Digital transformation offers governments a powerful pathway to improve public service delivery and strengthen state capability. Yet without clear guardrails – and amid incentives that often prioritize speed and visible delivery – these efforts can deepen exclusion, weaken accountability and produce systems that fail to reflect the lived realities of citizens, ultimately eroding public trust and government legitimacy.

In practice, these challenges stem less from the technology itself than from how decisions are made across the design and deployment of GovTech and digital public infrastructure (DPI) solutions. The GovTech Compass: Ten Principles for the Responsible Implementation of GovTech and Digital Public Infrastructure responds to this gap by offering a principles-based framework for more responsible and effective digital transformation. It sets out 10 practical principles to guide decision-making across the GovTech and DPI life cycle, helping governments and ecosystem stakeholders navigate trade-offs, align incentives and embed public value at the core of implementation.