This paper starts by examining the journey of social security administration from digitisation, defined as making a business process digital without material change to intent or purpose, to digitalisation, defined as making material changes to business processes based on insight and knowledge gained through the analysis of digital data. While digitization of social security administration has delivered significant bene- fits by enabling to place people’s needs at the centre of the service response, digitalization has the poten- tial to deliver better social outcomes for all, by pooling information, resources, and initiatives to address complex social problems. Investing in digital data however brings additional risk as human oversight and involvement in decision-making is partially replaced by machines driven by algorithms.