In today’s highly disruptive and digital-driven world, governments and public sector institutions at all levels are leveraging newfound opportunities to use data and emerging technologies to empower citizens and build more transparent, efficient, agile, and cost-effective services and programs.
According to Gartner, more than 60% of governments will have tripled citizen digital services by 2023. The next generation of government services is here, aiming to bring transformation across several dimensions — seamless citizen connectivity, cost containment, a more digitally-abled staff, and enhanced data security.
In today’s public sector landscape, the name of the game is “composable digital enterprises.” Government CIOs must visualize and build modern digital enterprises, using a robust set of products, services, and architectural techniques, that provide much-needed stability and agility during volatile periods like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, in response to evolving citizen expectations and rapidly changing workforce dynamics, governments are looking at disposing of legacy, monolithic systems, and processes in favor of modernizing existing infrastructure to build trust and resilience in public institutions.
The 2021 CIO Survey by Gartner found that 58% of the government sector respondents wish to increase IT investments in cyber/information security, 56% in cloud services/solutions, 54% in business intelligence/data analytics, 41% in process automation, and 36% in artificial intelligence/machine learning.
Let’s explore the leading strategic priorities for digital transformation in the public sector and how modern digital transformation journeys enable these.
What are the top strategic priorities for the government CIOs of today?
Digital transformation, a “must-have” for the public sector today, focuses on improving various stakeholders’ experiences, the most significant ones being citizens and employees.
In a recent survey, the leading consulting firm, Deloitte, found that “We need to modernize/keep up with the times,” “To enable us to innovate faster,” and “Meeting citizen demands/expectations” top the list of rationales for digital transformation.
Having said that, more than 80% of CIOs state that citizens now expect government agencies to use digital channels like AI chatbots, enable seamless self-service, and introduce new digital products and services.
Consequently, government agencies and public sector institutions must ensure citizens experience end-to-end digital engagement, characterized by features, including
- Personalization: Services tailored to citizens’ circumstances, expectations, and needs.
- Proactive and Anticipatory: Replaces traditional department-based service delivery with an anticipatory life-event approach.
- Frictionless: Accessing government services requires little or no effort.
- Omnichannel: Delivering seamless and consistent digital experiences to citizens across multiple channels (phone, web, mobile, common messaging apps, etc.).
- Universal digital identity: A unique digital ID that opens doors to an integrated and inclusive customer experience and allows citizens to access healthcare, education, and other government benefit programs, forms, and services in one place.
Moreover, it’s imperative for government agencies to view digital transformation from a “total experience” perspective. Which entails the development of adaptive digital technology platforms for employees that enable collaboration, facilitate communication and seamless information access, and empower the staff to deliver contextual and more meaningful services to citizens.
Below we discuss the digital transformation journeys that redefine government operations, helping government agencies augment employee experience and serve citizens better.
5 Digital Transformation Use Cases in the Government Sector
1. Hyperconnected public services for citizens’ well-being
Hyperconnected public services encompass the confluence of robust digital technologies, such as cognitive automation, cloud, AI-powered virtual assistants, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to streamline core government processes, automate workflows, and deliver hyperconnected, personalized, and end-to-end citizen services.
AI-enabled chatbots can allow governments to
- Provide a centralized portal to submit and track citizen requests from any device, respond to issues with built-in location services, and optimize task allocation.
- Help citizens resolve queries, find relevant information quickly, and locate emergency services.
- Empower citizens to identify the services they need, track deadlines, and execute vital tasks from any device.
- Enhance employee experience by automating query resolution, information access, and completion of routine tasks.
The result? — Improved data quality, delivery of more meaningful and proactive citizen services, increased employee efficiency, and reduced paperwork.
In a survey, Deloitte found that 83% of government executives believe process automation is making a significant impact on their organization.
Let’s look at a successfully implemented automation initiative in New York’s DEP.
NYC Department of Environmental Protection pioneers chatbot adoption to modernize the user experience
New York’s Department of Environment Protection (DEP) employs 6,000 people and supplies approximately 1 billion gallons of high-quality drinking water to the metropolis.
They saw the immense potential in deploying AI-powered chatbots for HR and IT to take the pressure off support agents. Here’s where we came into the picture.
Round-the-clock chatbots to efficiently address HR and IT queries, resolve tickets, and eliminate the cost of responding to queries after hours.
In the Microsoft blog, DEP’s Farhan Abdullah, Director of Production Support, stated, “Whether it’s [plant] operators, whether it’s somebody responding to a water main break at two o’clock in the morning, as an IT organization, we need to provide those services to them. Most of the calls that we get after hours are [for] password resets. We saw this as an opportunity to automate this whole process,” with chatbots providing self-service employee assistance. Objectives were “to radically improve our user experience – the engagement – and our ultimate goal was to drive operational efficiencies … [with] 24/7 availability.”
KPIs measured up to April 2021 reveal that these chatbots have addressed more than 15,000 queries, engaging 4,300+ DEP employees and producing quicker resolution times.
2. Augmenting employee experience with modern digital workplaces.
Modern digital workplaces provide a secure environment for government employees to access the right apps and digital tools on a unified platform and help achieve more effective and efficient inter-departmental and cross-agency collaboration.
Most importantly, advanced security capabilities protect mission-critical government information and highly-sensitive citizen data and allow employees to stay connected securely from anywhere and on any device.
3. Legacy infrastructure modernization
To improve speed, flexibility, innovation, and insight in delivering essential services to citizens and reduce costs, governments must modernize critical legacy applications.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, over 50% of government agencies will have modernized critical core legacy applications to improve resilience and agility and reduce costs.
Modular digital architectures must quickly pivot in response to new opportunities and threats while maintaining operational excellence and meeting sudden increases (or decreases) in citizen demand.
Legacy infrastructure modernization necessitates the use of cloud and cloud-native environments, agile and DevOps methodology, and advanced cybersecurity elements.
Research shows cybersecurity (54%) and cloud computing (54%) top the list of technologies that are expected to play an important role over the next two years in digital transformation.
4. Composable Government Enterprise
The 2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey found that organizations, including governments, that demonstrate characteristics of composability improve overall business performance (63%), reduce business risk (50%), and reduce operating costs (47%).
The question that then arises is — what is composability? As defined by Gartner, “Composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks. The composable government enterprise is any government organization that adopts design principles and adheres to enterprise architecture principles that improve the modularity and agility of business capabilities.”
Composability entails the following digital transformation journeys in the government sector —
- using iterative, low-code app development techniques
- developing a cloud-based, digital government technology platform, and
- creating dynamic and easily deployable integration capabilities.
5. Achieving analytics-driven decision-making through more and better data.
Data no longer fuels a select few domains. And this is true for government organizations as well. Government organizations are moving towards achieving data mastery through the dynamic and systematic use of structured and unstructured data.
Operationalized analytics that leverages powerful technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, and machine learning (ML) enable governments to expedite policy and decision-making, regulation, and procurement.
Data that flows seamlessly between different agencies helps governments make real-time, context-rich decisions and serve citizens better.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, 60% of government AI and data analytics investments aim to directly impact real-time operational decisions and outcomes.
How can Acuvate help?
Acuvate Software is a global player in next-generation digital services and consulting. With 15+ years of experience in building frameworks for composable technology, allowing government agencies to improve operational and cost efficiencies, empower citizens and employees, and ensure IT strategies are formulated with future-ready, tech-enabled governments in mind.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft technologies and converge AI, Big Data Analytics, cloud computing, and automation to build enterprise apps and platforms that streamline operations, support intelligent analysis and collaboration, and redefine information orchestration and processes in the government sector.
Our most popular solutions include
- BotCore: Enterprise bot-building conversational AI platform
- Cloud migration & modernization: Data modernization, Application modernization cloud migration, and managed AI services
- Advanced analytics solutions backed by the best in AI and ML technologies
- Mesh 3.0: Autonomous SharePoint intranet for a modern, digital workplace
To know more about Acuvate’s services, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
