By drawing on our private sector experience, we work to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of government institutions, enabling them to better fulfill their mission to the public. We also work with government agencies to develop the strategies and capabilities needed to address the leadership challenges that matter most.
Our expertise
Defense & Security
McKinsey has substantial experience serving defense ministries, military forces, police forces, and interior ministries. Our service to defense ministries and militaries has been wide ranging, often as part of major transformation projects. Our work has included major equipment acquisition, logistics and maintenance transformation, operations and training planning, organization, IT, procurement, and support for economic development. We have delivered cumulative economic impact to clients of more than $15 billion. We serve six Western defense ministries. Our engagements with interior ministries and police forces have included work on organization, process improvement, IT, and strategy.
Economic Development
Our economic development work focuses primarily on promoting economic growth in developing countries through social and public-sector channels. Currently, more than 80 percent of this work takes place in emerging economies. Our areas of focus currently include regional economic development and national reform strategies.
Health
With growing aging populations in many countries, governments face an unprecedented challenge to expand already overburdened healthcare systems. Our public-healthcare work focuses on serving public-sector agencies involved in provision and regulation of healthcare services. Our service to health systems and public agencies globally has been wide ranging—from strategy and health-system design to operations, performance transformation, and procurement.
Information Technology (IT)
Among the most challenging issues facing governments today is how to use IT effectively and cost-efficiently. IT is a critical tool for enabling the government to deliver more and higher-quality services to more constituents. However, many government agencies have experienced IT's downside—systems that don't deliver the desired functionality, cost overruns, premature obsolescence, and severe procurement problems.
We help our clients manage or avoid many of the most common IT-related pitfalls. As a result, we have developed a distinctive perspective on infrastructure transformation, IT architecture and application modernization, and technology-driven data.
Operations
Many government organizations have significant operational responsibilities. They are responsible for delivering products or services to their constituents on a massive scale. For example, postal services need to deliver mail to their customers; Social Security organizations have to deliver checks to their beneficiaries; defense departments need to deliver food, water, transportation, and military products to their troops.
We regularly work with public-sector clients to improve these operations. We use insights developed over years of working with private-sector firms on such efforts, and tailor those insights for the public-sector context.
Organization
Governmental agencies are among the most complex organizations in nearly every country in the world. They often are large, have multiple objectives, and face increasing demands to deliver more services at a lower cost. As a result of this complexity, McKinsey routinely helps government clients on organizational issues, including:
- Redesigning their organizations and their interaction with stakeholders
- Shaping major reform programs, including changing mind-sets and behaviors and transforming overall performance
- Building leadership capacity, creating talent management strategies, and enhancing organizationwide capabilities
Public Finance
Our public-finance work focuses on the effective budgeting and planning of public revenue and expenditures. This can include projects such as expenditure analysis, innovative project-finance models such as public-private partnerships, and exploring new methods of revenue generation. The goal of our public-finance work is to help governments be more accountable to those they serve by ensuring the most efficient use of public funds in achieving public goals.
Strategy
We support our clients in the public sector to develop and execute strategy. Just like their private sector peers, public sector organizations devise and implement strategy to address obstacles to success and ensure that targets are achieved. We support leaders from the earliest stages of the strategy process as they set out a vision for desired policy outcomes, and describe the goals that will translate that vision into reality. We develop the objective foundation of facts and provide rigorous analysis that helps public sector leaders agree on approaches to achieving those goals in the face of uncertainty and complexity. And we work with our clients to measure and evaluate progress in the execution of their strategic plans.