Citizen-centric government is not a technology upgrade. It's a power shift.

Governments are increasingly, and often unfavourably, compared to companies like Amazon and Apple as citizens come to expect the same seamless, efficient service from public institutions. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is reshaping how governments can serve citizens, and the opportunity is profound: not just faster services, but entirely new models of engagement that redefine trust, efficiency, and accessibility.

When A&E’s CEO Shannon Weber recently met with Malta’s Minister for the Economy, Enterprise and Strategic Projects, Silvio Schembri - following an earlier discussion with Prime Minister Robert Abela - the subject was not software. It was whether Malta is ready to redesign how citizens experience the state itself. Because technology is no longer a support function of governance, it has become its operating system.

Breaking the “efficiency trap”

For decades, digital government has focused on efficiency. Forms moved online. Counters became portals. Queues became ticketing systems. But this approach simply digitised bureaucracy rather than transforming it. True innovation does not come from making legacy systems faster, it comes from questioning why those systems exist at all.

When a bank or retailer asks for your driver’s licence, they are not interested in whether you can drive. They want a government-backed way to verify your identity or age. In the same way, citizens don’t want fire departments, they want buildings that don’t burn down. They certainly don’t want long queues at the local government office, they want immediate access to the services they need. When governments start designing around outcomes rather than departments, entirely new models of service delivery become possible.

This matters because trust in public institutions is now a digital problem. Malta, like many EU states, has made significant progress in digitising access to public services. But access is not the same as experience. Fragmented portals, disconnected databases and repeated identity checks quietly communicate a dangerous message: the state does not trust its own systems. And when government does not trust its data, citizens do not trust government.

Building a unified, citizen-centric digital platform

We have seen the erosion of public trust many times, particularly where digital systems are fragmented, opaque, or inaccessible. Addressing this challenge does not start with better messaging, but with better infrastructure.

In South Africa, disinformation during elections began to overwhelm institutions and erode democratic confidence. One of the most significant responses was the creation of REAL411, a national platform that provides citizens with a transparent way to report disinformation, track cases, and see outcomes.

Originally created by Moxii Africa in 2019, REAL411 has become a globally recognised example of how digital infrastructure can support democratic resilience.

The platform has recently undergone a complete rebuild to modernise its architecture and significantly improve usability for both the public and the expert teams responsible for reviewing and resolving cases.

This rebuild was delivered through a collaboration between A&E, who led the redesign of the brand, the user experience and reporting journeys, and Exonic Solutions, who handled the technical development and platform engineering. Exonic Solutions has been REAL411’s technical partner since the platform’s inception.

The reimagined platform is currently being tested and will be rolled out in phases over the coming two quarters.

The impact of REAL411 to date demonstrates what is possible when trust, transparency, and usability are designed into public systems:

• Over 3,000 cases processed across three national elections

• A 60% reduction in average case processing time through AI-supported workflows

• 99.9% uptime during election periods

• Six-fold capacity increases without additional staffing

• International recognition from UNESCO, Microsoft, and the European Union as a model of best practice

What REAL411 shows is not simply that technology can scale oversight, but that well-designed systems can restore confidence by making institutional action visible and accountable.

Digital trust, AI, and the foundations of modern government

A&E’s work in this space focuses on helping institutions design digital systems that people can understand, trust, and use, where security, compliance, and usability are not technical afterthoughts, but core design principles.

Security and compliance are what make European digital services legally valid, economically viable, and publicly trusted. Without them, digital government, finance, and commerce simply cannot function.