When digital government projects fail. And what we can learn from that.

In theory it’s all very simple. Digitising government needs one big solution that integrates everything, lets everything talk to everything else, and hey presto, we’ve got the perfect user experience and save costs on top. But an example from England shows that in practice it’s not that easy.

The UK government tried, with its “Matrix Project”, to bring central areas of government into one unified system. The goal: more efficiency, more speed, better functionality. Lovely! But despite a budget in the millions, the project ran into significant obstacles. Integrating numerous authorities, all their data, and communication between various legacy systems turned out, in the end, to simply be too complex. Officially, the project hasn’t failed, but it could end up as a monument to digital delusions of grandeur — the way the Elbtower is for architecture and urban planning.

Big solutions are still good and right in principle — but only if they’re actually achievable. If a project gets too complex, the risk of it failing completely at the end is high.

Have you ever had this experience too?

Image: This image was created with AI.

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