We are paying an "Invisible Tax" for every siloed system in government.
When a citizen has to repeat their life story to three different departments just to access one service, it isn't just a minor inconvenience. It is a structural failure.
In my latest article, Data Silos: The Price of Policy Debt in the Public Sector, I argue that our failure to connect data isn't a technical problem, it’s an ethical one. We’ve spent decades building departments that excel in "isolated brilliance" but fail the very people they are meant to serve because the architecture itself is fragmented.
I explore the concept of Systemic Architecture Debt: the hidden cost of legacy decisions that continue to drain public resources and erode citizen trust.
Key themes include:
The Citizen’s Invisible Tax: Why friction in public services is a form of systemic neglect.
Policy Debt vs. Technical Debt: Understanding why APIs alone won't fix a fractured culture.
The Ethical Imperative: Moving from departmental budgeting to holistic, human-centric service design.
It’s time to stop treating interoperability as a software update and start treating it as a fundamental requirement for a fair society.
