HKS Case 2187.

0
August 21, 2020

Different Approaches to Building a Unified Government

Website in Argentina, Peru, and Mexico

Government digitization has proven to benefit both citizens and public agencies. On the one hand,
citizens are able to find a consistent interface and reliable information on a single site and are able to
access streamlined digital government services. On the other hand, centralized digital platforms
enable governments to enhance services, reduce costs, and improve citizens’ quality of life.

Digitizing transactional services provided by public entities could lead to considerable savings as
traditional citizen-government interaction channels (physically or by phone) are considerably
expensive. The United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service (GDS), for instance, estimates annual
savings from shifting to digital to stand between between £1.7 billion and £1.8 billion pounds1 annually
for both government and users.2 In addition, by centralizing infrastructure that all agencies can
leverage rather than having departments independently build from scratch, a platform approach can
dramatically reduce software spending and maintenance costs.

A unified government platform helps build interdepartmental relationships, fosters a user-centric

mindset within the government, and allows public entities to focus their teams on their core services
(education, health, etc.)3 rather than on building individual digital presence.

Peru, Mexico and Argentina have led the way in digital transformation in Latin America, and have
been able to build and launch unified government websites in short timelines by leveraging a user-
centric approach. It is important to note that all these teams first focused on the problem and the
people, and then see where technology fits to help solve the problem. Building a unified government
website was one of the mechanisms to address the problem and goals. In Mexico the goal was to build
a new relationship between society and government, focusing on the experience of the citizen as a
user of public services. In Argentina, the goal was to inform and provide services to citizens. In Peru,
the goal was to bring the government closer to its citizens through innovation. By focusing on similar
digital transformation initiatives across different countries, this case highlights the challenges and

1David Eaves and Daniel Goldberg, HKS Case Number 2016.0, “UK Government Digital Service: Moving Beyond a Website,”
https://case.hks.harvard.edu/uk-government-digital-service-moving-beyond-a-website/.
2Gov.UK, “Digital Efficiency Report,” November 6, 2012, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-efficiency-
report/digital-efficiency-report.
3David Eaves and Ben MacGuirel, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, “2018 State
of Digital Transformation,” https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/2018-state-digital-transformation.

This case was written by Santiago Melo and Kathy Pham, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, at the Harvard Kennedy School
(HKS). HKS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements,
sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. KS1328

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initiatives across many countries trying to centralize information, and the importance of
understanding localized differences.

MEXICO4
In 2012, under the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, The National Digital Strategy Coordination
Office was launched to work on several Information and Communication Technology (ICT) related
areas including Government Digital Transformation, Digital Economy, Transformation of Education,
Effective Universal Health, and Civic innovation and Participation.5 The government believed that
adoption and use of ICT would maximize economic, political, and social prosperity, and thus improve
the quality of life of its constituents. To achieve these goals, the office was set to transform the
government by “building a new relationship between society and government, focusing on the
experience of the citizen as a user of public services through the adoption of ICTs in the government.”6

To do this, the office had to work on two fronts: 1) Government digitization and 2) Ensuring the
appropriate digital education, infrastructure and legal framework was in place in order to increase
internet access.

Led by Alejandra Lagunes and Yolanda Martinez, the office was responsible for remarkable
achievements in articulating the digital ecosystem in Mexico - Federal Agencies, Civil Society, Levels
of Governments, Industry, Regulators, International Organizations, among others - to double internet
access from 39 million in 2012 to 79 million in 2018.7 The office’s vision was to create an “...egalitarian
society where we can use technology and the internet to ensure everyone has access to education,
has the opportunity to become an entrepreneur, and our society is more equal.”8

The office was also responsible for launching GOB.MX, the Mexican government’s official site. On
this site, the team consolidated information about 300 different government agencies, 32 state and
local governments, standardized over 5,000 transactional services (87% of government services
migrated to online), and consolidated 34,000 databases from 250 government institutions.9 The goal
was to increase the government’s efficiency, reduce bureaucracy, and tackle the traditional siloed
approach in which public agencies’ operated.

The idea was to come up with a way in which the government was accessible anytime and
anywhere. When designing the site, the office wanted a model that allowed standardization and
wanted to have one single content management system. Their priority was to first consolidate all
government-related information in one site and then digitize public transactional services. The first
step was to migrate the 5,000 different government websites to a single domain called GOB.MX as
these independent sites had low traffic and provided a suboptimal user experience. This was a

4 Source of the information in this section is the interviews conducted with Yolanda Martinez, unless specified otherwise.
5 Office of the President of Mexico.
6 Programación de citas MEXITEL, https://embamex.sre.gob.mx/italia/images/pdf/national%20digital%20strategy.pdf.
7Scott Barsotti, "Delivering Digital Government to All of Mexico's 127.5 Million Citizens," Carnegie Mellon University News,
https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/media/2018/August/yolanda-martinez-digital-government.
8 Ibid.
9Government of Mexico, Mexico Digital Blog, https://www.gob.mx/mexicodigital/articulos/ventanilla-unica-nacional-
142596.

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significant pain point to the Mexican citizens as users had to look for information in multiple places
and, when executing a transactional service, they had to input the same information multiple times in
different sites. GOB.MX alpha was launched in 2014 and beta in 2015.10

GOB.MX provides a unified, standardized and redesigned customer experience that brings
multiple benefits to citizens such as having unified information collection and storage, the ability to
execute transactional services online, and a channel for civic participation and engagement. When
migrating services to the digital site, the office prioritized those which were most demanded by the
citizens, helped reduce corruption, and benefited individuals and corporations. The most in-demand
services included applications for passport, birth certificate, and company incorporation.

The office team designed GOB.MX based on user needs and prioritized information
democratization. Key success metrics for each site were services completion rates and site visits. By
the end of 2018, the site had more than 1 billion visits, more than 1.5 million hits per day and operated
an open data portal focused on the use and reuse of public sector information. It also processed more
than 27,000 citizen requests and 120,000 citizen forum entries. Simplification and digitization of
services resulted in an administrative cost reduction of 25%.11

One of the office’s most successful interventions was getting a copy of the birth certificate.
Previously, citizens had to personally attend the Civil Registry Office of the state where they were
born. México has 2,445 Municipalities and 32 states each with a different paper format. Today, people
can get a copy of their birth certificate within minutes through https://www.gob.mx/ActaNacimiento/
in a standardized format using electronic signature and with more than 140 digital services that do
not require the document as prerequisite thanks to the direct consultation of register data, saving
time and money to citizens.

Another example is the Electronic Professional Certification, required by all university graduates
to exercise their professions, with legal, medicine, and accounting the most demanded areas.
Previously, professionals had to wait 6 to 12 months to get their credentials and service was only
available in Mexico City; all foreign professionals had to come to the central offices or handle the
procedure from their university, with a significant delay in the time to respond. Today, professionals
can access and print their certificate through https://www.gob.mx/cedulaprofesional anytime, from
anywhere, and with any device, in a standardized format, using electronic signature. 9,000 educational
institutions must meet the new standard for electronic graduate diploma, a prerequisite for the
Electronic Professional Certification.

Each agency was in charge of their own digitization of information and services; they were
responsible for the migration to a single domain. Software development was registered as state asset
and usually outsourced through a government research center. The office was in charge of the product
vision and provided guidance, shared services, site standards, and encryption and data protection
requirements, interoperability guidelines, and advice on procurement. Teams were organized to be

10Alpha and beta launches are concepts in the software development cycle that refer to releasing a product in the early
stages to receive feedback from users.
11
OECD, “Digital Government in Mexico,” policy brief, https://www.oecd.org/gov/digital-government/digital-government-
mexico-2018-policy-brief.pdf.

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multi-functional and included lawyers, engineers, product managers, designers, and more, and
worked on monthly sprints with weekly meetings. Team leaders were present in each weekly and
sprint meeting to ensure compliance with standards and timely execution.

One of the key challenges was to mobilize dependencies towards a single domain. It was critical
that this was a presidential initiative. Onboarding and instruction about the benefits of digitization
was also critical. The National Digital Strategy Coordination Office held open office hours to provide
guidance to employees of public entities.

ARGENTINA12
After witnessing the successful digital transformation of the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s
government decided to ramp up its digitization efforts. In 2015, President Macri created the Ministry
of Modernization which was composed of a digital service team. Through a series of presidential
decrees, the president authorized the Ministry to spearhead digital transformation of the public sector
through both policy and the transversal deployment of technologies.

President Macri brought together a team of experts in digital policy, design and implementation
of services, public sector innovation, and open data to boost digital government efforts in the country.
Most of the team had already been successful in implementing the digital transformation of the local
government of Buenos Aires. In an effort to centralize modernization efforts and empower the digital
government team, President Macri eliminated the Ministry of Modernization and created the
Modernization Secretariat which sat at the President’s Office of Chief of Cabinet.

The Secretariat was tasked to create a more efficient, effective, and citizen-driven public sector.
The lack of centralized digitization efforts prior to 2015, led to multiple parallel initiatives held at a
local or public entity level. This resulted in a fragmented and non-standardized user experience and
cost duplication. With the goal to consolidate the government's digital presence, the team aimed to
unify the then 900 low-traction sites into one brand and one single domain.

In February 2016, the Secretariat launched ARGENTINA.GOB.AR and My Argentina, two platforms
aimed at informing and providing services to citizens. The platform included services such as
document apostille and certifications issuance from the National Social Security Agency. It also
included a citizen ledger, My Wallet, where users could access documents such as driver's license and
ID. At the National level, the Secretariat built the single domain and set the guidelines for the
digitization of the public entities. Ministries, for instance, were in charge of the execution and
development of their sites and integration to the single domain. Because different ministries and
agencies served vastly different user personas, the government decided that each public institution
should have their own digital team which was composed of content and user experience designers,
and software developers. In-house development, however, posed an important bottleneck due to the
lack of talent willing to work in the public sector.

Getting ministries on board with the Secretariat’s digital strategy was a challenge as it represented
not only a change of platform but also a change in the way they communicated to the citizens. Dealing

12Source of the information in this section is the interviews conducted with Julian Rodriguez Orihuela, unless specified
otherwise.

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with public servants with different roles and backgrounds made it even harder to mobilize ministries
into the single domain. To gain political capital, the Secretariat started by digitizing and centralizing
the digital presence of the President's Office. With the website’s increasing popularity and a strong
media campaign, the team started to work with ministries with which they already had political ties
and with which they easily could show “quick wins”. With a “show, don't tell” and data-driven
approach, they were able to engage ministries at all levels. Prior to engagement, the Secretariat
reviewed the institutions’ site digital performance metrics (mainly site visits and transactional services
completion rates). With this as benchmark, they showed the same metrics after revamping their
individual site and migrating it to the unified single domain. The benefits were clear and, as a result,
all ministries and most agencies migrated to GOB.AR as of late 2018, now with 700 editors of GOB.AR
who create and maintain 50,000 pages of content.

During the development of the site, the Secretariat service delivery team prioritized the
digitization of processes which fulfilled citizens’ needs and were aligned with public policy agenda. It
made sure the platforms were accessible and usable by every citizen and thus designed for individuals
who most struggled with the use of technology. For this reason, they considered it critical to have a
compelling content strategy. The team made sure all transactional services were described in detail
and in a simple language, and information was always up to date. To ensure language was easily
understood by citizens, the team went to search engines, such as Google, to assess how citizens
searched for information and what language they use. To further improve usability, they also
reorganized the site’s layout to a more instinctive one, regrouped services and created "life situations"
auxiliary pages that helped navigation through the site. Although the Secretariat expected to bring all
services fully online and tried to cover for all use cases, they found that: 1) There are edge cases that
need to be treated in-person because of their complexity, and 2) citizens of certain ages and
geographies preferred to access government services in-person as they saw the process as an
opportunity for socializing.

Through a presidential decree and with the support of all ministries, the government set the
Digital Agenda. This formal framework and the fact that the team was composed of digitization
experts, allowed the Secretariat to make progress quickly. In less than four years, the Secretariat was
able to achieve the following: 1,200 transactional services were digitized, 1.2 million users signed-up
to use these services, more than 3,500 digital tools were developed for both federal and local
governments, and an electronic document management system was implemented across all national
ministries and 184 public institutions. In terms of connectivity, the average broadband speed went
from 4.5 megabits per second to 14mbps, the deployment of 4G went from covering 10% of the
population to 58%, and more than 500,000 argentinians were provided digital literacy programs.13

PERU14
With the goal to "bring the government closer to its citizens through innovation," the Peruvian
Government launched the Innovation Unit in late 2016. The newly formed agency, under the Cabinet

13 https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/el-gobierno-presento-la-nueva-agenda-digital-2030
14Source of the information in this section is the interviews conducted with Daniella Raffo, Heidi Uchiyama, and Zoila Palza,
unless specified otherwise
15 https://case.hks.harvard.edu/bringing-the-peruvian-government-closer-to-its-constituents/

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of Ministers in the Prime Minister's office, adopted a user-centered approach to achieve its mission.
Rather than starting to build a government digital presence from the get-go, the Unit wanted to
understand the relationship between the government and its constituents, and most specifically
citizens’ perception about the government. Full details of these efforts are in the case study “Bringing
the Peruvian Government Closer to its Constituents with Digital Transformation.”15

The team started by interviewing youth between 15-35 years of age as this population segment
had a perception about the government that was still neutral and could be positively impacted. The
Unit found that most interviewees perceived the government as a distant entity and that this was
caused mainly because of the lack of information youth had about the government, perceived interest
misalignment between the government and constituents, and a general sense of mistrust. The team
considered that they could generate the most impact by providing Peruvians with reliable and easily
digestible information about the government and its citizen-facing transactions and services.

After testing several digital and non-digital options, the Unit decided to launch a unified website,
GOB.PE, where citizens could access all the Government and public agencies’ information. The site
was to be responsive and accessible from any device. The team made a deliberate decision to have a
centralized in-house software developing team, a decision that was meant to bring consistency and
speed to the product development.

To guide the development of the Single Domain and in order to understand how to fulfill the needs
for the entire Peruvian population, the Unit interviewed more than 50 citizens from different socio-
demographic groups. They concluded the following: 1) citizens’ points of contact with the government
are around informing themselves and executing government-related transactions, 2) government’s
organizational structure dictates how it communicates with its constituents, 3) information is
dispersed throughout different government sites, 4) government transactions are executed in person
or through the phone calls, 5) user journey does not start when they use a government service but
rather when they start informing themselves about the service, 6) for citizens, “process simplification”
means achieving their goals faster, not reducing paperwork, and 7) lack of information about the
government and its services put the citizens in a position of vulnerability.

To provide an optimal citizen experience, the Unit had to orient the government’s mindset
towards a user centric approach, ensure high levels of coordination between government entities, and
rewrite all content in order to be understandable by any Peruvian citizen. The Single Domain site was
to be launched in three phases. Initially, the site would contain information about government's
services. This was to be complemented, in a second phase, by content about each of the governmental
agencies. The third and last phase was to digitize government services and transactions.

The Unit, thus, needed to prioritize which of the 4,000 processes and services they were going to
create/adjust content for and subsequently digitize. This forced the user experience team to prioritize
transactional services by understanding Peruvians’ biggest needs. Prioritization criteria included
citizen demand, complexity of the service, and the importance of the service in the citizens’ lives.

In June 2017, GOB.PE was launched. Only seven months after, the site had more than 1.5 million
users, 30% of recurring users, 91% of satisfaction reported by users, and more than 3,000 reviews
received.

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Biographies
Digital Transformation leaders who contributed to this case study:

Yolanda Martinez - Mexico

Martinez has more than 15 years of experience in digital transformation in both local and federal
governments in Mexico, the global consulting firm Deloitte, and different development initiatives at
the United Nations Development Agency (UNDP). She has led Mexico’s digital transformation as the
National Digital Strategy Coordinator at the Office of the President since 2017. Prior to this, she was
Chief of Digital Government Unit at the Ministry of Public Administration where she was responsible
for promoting the use of ICT in the Federal Public Administration. She was also CIO and Policy Advisor
at the local Government of Zapopan.

Martínez holds a Master of Science in Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor in
Information Technology at Guadalajara University, and is a former Fulbright-García Robles Fellow.

Alejandra Lagunes Soto Ruíz - Mexico

Mexican communicologist, was named National Coordinator of Digital Strategy in 2012, where she
was responsible for the creation and dissemination of the National Digital Strategy of the Presidency
of Mexico. She is currently Senator of the Republic by the Green Ecological Party of Mexico. Her
professional career ranges from: the head of the press department of the federal government from
1993 to 1999; the coordination of sales in companies such as MSN, Yahoo, Televisa; digital strategies
for several candidates for popular election; as well as the co-foundation of Google Mexico.

Daniella Raffo - Peru

Raffo is currently Managing Director at Aporta Desarrollo Sostenible, the social impact lab of the
Peruvian corporate conglomerate Breca group. Prior to that, she led the Innovation Unit at the
Peruvian Government (Chief of Cabinet of Ministers Office), where she oversaw the launch of Gob.pe.
Raffo founded the EnsenaPeru (simile to Teach for America) and was Director of Education and
Planning at Innova Schools, an innovative school network that aims to provide high-quality k-12
education to all children in Peru. Prior to transitioning to the impact sector, Raffo worked at McKinsey
& Company and Procter and Gamble. She holds an MBA from Stanford University, a Bachelor’s in
business from Universidad del Pacifico and Bachelor of Science in Economics from Universita di
Bologna.

Heidi Uchiyama - Peru

Uchiyama is currently the Head of User Experience at Interbank, one of Peru's largest financial
institutions. Prior to that, she was Service Design Lead at the Peruvian Government (Chief of Cabinet
of Ministers Office). She also served as Managing Director at UXlab Peru and as a partner at Amable
(managing consulting firm). Previously, she was UX professor at Universidad del Pacifico and UX
consultant Switch Interactive Media. She holds a Master’s degree in User Experience in Digital
Platforms, a Bachelor’s of Arts in Advertising, and a Bachelor’s of Arts in Social Relations Policy.

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Zoila Palza - Peru
Palza is a Scrum Master in Belatrix Software, where she currently leads a software development team
and guides clients’ digital transformation in the financial industry. Previously, she was the Scum
Master in Gob.pe, the single domain project of the Peruvian government, conceived in the at the
Innovation Unit of the Prime Minister Office of Peru. Prior to that, Palza worked leading projects of
software development in the Ministries of Health, Justice and Energy. She also worked at Infosys and
BDO. She holds a Software Engineering degree from Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and also
coursed project management and public administration specializations from ESAN University.

Julián Rodriguez Orihuela- Argentina

Rodriguez served as National Director of Digital Services for the Government of Argentina from 2016
to October 2018. As the National Director of Digital Services for Argentina, Julián was in charge of the
implementation of the country’s unified website www.argentina.gob.ar, the citizen dashboard My
Argentina and the government-wide appointments system, among other projects. Julián was
previously in charge of content and design of www.buenosaires.gob.ar as part of the e-Gov Office of
the City of Buenos Aires where he was also a co-founder of the New Media office. Rodriguez holds a
degree in Audiovisual Design from Palermo University.

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