BoxWorks 2023: Reimagining state and local government
Every organization today deals with three digital imperatives:
- Driving productivity across the organization
- Simplifying IT while optimizing spend
- Protecting critical data
State and local government organizations are no different. With critical data stored across siloed servers and apps, agencies face tremendous risk in all three of these areas. In fact, because of their reliance on legacy on-premises infrastructure (and the strict regulations that most government agencies must meet), they may take a cautious approach to digital transformation. And that’s true even as citizens demand better experiences and a higher degree of transparency from their governing bodies every day.
The Content Cloud provides one secure, intelligent platform to solve all of these challenges, empowering government agencies to streamline citizen services as well as simplify and secure their workflows. At this year’s BoxWorks, I shared how the Content Cloud enables human services, supports law enforcement, helps teams manage transportation initiatives, and more.
Here’s an overview of the most important announcements for state and government agencies from BoxWorks 2023.
AI applied to citizen experiences
The biggest news is AI. With the introduction of Box AI, agencies get access to advanced AI models that are built right in the Content Cloud — with the same security Box customers know and trust. By partnering with Open AI for now (we’ll add other AI vendors as we grow), Box enables governmental agencies to, for instance, search policy and procedure documents for answers, whether they’re created in Microsoft, saved as a PDF, or other formats.
HR teams can draft fast, accurate job postings from existing internal documents. Public safety agencies can use AI to summarize lengthy investigative reports and evidence documents. Health and human service organizations can extract key information from clinical reports. And agencies involved in citizen services can convert call center notes to actionable information.
For countless areas of government work, applying intelligence to your unstructured content will help you speed up work while gaining access to information and insights that until now have been hidden within all that content.
To see a demo of how Box AI enables caseworkers to help clients more quickly, watch the state and local government video from BoxWorks on demand.
Advances in Box Shield and content security
At BoxWorks, Box CEO Aaron Levie reiterated how “Everything we do at Box is done through the lens of security, compliance, and data privacy.”
Any government agency deals with mission-critical, highly sensitive information that can’t be leaked to the public or bad actors, so security and compliance are always top of mind for agency leaders. That’s why the Content Cloud modernizes agency services and drives government cloud security, while maintaining industry compliance and adherence to standards like Box StateRAMP FedRAMP, ITAR, EAR, DoD SRG L4, ISO 27018, HIPAA, and IRS-1075.
When it comes to security, the new takeaways for state and local government IT leaders all have to do with Box Shield, our advanced security offering that helps organizations reduce risk and protect the flow of information.
- New partnership with CrowdStrike: This partnership will reduce the risk of malware infiltration and data breaches by preventing unsecured or potentially compromised devices from accessing content in Box. Customers of both Box and CrowdStrike can bring together powerful contextual insights from device posture and data access to evaluate risks in real time, build granular policies, and take remediation actions.
- Expanded Box Shield ransomware protection capabilities will mitigate the ever-growing threat of malware. These enhancements include a self-serve content recovery tool to restore corrupted content, as well as AI-powered threat detection to identify anomalous file activities originating from Box Drive. Stay tuned for the content recovery beta, coming soon.
- Increased admin controls: Even more control over how users access content, with the ability to automatically block users who are trying to access content from outside permitted regions. This will help prevent international bad actors with stolen credentials from accessing sensitive files.
To learn more detail about these changes to Box Shield, watch the state and local government video from BoxWorks on demand.
State and local agencies streamlining services and empowering citizens
We were fortunate to be able to feature six customer CIOs during two state and local government panels on modernization. They shared their modernization strategies along with how they’ve transformed critical processes across their departments, reducing cost and elevating citizen experiences along the way.
During the first panel, we heard from:
- Cameron Smith, GIS Manager at Orange County Public Works in California, who shared how the Content Cloud has facilitated field work and helped the agency achieve over 50% cost reduction
- Tom Kambouras, CIO of the NYC Employee Retirement System, who described how cloud-first architecture and integration with Salesforce has transformed the state employee experience of filling out retirement applications
- Dan Ault, CIO of the Town of Cary, North Carolina, whose agency chose Box for cost savings and has since seen more benefits unfold, including securing and streamlining teamwork.
In the second panel, we heard from three more CIOs:
- Chris Tonjes, CIO of the Washington DC Department of Employment Services, who referred to content as a “dynamic asset that has to be managed, should be categorized, and can be automated when possible”
- Aman Bhullar, CIO of the LA County Registrar-Recorder and County Clerk, who stated, “It’s imperative for us to ensure that the appropriate content has the right access for the right folks at the right time — the cloud has been instrumental in modernizing the journey”
- Amin Almuhajab, CIO of the LA County Board of Supervisors, who described how agencies have been able to deprecate manual processes reliant on paperwork by using Box and other cloud-based toolsets
By combining Box as a core content layer with Salesforce and other app integrations, state and local government agencies give their employees, agents, and caseworkers the power to enhance the way services are delivered to the community. In turn, citizens get services faster and gain more control over their transactions with government agencies.
Content at the heart of state and government agency work
Today, government agencies are in an incredible position to drive digital transformation in ways that deliver all new experiences for citizens and community members. Both customer engagement and internal government infrastructure stand to gain from the potential of digitizing workflows. If you’re curious to read more about how Box customers from various state and local governments use the Content Cloud to empower their employees and citizens, read on.