William D Eggers

Deloitte’s William Eggers discusses the “bridgebuilder” approach to government leadership — solving problems through collaboration with partners both inside and outside of the public sector.

The state brought together a remarkable coalition and waived red tape to get traffic on I-95 moving again just 12 days after a bridge collapsed. That kind of focus on results, not procedures, can help restore trust in government.

A toolkit for public sector organizations to energize ecosystems and spur innovation

The qualityof the government digital experience can play a key role in the level of trust constituents have in their government.

Traditional approaches to the kinds of complex issues governments face stymie creative work. Houston has been making significant progress on reducing homelessness with a process of bridge building among stakeholders.

Governments are tearing down walls to deliver solutions. The change is happening at all levels of government. In both thought and practice, visible both inside and outside public buildings: Walls are coming down. The silos inside governments and between government agencies and between government and the private sector—all of these boundaries are increasingly being dissolved in the service of results.

To get the most out of learning, it should be designed around the learner. Here are five design principles that can help do just that and transform employee upskilling in the public sector.

The transformations that are needed to solve society’s largest challenges today are unlikely to be solved by technological innovations alone. Government has a phenomenal history of catalyzing innovations that shaped the modern world, but the challenges of the 21st century are beyond the power of any single player. It needs to understand who plays what role, when, and with what tools.

Private sector professionals and government officials see new trends shaping the future of infrastructure amid increased funding

COVID is not the only driver of change among government organizations. In this essay, William Eggers describes the changes that are in the works as governments at all levels put a greater emphasis on resilience.

Too many programs place the burden of complexity on citizens, leaving those who need services the most struggling to access them. To include marginalized users, services should be designed for them.

The pandemic showed how government can help speed up innovation in every area—from production of masks to tests, drugs, and vaccine production. This report explores the role of government as a catalyzer of innovation for public good.

Ten trends transforming governments across the globe in 2022 to become future ready in a postpandemic world.

The trend toward coordinating, collaborating, and linking up government through joint efforts across government, missions, and programs is accelerating. This can help them improve services and tackle wicked problems by enabling collaborative engagement.

If leaders pave the way, emerging technologies can fundamentally change how government approaches public services—and how citizens experience government

The challenge isn’t just how to regulate new technologies. Technology is changing the capabilities of regulators themselves in ways not previously imagined.

Rapidly maturing technologies hold the key for dramatic improvements across an institution that was designed for incremental change. Governments need to act quickly, deliberately and flexibly.

Learn how governments can use the building blocks of change to design a more anticipatory, prepared, and resilient future.

How governments can maximize the value they derive from data

How to effectively plan for postelection amidst a pandemic

In responding to COVID-19, governments have been forced to move far more quickly and flexibly. What they've learned will prove invaluable as they prepare for the crises of the future.

As new technology, demographic shifts, natural disasters and pandemics lead to an increasingly uncertain future, government institutions must adapt.

Coping with today’s COVID-19 challenges and thriving in tomorrow’s disruptive environment calls for enhanced capabilities in three areas: foresight, agility, and resilience.

COVID-19 has forced governments to respond nimbly to rapid change—leading them to challenge some deeply held beliefs on how they should operate. Here are 10 changes that might be permanent for government.

Government's response to this crisis must account for the urgency of the situation and embrace both short- and long-term perspectives.

Governments are on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis. In the coming months, they will be focused on balancing health and economic impacts; promoting economic health for individuals, businesses, and other sectors; and reopening the economy with an eye towards a better future.

New technologies can move the focus from cleaning up problems to preventing them, while putting taxpayer money to more efficient use. But governments lag the private sector in employing these evolving tools.

​As government uses artificial intelligence more, how can the experiences of early adopters guide other public sector organizations?

Complex, multistakeholder challenges don’t often present a single obvious solution. Cocreation—where the stakeholders share responsibility for the problem—can be an effective way to unlock solutions.

With companies increasingly leading technology advances, government often has to look externally for solutions. Corporate venture capital offers a blueprint for governments to spin in technology innovation.

Agencies are handicapped by outdated management rules—it isn’t a worker problem, it’s a system problem.

Public-sector management practices and workplace tools rooted in the distant past can't address today's complex challenges.

Technology and new talent models are transforming the way the world works. This study shows how government leaders can navigate the transformation of work in the public sector.

The potential for governments to employ advancements in natural language processing defies limitation. Governments collect massive numbers of unstructured records. Fragmented information presented in deeply non-mathematical formats, at volumes far too huge for human assessment, are now available for the kind of deep-pattern analysis originally reserved for numerical databases. NLP can open the public sector to new insights, better tailored services, and faster responses to information.

From preventing terrorism to spotting restaurant heath violations, a form of artificial intelligence called natural language processing can help connect the dots.

Government agencies are awash in unstructured and difficult to interpret data. To gain meaningful insights from data for policy analysis and decision-making, they can use natural language processing, a form of artificial intelligence.

The new mobility ecosystem offers the potential for massive benefits—and disruption. Who will ensure that still-unproven technologies improve safety and make people’s lives better? The burden will likely fall on an ecosystem of industry and regulators.

President Trump has instructed his Cabinet secretaries to cut their budgets by 5 percent next year.

Technological advances, demographics, consumers, and talent markets are shaping the future of work, creating threats and opportunities. Learn how government employees and machines can work together to optimize our collective impact.

Government bodies will likely face significant budget constraints due to rising costs in such areas as health care and education. Because it won’t be enough to massage budgets or make one-time cuts, agencies should seek lasting cost impact with the dollars they save.

Cognitive technology has a role in many organizations. For public finance, automation can boost accuracy, cut backlogs, and free workers from basic tasks. To capitalize, state bodies need to evaluate processes, recognize areas of opportunities, and set integration plans.

New business models and services, such as ridesharing and initial coin offerings, challenge governments to create or modify regulations, enforce them, and communicate them to the public at a previously undreamed-of pace. As regulators wrestle with these new regulatory challenges, four foundational questions are critical to address

Agencies can no longer craft rules slowly and deliberately, and then expect to keep the results in place for decades.

There's always going to be resistance to change. Behavioral science can help overcome it.

​In some cases, a strategic initiative driven from the corner office can jump-start state innovation. Here are some bold ideas that could drive positive change in state government.

Understanding AI and its applications in human services

Citizens are customers, too—who increasingly demand quick and effective service from government organizations online. Learn about how state and provincial governments can provide a better user experience by emulating the methods of top digital companies.

​Trade-offs abound in government. A common debate is whether the value of regulatory protections offsets the accompanying burdens on businesses and citizens. But what if emerging technologies and new techniques could help break these trade-offs?

In its war on blighted properties, New Orleans is demonstrating its leadership in the use of data analytics.

​The same artificial intelligence-based technologies we've come to rely on in our personal lives can now be put to work in human services, helping agencies to cut costs, free up millions of labor hours for more critical tasks, and deliver better, faster services.

Jurisdictions are tapping the latest in behavioral science to steer people toward better choices. Emerging technologies can increase its impact.

It's cutting costs and freeing up public workers to do things humans do best.

Can cognitive technologies do government employees’ thinking for them? Not quite—at least not yet. But right now, AI-based programs can help agencies cut costs, free up millions of labor hours for more critical tasks, and deliver better, faster services. ​

Farewell, paperwork? New cognitive applications could well mean government doing more with less—less work, that is, not necessarily fewer workers. Depending on the level of investment, AI technology could allow people to spend fewer hours on noncore tasks and more on client service and creative work.

To close the innovation gap between the public and private sector, governments may need to transition into "cognitive learning systems." It would be a radical change.

The success of an intergovernmental, cross-jurisdictional effort to reduce -- and end -- homelessness among veterans shows the way.

When it comes to facilitating regulatory compliance for businesses, government agencies can learn some valuable lessons from the private sector and adopt a customer experience mindset.

America's most successful companies have learned a lot about keeping their customers happy. The public sector can join that revolution.

While many businesses may welcome fewer government regulations, what’s often most important to them is simply to spend less time on reporting and compliance. A focus on improving the customer experience may offer a key to reducing friction costs in government-business interactions.

Think of cybersecurity like a chess match: Governments need to deploy their advantages and strengths against their opponents’ disadvantages and weaknesses.

For government, cybersecurity isn’t only a challenge—it’s a big obstacle to long-awaited digital transformation. Plus, the stakes are sky-high: Hacking public-sector information might imperil national security as well as citizens’ trust. Is government up to the task?

This article is adapted from his new book, “Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies that are Transforming Government” (New York: Rosetta Books/Deloitte University Press), June 2016

Imagining the future of public transport, as a digitally-enabled service, and Helsinki's big plans.

The simple practice of observing how a user actually works during an average day can sometimes yield more useful information than hours of interviews.

It takes a certain kind of leader to force governments into the digital age, as Francis Maude, Mike Bracken and Mikey Dickerson demonstrate.

The face government presents to the public is far too complex. If the public sector isn't to become increasingly irrelevant, that has to change.

We now have the digital tools (cloud computing, mobile devices, analytics) and the talent to stage a real transformation in government. A digital mindset is a different way of thinking about customers, products, and process. It’s faster, iterative, and adaptable. And if government adopts it, the changes can be just as revolutionary. This book provides the handbook to make it happen.

As employees increasingly look for meaning and social impact in their corporate jobs, companies are seeking—and finding—ways to link talent development and rewarding, purpose-driven work, for both employee engagement and competitive advantage.

Three ways government agencies can redesign work to derive value from the IoT: eliminating routine tasks, enhancing employee capabilities and engaging a community of mission partners.

This report explores how the emergence of digital technologies, from cloud computing to mobile to analytics, is transforming the way financial management organizations operate based on survey data collected from NASACT members.

Like companies, government agencies are striving to deliver quality services in increasingly complex environments. And the public sector is also looking at ways to apply Internet of Things technology to find new value for citizens, aiming to enhance capabilities, streamline processes, and make cities smarter.

How could ridesharing, bike commuting, carsharing, and on-demand ride services transform urban mobility in America

To achieve real breakthroughs in public management, we need governments capable of continuously adapting to changing technology.

Deloitte’s latest Business Trends report explores how forward-looking organizations can thrive in a world of ecosystems. The nine articles in this report can each be read as a stand-alone—and collectively, they provide an integrated overview of a historic transition in the world of business in the 21st century.

To capitalize on text analytics to gain a more nuanced understanding of oversight effectiveness, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and other federal agencies should begin to look at oversight reports and recommendations as data that can be programmatically analyzed and made more transparent.

The creation of products and services derived from crowd-based insights is the foundation of the “billion-to-one” experience. Taking your characteristics and behavior and contextualizing them with data from many thousands of other individuals allows designers to deliver products and services that are, or at least feel, unique

The creation of products and services derived from crowd-based insights is the foundation of the “billion-to-one” experience. Taking your characteristics and behavior and contextualizing them with data from many thousands of other individuals allows designers to deliver products and services that are, or at least feel, unique.

Gov2020 is the culmination of an extensive exploration of the drivers that are influencing education, human services, defense, transportation, and much more. Our research draws from more than 300 interviews conducted over a multi-year period with leading experts from government, business, academia, and think tanks conducted by our core research team and GovLab fellows.

Dynamic ridematching technologies are breathing new life into an old congestion reduction solution: carpooling. Our methodology allows us to estimate the potential economic benefits at the neighborhood level from this emerging technology.

Using distributed technology to tackle society's most intractable challenges.

In recent years an entire economy of societal problem solvers have emerged to tackle old problems in new ways.

Sometimes a major initiative can never recover from a poor launch. To maximize the chances of success, it's critical to avoid the "Overconfidence Trap."

Free platforms such as Wikipedia and Khan Academy have eliminated barriers to knowledge providing vital services to millions

Our latest Harvard Business Review blog piece looks at the emerging ridesharing battles and what has so far been missing in the debate.

Governments are one of the biggest producers of data—and one of the few that deliver data to the public free of charge. They already regulate how organizations may use personal data and myriad other issues related to data.The question, then, isn’t really whether governments should get involved in the new data marketplace, but rather how they should take part

From Silos to Solution Ecosystems

From recycling to space exploration, collaborations between business, government and charities can create huge public value

A new cadre of problem-solvers is changing the global economy and the way America innovates. They're not a select group making big bucks and names for themselves in the history books, nor are they all high-techies developing the kind of futuristic gadgets we've seen before on the Business Desk.

These problem-solvers are all around us, changing our quotidian habits, improving life on spaceships and facilitating commerce in remote areas. At least, that's what the landscape looks like to… Show more

A new cadre of problem-solvers is changing the global economy and the way America innovates. They're not a select group making big bucks and names for themselves in the history books, nor are they all high-techies developing the kind of futuristic gadgets we've seen before on the Business Desk.

These problem-solvers are all around us, changing our quotidian habits, improving life on spaceships and facilitating commerce in remote areas. At least, that's what the landscape looks like to two consultants who have written about a grassroots, "solution revolution" taking hold in the marketplace. Show less

The companies working to better society and the planet are creating their own economy, but it's up to us--and our governments--whether or not they succeed.

Getting better results needn't always mean massive spending and heavy infrastructure. There are innovative ways to get the same results at a fraction of the cost, or even at no cost.

Where tough societal problems persist, citizens, social enterprises, and yes, even businesses, are relying less and less on government-only solutions. More likely, they are crowd funding, ride-sharing, app-developing or impact-investing to design lightweight solutions for seemingly intractable problems. No challenge is too daunting, from malaria in Africa to traffic congestion in California.

These wavemakers range from edgy social enterprises growing at a clip of 15% a year, to… Show more

Where tough societal problems persist, citizens, social enterprises, and yes, even businesses, are relying less and less on government-only solutions. More likely, they are crowd funding, ride-sharing, app-developing or impact-investing to design lightweight solutions for seemingly intractable problems. No challenge is too daunting, from malaria in Africa to traffic congestion in California.

These wavemakers range from edgy social enterprises growing at a clip of 15% a year, to mega-foundations that are eclipsing development aid, to Fortune 500 companies delivering social good on the path to profit. The collective force of these new problem solvers is creating dynamic and rapidly evolving markets for social good. They trade solutions instead of dollars to fill the gap between what government can provide and what citizens need. By erasing public-private sector boundaries, they are unlocking trillions of dollars in social benefit and commercial value.

The Solution Revolution explores how public and private are converging to form the Solution Economy. By examining scores of examples, William Eggers and Paul Macmillan reveal the fundamentals of this new—globally prevalent—economic and social order. The book is designed to help guide those willing to invest time, knowledge or capital toward sustainable, social progress. Show less

World hunger. Climate change. Crumbling infrastructure. It’s clear that in today’s era of fiscal constraints and political gridlock, we can no longer turn to government alone to tackle these and other towering social problems. What’s required is a new, more collaborative and productive economic system. The Solution Revolution brings hope—revealing just such a burgeoning new economy where players from across the spectrum of business, government, philanthropy, and social enterprise converge to… Show more

World hunger. Climate change. Crumbling infrastructure. It’s clear that in today’s era of fiscal constraints and political gridlock, we can no longer turn to government alone to tackle these and other towering social problems. What’s required is a new, more collaborative and productive economic system. The Solution Revolution brings hope—revealing just such a burgeoning new economy where players from across the spectrum of business, government, philanthropy, and social enterprise converge to solve big problems and create public value. Show less

Government is one of the biggest producers of data—and one of the few that deliver data to the public free of charge. Governments already regulate how organizations may use personal data and myriad other issues related to data. The question, then, isn’t really whether government should get involved in the new data marketplace, but rather how it should take part.

The American people are frustrated with their government-dismayed by a series of high-profile failures (Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown) that seems to just keep getting longer. Yet our nation has a proud history of great achievements: victory in World War II, our national highway system, welfare reform, the moon landing.

We need more successes like these to reclaim government's legacy of competence. In If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, William Eggers and John O'Leary explain how to… Show more

The American people are frustrated with their government-dismayed by a series of high-profile failures (Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown) that seems to just keep getting longer. Yet our nation has a proud history of great achievements: victory in World War II, our national highway system, welfare reform, the moon landing.

We need more successes like these to reclaim government's legacy of competence. In If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, William Eggers and John O'Leary explain how to do it. The key? Understand-and avoid-the common pitfalls that trip up public-sector leaders during the journey from idea to results. Show less

To catalyze innovation, government regulatory agencies can encourage investment, streamline regulation, and set standards to promote industry best practices.