The aim of a coherent and self-conscious digital-era governance strategy would not just be to
achieve a time-limited or one-off direct stimulus to social problem solving like earlier
management regime changes. It would also encompass opening up government to others and
to itself, so as to create a radically less complex institutional and policy landscape, engineered
for simplicity and automaticity in routine operations and for agility and responsiveness in
service delivery and government’s monitoring of the risk environment. Digital-era changes
inside the government machine would be closely meshed with and run strictly in parallel with
increases in citizens’ autonomous capabilities for solving social problems. They would go
with the grain of what civil society stakeholders are doing anyway, as the digital era unfolds
further. For public managers the trick will be to help make it so.