internet). Our server and development infrastructure was mostly on AWS and GitHub. Every single person in my unit has since either left, or been virtually pushed out of the organisation. Our preference for building up service-based infrastructure, developing a federated and privacy-preserving digital identity framework (distinct from a technical system implementation, which my team prototyped using OpenID Connect), and direct public participation (via GitHub) were at odds with the preferences of senior management. They preferred shiny new dashboards, a single government service 'portal' and a fully centralised roles-based permissions/authentication system for all citizen & business to government transactions. I wish the solution were as simple as throwing technical talent at the problem until solved. However, this is unfortunately not the case. I admire the idealism of talented engineers who are willing to get involved to make a difference. I just hope they realise that, although absolutely necessary, rationality and technical merit are not sufficient for solving this problem. If they don't realise this, they're going to have a very unpleasant and frustrating time working in government. Probably the most important attribute they'll need is 'persistence', of the same kind needed to successfully fight a guerrilla war.