This article is co-authored by Valeriya Ionan, Advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister — Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine on Innovations, Digitalisation and Global Partnerships, and Manuel Kilian, Managing Director, Global Government Technology Centre Berlin.

Rather than arguing ideologically for or against public-private partnerships in GovTech, governments should focus on how they can be smartly and strategically structured, layer by layer, across the technology stack. To do so, we provide a framework that provides both the strategic rationale and practical guidance for calibrating public towards private roles to deliver modern digital services while maintaining democratic accountability.

When the aggressor state launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the country's digital government team had hours, not months, to deploy a nationwide air raid alert system. Working with private partners, for example Ajax Systems and ST Falcon, they immediately built and launched a life-saving platform Air Alert. Air Alert is a mobile app that instantly notifies users about the start and end of air raid alerts in their region, helping people stay safe during attacks. This did not follow traditional procurement — it was a strategic partnership under the ultimate pressure test.

The speed and effectiveness of Ukraine's response illustrates a crucial point: the old debate about whether governments should work with private companies misses the real question. In an era of rapid technological change, cyber threats, and rising citizen expectations, the question is not whether to partner — it is how to partner strategically.

The End of Binary Thinking

For too long, discussions about public-private partnerships (PPP) in GovTech have been trapped in ideological frameworks. Advocates argue there is no alternative to private sector innovation. Critics warn of vendor dependency and democratic erosion. Both sides treat partnerships as uniform entities — as if buying cloud storage requires the same approach as building a national identity system.

This binary framing is not only outdated; it is counterproductive. The modern digital government operates across multiple layers, each with distinct characteristics, risks, and requirements. Success requires matching partnership models to technological layers, not applying one-size-fits-all solutions.

The Strategic Foundation: Eleven Principles for Effective Partnerships

Before diving into the practical framework, it is essential to understand the core principles that make PPPs effective in GovTech. These eleven principles cluster around four strategic imperatives:

Strategic Innovation Imperatives

1. Innovation as the Engine of Progress: Most technological breakthroughs originate in the private sector, driven by competition, rapid decision-making, and willingness to take risks. Through strategic partnerships, the state gains access to innovations that would otherwise take years to develop independently.

2. Deep Technological Expertise: Advanced technologies like AI and quantum computing evolve faster than governments can build internal capabilities. Partnerships are the way to access specialised knowledge that changes rapidly.

3. Operational Velocity: Private sector agile methodologies enable governments to launch services in weeks, not years — critical for states facing rapid technological change, crisis response needs, and rising citizen expectations.

Risk Management and Resilience

4. Smart Risk Sharing: Digital projects carry inherent technological and market risks. Well-structured PPPs allow the private sector to absorb technological and commercial risks while the state retains control over data, accountability, and standards.

5. Resilience Through Collaboration: A structured dialogue between government and business creates mechanisms for early problem detection and rapid response. In times of geopolitical instability and constant cyber threats, such cooperation becomes critical for national security.

6. Adaptability By Default: Tech landscapes change every two to three years, if not faster, making adaptability essential for digital government survival. PPPs provide built-in mechanisms for rapid technology adoption.

Economic and Ecosystem Development

7. Success Multiplier: Businesses that are successful through PPPs create jobs, pay taxes, develop infrastructure, and shape a positive global image. In the digital realm, every successful GovTech project becomes a showcase for technology exports and investment attraction.

8. Innovation Ecosystem Development: Every major PPP project creates an ecosystem: academic programs, startups with complementary services, and developer communities. This transforms individual government projects into catalysts for broader economic and technological development.

9. Strategic Competition Management: Initial support for local champions through PPP builds a strong base. Later engagement of international partners fosters healthy competition, raises standards, and enables technology transfer.

Service Excellence and Scalability

10. Citizen-Centric Approach: Private companies survive by focusing on the user — a thinking governments often lack. PPPs bring design thinking and a culture of continuous improvement into government services.

11. Global Compatibility: Using international standards via PPP makes state systems instantly interoperable with other states or global private sector services. This approach provides a fast track to achieving the much-debated goal of interoperability.

Ukraine demonstrates these principles through the Diia ecosystem, where partnerships with thousands of partners — from banks to educational institutions — enable rapid service delivery, continuous innovation, and ecosystem development that transforms domestic digital capabilities into assets appreciated internationally.

The Technology Stack Framework

Understanding why partnerships matter is only the first step. The crucial insight is that different technological layers require fundamentally different partnership approaches. Here is how to think strategically about each layer:

Layer 1: Citizen Experience

Partnership Approach: Learn from private sector design methodologies while maintaining government control over service strategy and content.

The citizen experience layer encompasses everything users see and interact with — web portals, mobile applications, and service interfaces. Citizens expect government services to match the quality of consumer applications they use daily, requiring adoption of user-centred design, iterative development, and sophisticated design systems.

Governments do not need to reinvent the wheel but can learn easily from the private sector. However, governments must maintain ownership of service design strategy and content for critical citizen-facing applications. Trust requires that citizens know their government — not a private contractor — is ultimately responsible for the user experience they receive.

Example: The UK's GOV.UK portal demonstrates this approach perfectly. Developed internally using private sector design principles, it delivers a consistent, accessible citizen experience while maintaining clear public ownership and accountability.

Layer 2: Applications and Service Delivery

Partnership Approach: Use custom development for government-specific applications while leveraging proven commercial solutions wherever viable.

Applications and service delivery encompasses the software and workflows that power government services — from benefit eligibility calculations to permit processing, tax collection to case management systems. The strategic approach focuses government development resources exclusively on core government-specific logic while procuring commercially viable solutions that are already tested and trusted by other clients.

The key is architectural modularity through microservices and API-first design. Rather than building monolithic systems, governments should separate core government business logic from standard technical components, making systems open, modular, and interchangeable. This enables selective procurement of proven commercial solutions while maintaining control over essential policy and service decisions.

Example: Canada's benefits delivery system demonstrates this approach effectively. The government built custom eligibility calculation engines that encode specific Canadian social policy rules, while using commercial solutions for user authentication, document management, payment processing, and case workflow management. The modular architecture allows components to be updated or replaced without affecting core policy logic.

Layer 3: Digital Public Infrastructure

Partnership Approach: Government-led development creating ecosystem foundations that enable private sector innovation.

Digital Public Infrastructure encompasses the foundational digital systems that enable broader economic activity — digital identity, payment systems, and other core platforms that businesses and citizens can build upon. This represents strategic national infrastructure that governments should develop and maintain.

The approach is fundamentally about ecosystem creation. By building robust, open digital infrastructure, governments create platforms that enable private sector innovation and economic development. These systems become digital utilities that reduce costs and increase capabilities across the entire economy.

Example: India's Aadhaar digital identity system and UPI payments infrastructure demonstrate how government-led DPI creates enormous economic value. Private companies can easily integrate these services, enabling innovation without rebuilding foundational components.

Layer 4: Data & Integration

Partnership Approach: Strict government control of data governance and integration standards with private sector capabilities for technical implementation.

This layer manages all data assets and system connectivity — citizen records, government databases, API management, and interoperability between systems. It represents sensitive aspects of government operations requiring careful balance between capability and control.

Governments must maintain ownership of data governance, defining standards, controlling access, managing integration protocols, and maintaining oversight. However, they can leverage private sector capabilities for technical implementation, storage, and analytics under strict compliance frameworks.

Success requires clear separation between governance decisions (which remain with the government) and technical implementation (which can involve private partners under strict oversight and compliance requirements).

Example: Estonia's X-Road demonstrates effective data layer management: the government controls all integration standards and data governance while enabling secure data exchange between agencies and approved private partners.

Layer 5: Compute Infrastructure and Security

Partnership Approach: Multi-provider strategy with government control of security governance and compliance standards.

Infrastructure encompasses the computing, networking, and security systems that underpin all digital services. Building everything in-house would be enormously expensive and technically suboptimal, yet dependency on single providers creates unacceptable risks.

The solution is strategic multi-provider approaches that leverage private sector infrastructure capabilities while maintaining government control of security governance. This means managing compliance frameworks and incident response internally while procuring computing and networking services from vetted providers.

Success involves adopting multi-provider strategies to avoid dependency while maintaining government control of security governance, focusing internal capabilities on oversight rather than infrastructure ownership.

Example: Japan's Government Cloud programme provides a curated list of certified domestic and global providers that agencies can use under standardised contracts. The state retains control over security compliance while leveraging proven infrastructure through a vetted, multi-provider model.

Calibrating Partnership Models

The technology stack framework establishes which partnership approach suits each layer, but within each layer, the specific structure depends on three additional factors. A case management system (Layer 2) will be structured very differently if it handles sensitive legal proceedings versus routine permit applications, involves cutting-edge AI automation versus established workflow technology, or represents a small pilot versus a nationwide rollout. 

These three dimensions — criticality, innovation requirements, and investment scale — determine the precise partnership model within each layer:

Criticality Level: High criticality systems such as defence, civil registries, and energy should maintain 80 to 100 percent state control, with the private sector engaged only for non-critical components under strict oversight. Medium criticality systems like healthcare or education can be structured so that the state controls sensitive data and policy logic while private partners manage applications and user experience. Low criticality systems such as tourism or feedback portals might be almost entirely delivered by private players, with the state setting standards and supervising outcomes.

Innovation Requirements: High innovation projects involving AI, IoT, or emerging technologies might require maximum private sector involvement through innovation partnerships and pilot programmes. Medium innovation projects like process digitalisation or cloud migration can benefit from balanced public-private approaches with clear technology transfer requirements. Stable technology areas such as web standards or core protocols are best maintained primarily in-house with selective private sector updates.

Investment Scale: Mega-projects over 50 million US dollars should be executed through diverse consortia that combine large companies' financing capacity and experience with mid-tier firms' specialisation and startups' innovation. However, keeping projects manageable and avoiding overly large implementations prevents default dominance by large enterprises alone. Medium-sized projects between 5-50 million US dollars benefit from mid-tier company leadership with deep domain expertise. Small projects under 5 million US dollars serve as proving grounds for startups to test bold concepts before integration into larger national systems, with successful approaches scaled through consortium models.

Measuring Success Beyond Efficiency

Traditional partnership metrics focus heavily on cost savings and efficiency gains. While important, these miss the transformational potential of strategic partnerships. Success metrics must evolve to include innovation velocity — measuring time from technology emergence to government adoption — alongside citizen satisfaction through user experience quality and service accessibility. Ecosystem development should track private sector capability building and export potential, while resilience measures system redundancy and crisis response capabilities.

Countries measuring only efficiency miss opportunities to create entirely new service paradigms and economic advantages. The most successful digital nations view PPPs not as cost-cutting exercises but as innovation partnerships that create competitive advantages and strengthen national capabilities.

Conclusion: The Future is Collaborative

While other nations spend years in procurement cycles, Ukraine proved that existential pressure can compress decades of digital transformation into months. The question is not whether democracies can innovate at this speed — Ukraine already did. The question is whether they can replicate this urgency without waiting for missiles to fall.

Ukraine's transformation reveals the ultimate PPP lesson: when governments stop viewing private partners as vendors and start treating them as co-architects of national resilience, extraordinary outcomes become possible. Under wartime pressure, traditional buyer-seller relationships dissolved into something far more powerful: shared ownership of national survival. Private companies did not just deliver services; they became extensions of government capability, while maintaining their innovative edge and accountability to citizens.

The challenge for democratic leaders is learning to harness this collaborative intensity proactively, building the trust, frameworks, and shared purpose that crisis naturally creates, but doing so before the crisis forces their hand.