Towards a "Connected, Powered, and Trusted" government

The past five years raced by at rapid pace. As a society, we were confronted with numerous challenges, crises and new developments that have had - and still have - a profound impact on how we live and work in Belgium today. Our public services were also put to the test at every possible policy level and forced to find quick answers in often difficult circumstances to support citizens and businesses in the best possible way, and all this on top of their 'normal' work. KPMG recognizes the complex challenges and enormous efforts that were made, and we are glad that we were able to actively contribute with our multidisciplinary 'public sector'- team to the management of several crises and the realization of several small and large digitalization and optimization projects at our government clients.

In 2019, following the elections, we identified three major areas of focus for the government of tomorrow, which were consolidated in our vision paper "Towards a smart and forward-looking government", namely:

• A smart and data-driven policy
• A customer-centric, digital approach
• Increased agility and integration

These focus areas remain relevant to this day, but the context in which they must be addressed has only grown more complex in recent years due to several major, often disruptive events (such as COVID-19 and its aftermath, the war in Ukraine and the subsequent energy crisis, the increasingly tangible effects of climate change, ...) as well as new developments, such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), which has the potential to disrupt a wide range of sectors.

Recent technologies offer additional opportunities but also create new challenges for implementing a smart and data-driven policy. Moreover, technological progress and innovation present governments with new strategic, technical, and ethical questions.

A customer-oriented, digital approach is still what citizens expect, but to maintain trust, governments will more than ever need to pair such an approach with proper attention to digital inclusion, cybersecurity, and data privacy. Finally, the aforementioned challenges have prompted the public sector to reassess what agility and integration truly mean for them.

Although still relevant, the themes of our previous vision paper need to be somewhat adjusted to the significantly changed context and the developments of the past government term. And that is what we aim to do with this new paper: to once again provide key guidelines that we consider important challenges for the public sector in the coming legislative term, summarized in three major focus areas (Connected, Powered & Trusted Government). Within these, KPMG is ready to be a partner to our government clients.