Trends in 2025 for Public Administration

In today’s interconnected world, traditional boundaries in government at every level (local, state, national) are increasingly dissolving. This shift is driven by the urgent need for integrated, citizen-centric service delivery and the efficient utilization of resources. Governments are moving from siloed operations to a whole-of-government approach, where entities collaborate across jurisdictions to achieve shared objectives and provide responsive, efficient public services.

At the heart of this transformation is interoperability. Governments are prioritizing interoperability principles to foster collaboration among agencies, sectors, and even across national borders. This requires the seamless exchange of data, systems, and processes, supported by a robust framework that addresses organizational, legal, semantic, and technical challenges.
Around the world, interoperable services are reshaping public administration, showcasing the value of integrated public services:
Denmark—offers coherent public services and consistently rank 1^st in UN e-gov survey
Australia—delivers life-event-based services through MyGov
Singapore—the LifeSG app integrates and provides a wide range of unified public services
Many societal challenges today transcend national or jurisdictional boundaries. Issues like climate change, public health crises, rapid urbanization, cybersecurity threats, and migration & displacement require coordinated, cross-border interoperability efforts.  To assist governments in their efforts, several interoperability frameworks are gaining traction:
– European Interoperability Framework (EIF): Established in 2017, the EIF provides guidance for EU member states to achieve cross-border public service integration. The Interoperable Europe Act (2024) promises to accelerate these efforts, mandating more rigorous interoperability initiatives (e.g. the Once Only Technical System).
– Digital public infrastructures (DPI): Defined as interoperable and shared digital systems open for collaboration across public and private services, DPIs are gaining traction along their promise to enhance initiatives in the field of digital identity or wallets.
– ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA): Currently in negotiation phase, DEFA emphasizes cross-border data flows, data protection, and cybersecurity. Once implemented, it is expected to transform digital collaboration within the ASEAN region.
These efforts promise not only more efficient service delivery but also better preparedness for collaboratively tackling global societal challenges.  Capgemini is committed to helping our clients address the interoperability challenges to transform public services delivery within and across borders

As EU President Ursula von der Leyen aptly stated, “Europe needs a data revolution,” highlighting the urgency for governments to harness data’s untapped potential. Governments worldwide are now reimagining how they share and leverage data, moving away from centralized data hubs toward decentralized, sovereign data-sharing ecosystems.
Historically, centralized data hubs allowed limited collaboration due to agency concerns about losing control over their data. Today, data spaces, enabled by protocols and technologies that ensure sovereignty and security, are fostering new levels of trust and cooperation. These frameworks empower sector and cross-sector data sharing, facilitating innovation and improving public services.
Supportive initiatives like the EU Data Spaces Support Center (DSSC) and open-source projects like SIMPL act as catalysts, standardizing and enabling broader adoption of data spaces, both on the implementation and the governance perspective. Stakeholders such as the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) have been instrumental in formalizing these efforts, promoting the Data Spaces Protocol as a potential global standard for interoperability.
The EU leads the way with its Common European Data Spaces initiative, creating sector-specific data ecosystems for health, agriculture, cultural heritage, and climate goals (Green Deal). These initiatives are already yielding results, such as the European Health Data Space, which enhances cross-border healthcare and crisis response.
Globally, interest in data spaces is growing.  Australia is piloting data spaces through its leading national data infrastructure research agency Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), inspired by EU efforts.  China, through its 2024-2028 National Data Administration Action Plan, aims to establish over 100 data spaces, driving an integrated national data market, while securely connecting with international partners.
Data spaces are evolving from niche proofs-of-concept to broader ecosystems capable of addressing complex societal challenges. Still there are significant developments happening in the application of decentralized identity management, privacy-preserving technologies, and robust usage control mechanisms at protocol and technology components level.  These developments will further enhance trust and accelerate wider adoption, while the existence of such privacy-enhancing techniques should skip the human part, along needed organizational change and stakeholder management. The rise of new roles such as the Chief Data Officer, the role of scoping phases, and a tailormade data collaboration approach along specific use cases and the culture of the organizations, remain key features of a successful journey towards sharing data.

GovTech is no longer just a buzzword. It’s a revolution that’s transforming the way public administrations operate and deliver public services. What was once an afterthought relegated to IT departments, has now become a strategic priority of administrations worldwide. GovTech, defined as the public sector’s adoption and use of innovative technological solutions to improve public service delivery, is the key to achieving better social outcomes, digital inclusion, and improved public sector services. 

With government technology projected to surpass $1 trillion and become the largest software market by 2028, it´s clear that public administrations do not want to be merely passive buyers of innovation—they want to be innovative players themselves. Indeed, GovTech is not just about purchasing technology, it’s about co-creating value through partnerships. While legacy IT systems, siloed governance structures and traditional procurement processes that favor large vendors still pose challenges, public administrations are increasingly trying to overcome them by rethinking their engagement with the private sector, turning to public-private partnerships (PPPs) to tap into the creativity, agility, and expertise of startups and SMEs. These collaborations allow administrations to work with non-traditional players to co-create solutions, share risks, and scale innovations to improve service delivery. In this regard, a pivotal moment in the worldwide GovTech ecosystem came with the official opening of the Global Government Technology Centre in Berlin (GGTC Berlin), a hub for collaboration and digital transformation.
Capgemini is proud to be a co-founder of this first-of-its-kind center, which brings together governments, startups, and private enterprises to accelerate the adoption of GovTech. GGTC promotes a systematic approach to GovTech, encouraging cross-sector collaboration and co-creation among global experts to tackle challenges like interoperability and siloed systems, ensuring that solutions can be shared across borders to benefit countries with fewer resources, helping bridge the digital divide.
Looking ahead, and as exemplified by the GGTC, a strategic, systematic, and sustainable approach to GovTech will mark the new era of innovation for public administrations. As the GovTech ecosystem matures, public administrations will unlock new technological solutions, ensuring digital transformation is inclusive, scalable, and impactful across borders, all while being more agile, innovative, and responsive to digitally native societies.

Digitally sophisticated citizens are demanding faster, seamless, and personalized digital services. Simply digitizing public services is no longer enough; public administrations must step up their game by adopting a human-centered approach, organized around citizens’ life events to proactively meet their needs.

While digital public services have become more efficient and accessible, many remain mere electronic replicas of outdated traditional processes. Challenges such as siloed systems and unequal access to eGov services persist in many public administrations, along with the growing pressure to match the intuitive user experience and responsiveness of private-sector platforms. Moving public services online is insufficient; administrations must ensure that citizens can and will use them. Governments with lower service design maturity levels are only now moving beyond basic digitalization, while more advanced administrations are shifting from fragmented electronic services to proactive, fully integrated service delivery. This transformation requires systemic reforms and interagency collaboration to co-create Citizen Services that are human centered by design and informed by real-time user insights rather than outdated government silos. Meeting citizen expectations today means providing multi-service, omnichannel experiences that anticipate their needs, mirroring the seamless interactions they have with private-sector services.
Some countries are already exploring proactive governance approaches, moving towards a truly “invisible bureaucracy”, where services are seamlessly embedded into daily life. By leveraging data-driven insights, governments can determine eligibility and deliver services automatically, without requiring citizens to apply. For example, the UAE Government has been pioneering this transformation, offering bundled, proactive services that range from offering 18 housing services in just one platform to bundled services for hiring employees or saving families time and effort when a baby is born. This new reality extends public services’ reach to underserved populations, with the user-friendliness of private sector platforms. Citizens no longer need to apply or even be aware of service delivery, minimizing bureaucratic burdens while enhancing user satisfaction.
Ultimately, the future of public service delivery is not just about making public services digital, it is about making them intelligent, integrated, and anticipatory. Achieving this vision requires breaking down silos and fostering strong partnerships across government agencies, private-sector innovators, and civil society to co-create data-driven services that proactively meet citizens’ needs.

As citizen expectations rise, budget shrinks and workloads increase, AI has emerged as a powerful tool in the hands of public administrations to improve internal operations and deliver better public services. No longer a distant promise, AI is here and is now transitioning from experimentation to large-scale implementation, but challenges remain.
Unlike with previous technological innovations, accessible, “democratic” tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot have empowered civil servants to explore (Generative) AI’s potential from the outset. In countries like Australia and the UK, trials of Microsoft 365 Copilot and RedBox Copilot have demonstrated significant time savings on tasks such as document summarization, information retrieval, and briefings creation. This allows civil servants to focus on strategic high-value work, improving their productivity and job satisfaction. This is in line with recent studies which show how GenAI could increase productivity by up to 45%, automating 84% of routine tasks across over 200 government services, ultimately driving a global productivity boost of $1.75 trillion annually by 2033.
Beyond internal operations, AI is reshaping how administrations interact with citizens. Tools like chatbots and virtual assistants are improving transparency and fairness while creating more personalized, accessible, and inclusive public services. For example, the Generalidad de Catalunya in Spain partnered with Capgemini to implement a GenAI chatbot for handling citizens’ queries in both Catalan and Spanish, reducing employees’ workloads and ensuring equitable access to services for all citizens. By incorporating human oversight to verify chatbot outputs, the AI-powered chatbot is driving efficiency and inclusion in public service delivery without compromising quality and trust.
These early successes are just the tip of the ice