Creating a Successful Digital Transformation in Government

Citizen expectations of governments are changing with modern technology causing shifts to take place in societal behaviour. People can manage most daily needs from any place, at any time, and on any device. Implementing a Digital Transformation for governments can seem daunting as they cover a wide remit of institutions and operations. Deloitte reported from a recent survey that three quarters of respondents say that digital technologies are disrupting the public sector with many actively engaged in programmes and nearly all (96%) characterised the impact on their domain as significant.

Digital Opportunities

Top of mind is the value and benefit of cloud computing and cybersecurity for international, regional and local governments. Another important consideration is digital asset management including the management of data coming in from multiple sources including calls, web, video from body cams and vehicle cams, CCTV systems, and social media posts.

A great example of Digital Transformation in central government is the area of court modernization with organic cloud adoption and growth within judicial systems across the world. Courts need to be transparent by nature and cloud computing offers them a platform to accomplish this.

Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) Courts embarked on an end-to-end transformation to deliver fully digital courts for the first time in their judicial and legal system last year. The court is now accessible 24/7 from anywhere in the world. You can register, submit documents, file and pay online, and utilize Skype-enabled trial hearings from remote locations. They can also manage and visualize the judicial process workflow, which is one of the biggest workloads for courts. This technology-based system will enable judges and court professionals to operate in a judicial system that lets them do more daily. They also have a truly unique embedded evidence bundle with no cost to the parties, so they can interact with the court and produce the evidence they need to manage their cases extremely quickly.

 Digital Transformation is essential to sustaining a competitive advantage in government. There are 4 key components to consider:

Engage and connect with your citizens

Citizen engagement is front of mind for every government and today's citizens demand a higher level of citizen service, including the ability to access government resources with the tools they use every day. You can engage citizens by enabling smarter government and citizen interactions by empowering field workers, case workers, inspectors and community leaders with security enhanced mobile role-based apps and services. In addition, create web services, portals, apps and social media connections for scalable mobile delivery providing 24/7 fast government access for citizens on their terms. It is important to engage and serve citizens more effectively to increase trust, engagement and participation.

A great example of this Brampton , a city in Southern Ontario, Canada. The city has a population of just over half a million. The City of Brampton’s objective is to provide citizens with a productive and enriched life. To achieve this, the city is constantly seeking innovative ways to engage with citizens, provide the services they need, and make things easier for everyone. The city recognized that citizens wanted to access government services whenever and wherever was convenient for them, without having to visit city hall. They modernised their call centre with at CRM solution that enables the city to resolve at first point of contact as much as possible. As a result, in the last few years citizen services have grown from a small, limited call centre into a multi-channel, multi-location, 24x7 contact center. They can answer any question anytime about any type of service or navigate on behalf of the citizen. The City of Brampton can also provide greater confidence to investors who are looking for communities that are innovative and creative.

Empower your employees

Connected employees are empowered employees. It is important to enable your workers to interact and communicate with citizens more easily and effectively. Providing enhanced mobile devices, apps, and other tools can support employee productivity and collaboration while mitigating the risks that come with providing freedom and space to employees. It is about helping workers collaborate more efficiently, sharing critical information quickly and easily, whilst ensuring security and privacy regulations are met.   

The State of Hawaii serves a population of nearly 1.5 million residents. Hawaii wanted to centralize its IT structure to improve interdepartmental communication and collaboration for its 21,000 employees across 13 different departments. In the past, each agency had a high degree of autonomy when it came to planning and managing IT. This resulted in a mixed IT ecosystem that created day-to-day challenges such as the inability to find an email address, no instant messaging system, and difficulty scheduling meetings. Their Digital Transformation involved connecting 13 state agencies, streamlining document management, and moving to the cloud. This made it easier for state employees to collaborate with colleagues, track legislative information, and work on mobile devices. This also increased the efficiency of monitoring state bills throughout the entire legislative process.

Optimising government operations

You can optimize the cost and operating efficiency of government with flexible, trusted cloud services and solutions that allow you to harness the transformational power of the cloud on your terms. Government agencies can optimize their legacy IT infrastructure while adding new services. This will help decrease software and application maintenance, staffing, and administrative costs, while improving asset utilization. You can also improve agency agility through self-provisioning services.

Home to more than 4 million residents and over 100,000 businesses, Los Angeles’ local government has the unique challenge of managing city services for a massive, multicultural population with diverse needs and experiences. The City of Los Angeles wanted to help residents more easily navigate government resources and procedures and free up employees to focus on higher-value activities. A team within the city created the City Hall Internet Personality (a.k.a. “Chip”), a chatbot that operates as a 24/7 digital personal assistant. This reduced email queries by > 50% by offering over 900 answers to citizen FAQs in real time. It also enabled increased attention to urgent and unusual cases and boosted employee morale by shifting focus away from busy work and towards more meaningful and impactful problem-solving.

Transforming services

Transforming services will produce actionable analysis, deep insights and better decision making to innovate new digital government processes and services for increased effectiveness and efficiency that benefit society and the economy.

Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and the third largest city in the UK. The City of Glasgow wanted to give greater insight into how they operate, and make that data available to everyone. They used technology to create a cloud-based storage, search and delivery solution. All non-personal and non-sensitive information is available to the public. This provides citizens, businesses, communities, and decision makers with open access to the latest information on everything from pass rates at different driving test centers to the location of bike racks and the amount of foot traffic in retail areas. The availability of data to every citizen improved decision making and communication between project, business and city leaders. It also led to an open data culture within the city, which increased public engagement and led to more important data and insights being used to improve the city.

A final thought

Deloitte reminds us that citizens want outstanding digital service from their government for the same reason they want it from an online retailer, bank, or travel booking site: it makes their lives easier.

Zagreba?ki Holding provides utility services, transport services, commercial activities, and energy services for the City of Zagreb, Croatia. Their recent Digital Transformation means greatly increased security (Croatia is second only to Japan for ransomware attacks) a greater customer experience, and operational efficiencies from standardization and centralization of management and maintenance. Most of all, the company sees this move as securing its future.

Well-designed digital services encourage customers to engage with the public sector in ways that help government achieve its own goals. With frequent news of increased funding from governments for Digital Transformation it paves the way for exciting times ahead for all.