Sustainable Digital Government
The pandemic presented multiple challenges for Government agencies worldwide. Local governments had to marshal a public health and safety crisis response, ensure operational resilience, and support a workforce facing new issues everyday. Government agencies responded with agility in policy and operations to ensure that employees can work from home and maintain critical services for public health and civic life. Government IT departments, armed with rapid decision-making and fiscal resources, deployed modern platforms to support rapidly evolving operational needs. This year, the conversation is shifting from crisis management to sustainable and scalable IT modernization. The crisis response enabled government operations to realize benefits of cloud technology, remote workforce, and digital citizen engagement, and that those gains need to be made permanent and durable. There are key insight and experiences gained from the last two years that will inform government IT roadmaps.
Digital Ecosystems
Government IT modernization was well underway prior to the pandemic. Speed of adoption were subject to local government budgets, priorities, and business appetite for change. As CIOs formulated a crisis response, they enhanced investments in cloud, mobility, and security to provide key capabilities that are needed to support a functionally diverse and geographically dispersed workforce. Business processes critical to maintain citizen services, health care response, and public safety were ideal candidates for digital transformation. This journey highlighted the need for intelligent, seamlessly integrated, and automated digital ecosystems built upon best of breed cloud platforms.
Content is both the input and driver of business processes in government. From permit applications to voter registration, public safety operations to social service benefits administration, and property assessments to infrastructure projects, government services are delivered by knowledge workers using content centric workflows. Any government digital ecosystem needs to provide a high fidelity, pervasive, user friendly, native cloud content and collaboration system.
As more services and processes transform, new platforms, tools and multiple clouds will be introduced into the digital ecosystem. And without a unified, pervasive cloud content management platform to manage the entire lifecycle of your content, government agencies can run the risk of losing control as content fragmentation can lead to compliance risk, operational inefficiencies, and loss of service quality. A key step to mitigating these risks is replacing content silos and legacy content management systems and moving to the content cloud. There is strategic value and immediate operational ROI that can be realized by doing so as described in detail here.
Hybrid Workplace/Work from Anywhere
A transformational change in government operations is the realization that citizen services can be delivered with a remote or hybrid workforce without compromising quality and timeliness. Every government agency I speak with is in the process or has already implemented a hybrid workplace policy. For IT decision makers, this means implementing a work from anywhere strategy. It should be the same productivity, engagement and experience regardless of the employees’ location.
Box enables a remote workforce with a single secure platform built for the entire content lifecycle, from file creation and sharing, to co-editing, e-signature, classification, and retention. With automated workflows, simple e-signatures, robust integrations, and comprehensive access control features, agencies can drive collaboration across their organization and accelerate work, ensuring their sensitive content is secure. With Box, government agencies can create secure, collaborative workspaces with real-time access to content like maintenance manuals, historical case files, maps, and blueprints to improve productivity across agencies, whether the employee is behind a desk, at home, or in the field.
Digital Citizen Services
Citizen expectations have evolved during the last two years and have accelerated what was a generational shift to digital government. Citizen services are the end goal of a digital transformation for any government agency, resulting in agencies re-imagining existing in-person experiences laden with paperwork and disjointed processes into personalized, efficient, intelligent and automated digital engagement.
From field to IT, Box enables your teams to work from anywhere with seamless, cross-agency collaboration, faster citizen and case intake, and secure mission-critical processes. By digitizing claims processes, your teams can optimize citizen requests and reduce the burden on citizen service centers by accelerating claim intake, processing, and archiving.
Box has been helping government agencies manage both growing citizen expectations and increasing security and compliance risks by enabling them with one, secure platform to collaborate across agencies, manage sensitive content, and simplify workflows like case management. Find out more here.